“The Rocking-Horse Winner”

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“The Rocking-Horse Winner”

by D. H. Lawrence

THE LITERARY WORK

A short story set in London in the 1920s; published in America in Harper’s Bazaar in July 1926 and in Cynthia Asquith’s collection The Ghost Book (London) in September 1926.

SYNOPSIS

An aristocratic woman’s relentless pursuit of wealth ends in her young son’s death.

Events in History at the Time of the Short Story

The Short Story in Focus

For More Information

Born the son of a coal-mine employee in Nottinghamshire, England, in 1885, David Herbert Lawrence is one of English literature’s most controversial figures. Several of his novels—most famously, Lady Chatterley’s Lover —were banned or burned as pornography. His wanderings took him all over the world, from Italy and the south of France to Mexico and New Mexico in the United States, and his work reflects the variety of cultures that he encountered. Throughout his writings, Lawrence focuses on the spiritual problems attendant upon industrial society, castigating people for losing touch with nature and with the wisdom of the body in their drive to accumulate more possessions. Plagued his whole life with respiratory illnesses, Lawrence died in Vence, France, in 1930; his ashes were later taken to Taos, New Mexico, and buried near the ranch where he once lived.

Events in History at the Time of the Short Story

Conspicuous consumption

Money, money, “there must be more money”—this desperate chant echoes throughout the household of the cash-strapped aristocrats in Lawrence’s short story (Lawrence, “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” p. 790). The tight financial circumstances experienced by the fictional family were shared by many upper-class people in the years following World War I. To understand the seemingly irrational disappointment and disillusionment of the socially ambitious mother in the story, it is necessary to realize the emphasis that was placed on possessions and the appearance of wealth among the privileged classes in early twentieth-century England, and in London in particular. A “perpetual fireworks display,” as it has been called, the nonstop social calendar demanded showy clothes, extravagant menus, hordes of servants, trips abroad, and, of course, an impressive automobile (Bédarida, p. 149). This final luxury was regarded as the ultimate status symbol, which probably explains why Hester, the mother in the short story, is so bitter over having to rely on borrowing her brother’s car or hiring a taxi. Indeed, it is from her son’s innocent question regarding the family’s lack of a car that the entire tragic story of “The Rocking-Horse Winner” ensues.

After the end of World War I, many people expected that life would revert to its former status. Perhaps a sense of relief at having emerged victorious and alive from the horrifying trenches in France led some to a frenzied and spendthrift return to prewar ostentation. The “Roaring Twenties,” a hedonistic decade of relaxed morals and carefree spending often celebrated in literary works of the time, were not, despite the image, enjoyed by most English people, who remained as poor as they had ever been. In fact, even the very rich soon slipped into hard times because of England’s declining economy.

World War I and its aftermath shook England’s economy to its foundations. Predominantly a trading nation, England was unable to conduct commerce as usual once the war hit. And war not only disrupted economic life for its duration, it also weakened and destabilized the country in the years following Germany’s surrender in 1919. Japan and the United States emerged as the world’s new economic giants, and those industries by which England had traditionally prospered—coal, shipping, and textiles—slipped seriously into decline. As one author notes, “Poverty like a leaden cloak enveloped large parts of the country: their inhabitants felt doomed and without hope” (Bédarida, p. 175). It wasn’t just the working class and tradesmen who felt the pinch: British landowners lost many of their renters when farmers began to buy land from aristocrats who were anxious for cash and no longer able to maintain the comfortable lifestyles to which they had become accustomed. Where possible, the aristocracy traded its land for money and thus were able in most cases to hold on to their wealth and prestige; but those of the upper and middle classes who were more dependent on earned income were not so lucky. Among these unlucky English are the parents in “The Rocking-Horse Winner.”

Racetracks in England

The “sport of kings,” horseracing, by which the young hero of Lawrence’s story grows rich, was a sport practiced by the most ancient of civilizations; classical Greek, Roman, and Mesopotamian art all attest to its popularity. The sport’s English roots extend back to the time of the Crusades of the Middle Ages, when twelfth-century English knights rode off to the Holy Land in an attempt to reassert Christianity’s claim to Jerusalem. When they returned, many brought with them spectacular Arabian horses—sleek and fast steeds that they bred with English mares. The English sport branched into two main types— thoroughbred racing, in which horses race for a certain distance on a track, and steeplechase, in which the horses race a course dotted with fences and other barriers of varying heights and difficulties.

