This article is more than 13 years old

Lawrence on University College Nottingham

A controversial piece from D H Lawrence More of Lawrence on Nottingham is available here but this entertaining piece is a highlight. Not exactly what you’d want to use in promotional material though. ‘Nottingham’s New University’ in Pansies (1929) In Nottingham, that dismal town where I went to school and college, they’ve built a new university … Continued
This article is more than 13 years old

A controversial piece from D H Lawrence

Wonkhe Lawrence Nottingham University College

More of Lawrence on Nottingham is available here but this entertaining piece is a highlight. Not exactly what you’d want to use in promotional material though.

‘Nottingham’s New University’ in Pansies (1929)

In Nottingham, that dismal town

where I went to school and college,

they’ve built a new university

for a new dispensation of knowledge.

Built it most grand and cakeily

out of the noble loot

derived from shrewd cash-chemistry

by good Sir Jesse Boot.

Little I thought, when I was a lad

and turned my modest penny

over on Boot’s Cash Chemist’s counter,

that Jesse, by turning many

millions of similar honest pence

over, would make a pile

that would rise at last and blossom out

in grand and cakey style

into a university

where smart men would dispense

doses of smart cash-chemistry

in language of common-sense!

That future Nottingham lads would be

cash-chemically B.Sc.

that Nottingham lights would rise and say:

-By Boots I am M.A.

From this I learn, though I knew it before

that culture has her roots

in the deep dung of cash, and lore

is a last off-shoot of Boots.

One response to “Lawrence on University College Nottingham

  1. This is George Orwell writing about my home city, Sheffield, in March 1936

    “Had a very long and exhausting day…being shown every quarter of Sheffield on foot and by tram. I have now traversed almost the whole city. It seems to me, by daylight, one of the most appalling places I have ever seen”.

    Again, not one for the prospectus.

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