At first, horse races amounted to running two horses against each other to see which was fastest, but during the reign of Queen Anne (1702-1714) this changed; several horses now challenged one another, with the spectators betting on which would win. Queen Anne became the official sponsor of English horseracing, establishing in the Berkshire village of Ascot a racing track that is still in use for some of the nation’s most prestigious races—the Ascot Stakes, Coventry Stakes, and Queen Elizabeth Stakes, among others. Racetracks sprang up all over the country, and the money to be won increased to such an extent that it became financially lucrative to raise and breed horses. In 1750 racing enthusiasts formed the Jockey Club to regulate the sport; this organization still exists and controls every aspect of horseracing in England. In 1791 the Club released the first of the many “General Stud” books, which listed the pedigree of every single horse that was racing in England. Thoroughbred horses—those in the General Stud book, and the only horses allowed to compete in races sponsored by the Jockey Club— are so inbred that they all trace their lineage to one of only three horses: the Byerley Turk (born 1679), the Darley Arabian (1700) or the Godolphin Arabian (1724).

The betting system known as “pari-mutuel,” which dominates western racetracks, was first invented in the late nineteenth century in France. Of all wagers taken, a certain percentage automatically goes for the purse (the fund to pay owners whose horses win), for track maintenance, and to pay off other race-related expenses. The remaining money is divided by the number of bets laid on each individual horse to determine the payoff for each horse should it win. If a horse is listed as being at 10-1 odds, for example, that means that each $1 wagered will earn $10 in winnings.

THE SACRED NINE

The nine most influential public schools in England were long-established institutions, attended by boys from England’s upper classes. Seven of them were boarding schools: Winchester (established 1382), Eton (1440), Shrewsbury (1552), Westminster (1560), Rugby (1567), Harrow (1571), and Charter House (1611). Two day-schools (whose students went home at the end of the day) were also counted among the nine: St. Paul’s (1509) and Merchant Taylors (1561).

The British racing season is punctuated by five premier competitions, which, since 1814, have been known as the “classic” races: St. Leger Stakes, Epsom Derby, 2,000 Guineas (these first three races are known together as the English Triple Crown), the Epsom Oaks, and the 1,000 Guineas. The Epsom Derby, the most famous of the British thoroughbred races, covers 1.5 miles. The most famous steeplechase in Britain is the Grand National, which runs 4.5 miles and incorporates thirty jumps, the highest of which is slightly over five feet.

Lawrence and English Schools

In “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” the family of the young hero, Paul, takes on the financial burden of the boy’s education at Eton, the place of learning his father attended and England’s most prestigious secondary school. Eton caters to boys aged twelve to eighteen. Before World War I, two very different schooling systems were in place: the elite and pricey public schools and the free church- or state-sponsored schools for the children of the lower and working classes. In the social atmosphere of the time, precisely where a boy went to secondary school determined the course of his entire future.

It was in the public schools, where the elite classes sent their sons, that the leaders of the country were created (the term public school in England is equivalent to the American private school). Children attending the elite schools could expect to study the Latin and Greek classics for the majority of their time, but also other subjects that would prepare them to assume social leadership, such as math, science, and modern languages. Furthermore, most of the best institutions were boarding schools that also taught boys how to conduct themselves socially and how to govern themselves according to age and class.

After World War I, things began to change, though less for the elite than for the children of the working class. The elite schools, even in the late twentieth century, maintain their grip on English social and political life, producing most of the prime ministers—Eton alone asserts to have schooled nineteen—and influential business people in the nation. There were, however, some nationwide changes in the years following the war. In 1918 legislation insisted that no child leave school before age fourteen, and feminist pressure on the government to ensure equal opportunity for girls increased the number of students in government-run classrooms. The curriculum in the schools for the lower classes was decidedly utilitarian, with English, not Latin, becoming the main language of study. Clearly, students in such institutions were viewed as the future’s next wave of workers.

Lawrence himself benefited from earlier educational reforms, namely the Education Act of 1870, which aided schools that already existed and created an additional five thousand new ones. Lawrence attended the Beauville boarding school in Eastwood, and while most of his fellow students began their adult lives as coal miners immediately upon graduation, Lawrence won a modest scholarship to attend Nottingham High School. There, he studied English literature, German, French, shorthand, accounting, and the Bible, among other subjects. Eventually, he became a teacher himself, although he was uncertified, or one without university training. He returned to teach in Eastwood, where he came to despise the profession. Nonetheless, upon winning a prestigious scholarship to University College in Nottingham, Lawrence commenced a two-year program that would give him an official teaching credential. His final letter of recommendation reads, in part:

He would be quite unsuitable for a large class of boys in a rough district. . . . He is emphatically a teacher of upper classes. Mr. Lawrence is fastidious in taste, and while working splendidly at anything that interests him, would perhaps easily tire amid the tedium and discouragements of the average classroom.
(Meyers, pp. 39-40)

Unfortunately, Lawrence wound up teaching in a rough London suburb and, true to form, proved “quite unsuitable.” By 1912 he had permanently abandoned his teaching career.

The 1920s English family

At the time Lawrence was writing about the alienated relationship between mother and child in “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” the English family was undergoing a transformation: married couples were having fewer babies than ever before. Of married couples in 1925, 16 percent had no children, 25 percent only one, 25 percent had two, and 14 percent had three; the three-child family in Lawrence’s story is therefore unusually large, which may in part account for the mother’s dissatisfaction. While the decline in children had an economic explanation—children have always been expensive—emancipation played at least as important a role in forming the expectations of women, who were looking beyond the home in increasing numbers. In 1918 women over the age of thirty first won the right to vote; in 1928 (two years after Lawrence wrote “The Rocking-Horse Winner”), all women eighteen and older could vote. In 1919 the British Parliament passed the landmark Sex Disqualification Act, allowing females equal access to universities and professions that had previously been closed to them. No longer were women content solely with the traditional roles of wife and mother.

Increasing numbers of them began to seek out intellectual and economic opportunities for themselves. Although she is unsuccessful in her professional ambitions as a fashion designer, Paul’s mother attempts to make use of this new economic freedom to save herself and her family from financial ruin.

A further reason for the decline in the birthrate was the specter of overpopulation. Beginning around 1920, the English, battered by war and poverty, began to use contraception more widely. Only the rich were able to afford such scientific methods as condoms and diaphragms; the rest of the British population resorted to biological means—abstention and coitus interruptus. As historians have suggested, “between the end of the nineteenth century—the beginning of contraceptive practices—and the Second World War, when more satisfactory methods became widespread, English men and women were ‘frustrated people”’ (Bédarida, p. 229). Such dissatisfaction might account for the aura of chilliness that surrounds the unhappy marriage in Lawrence’s story.

The Short Story in Focus

The plot

“The Rocking Horse Winner” recounts the dark tale of young Paul and his cold, socially ambitious mother, a woman whose ruthless pursuit of wealth kills her emotionally, and him literally. Living in a style beyond their means, “in a pleasant house, with a garden, and. . . discreet servants” (”The Rocking-Horse Winner,” p. 790), the upper-class parents search desperately for money to keep up appearances, but they only dig themselves deeper into debt. “There must be more money, there must be more money” is the insistent whisper that their preteen-aged son, Paul, imagines he hears everywhere about him (”The Rocking-Horse Winner,” p. 790).

HORSE IMAGERY IN LAWRENCE

Horses recur throughout Lawrence’s work, most strikingly in his novels Women in Love, The Rainbow, and St Mawr, where they often draw attention to man’s alienation from nature and to the rival claims of body and intellect. In his critical work, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, Law rence gives an indication of the metaphoric or symbolic associations that he consistently made with the horse: “Far back in our dark soul the horse prances. He is a dominant symbol: he gives us lordship: he links us, the first palpable and throbbing link with the ruddy-glowing Almighty of potency: he is the beginning even of our godhead in the flesh. And as a symbol he roams the dark underworld meadows of the soul.... Within the last fifty years man has lost the horse. Now man is lost, Man is lost to life and power—an underling and a wastrel. While horses thrashed the streets of London, London lived” (Lawrence in Sagar, p. 251).

When Paul asks his mother why their family has fewer luxuries (namely, a motor-car) than other family members, she replies, “Because your father has no luck” (“The Rocking-Horse Winner,” p. 791). The boy immediately connects luck with money and, further, with his childlike notion of God, who, his mother suggests, may be the only person to know why luck descends on some and not on others. A bizarre ritual develops in which Paul mysteriously seeks “luck” in the frenzied riding of his nursery rocking-horse. “He would sit on his big rocking horse, charging madly into space, with a frenzy that made [his sisters] peer at him uneasily. Wildly the horse careened, the waving dark hair of the boy tossed, his eyes had a strange glare in them. The little girls dared not speak to him” (”The Rocking-Horse Winner,” p. 793).

PERSONAL CIRCUMSTANCES

“The Rockmg-Horse Winner” was certainly not the only story in which Lawrence treated his friends and acquaintances to fictional representations of their lives and characters. Lady Cynthia Asquith herself makes another appearance in the short story “The Ladybird” under the name “Lady Daphne” Lady Cynthia did not seem to mind her translation into art, but others were not so impressed with the caricatures of themselves that Lawrence sometimes created. Lawrence himself felt that the great art that he was producing more than justified his often mocking description of people he knew, and defended the practice in a letter to a friend; “If I need any woman for my fictional purpose, I shall use her. Why should I let any woman come between me and the flowering of my genius” (Lawrence in Meyers, p. 134). Lawrence also freely borrowed from the personas of his male acquaintances as well in his fiction.

Somehow, inexplicably, magically, the boy hears—from the horse’s mouth, as it were—the name of the horse that will win whatever major British horserace is about to take place. With the help of the family gardener, Bassett, Paul starts betting on the races and slowly amasses a small fortune without the knowledge of his parents. His maternal uncle, Oscar, discovers Paul’s secret and counsels him to give some money anonymously to the mother. Paul eagerly agrees. That money instantly disappears going to pay off debts and buy more things, notably a place for Paul at Eton.

The pressure to be lucky and to pick the right horse (which involves a combination of frenzied rocking and trusting his own instincts) finally becomes too much for the boy. His last big win literally costs him his life. He dies of brain fever, incoherently pleading with his mother to acknowledge how lucky he has been. The story closes with the tormented mother being offered small comfort by her brother, Oscar, who observes that the boy is better off dead than seeking so desperately after luck.

With this quotation in mind, “The Rocking-Horse Winner” becomes a sweeping indictment not only of one family’s deadly lust for money, but of the spiritual death of England in general.

Batman

The young gardener, Bassett, with whom young Paul plays the horses, is described as the “batman” of Paul’s Uncle Oscar. A batman is the military servant of a cavalry officer; given the story’s setting in the 1920s, the two men would have served together in World War 1. Of the many social ills that plagued England in the years immediately following the war’s end—unemployment, poverty, labor unrest—one of the most serious was the sense of betrayal suffered by many of the common soldiers who had risked their lives in the battlefields of France, only to return home to the England for which they had fought to find themselves unappreciated and in the same dismal social plight they had been in when they left. “The ideas of universal brother-hood and prosperity they had cherished in the trenches were, for all their altruism, found to be hopelessly anarchic and at odds with the most elementary political and diplomatic realities” (Bedarida, p. 172).

Sources

“There was a woman who was beautiful, who started with all the advantages, yet she had no luck. She married for love, and the love turned to dust. She had bonny children, yet she felt that they had been thrust upon her, and she could not love them. They looked at her coldly, as if they were finding fault with her” (”The Rocking-Horse Winner,” p. 790). Thus begins “The Rocking-Horse Winner”; the model for the dys-functional family in the story is that of Lawrence’s old friend and admirer, Lady Cynthia Asquith, whom he first met in 1913. Lady Cynthia—once described as “the greatest flirt that ever lived” (Feinstein, p. 107)—was the daughter of the Earl of Wemyss and had, on the surface, married well. Her husband, Herbert, was an upper-class barrister whose father was a former prime minister of England. But the Asquiths were beset with troubles: Herbert proved to be an uninspired lawyer and, worse, had suffered severe psycho-logical trauma from his four years as a soldier on the battlefields of France during World War 1. The couple was always strapped for cash, and was relegated to a peculiar place as members of the upper classes who were accustomed to wealth but had none of their own.

Cynthia and Herbert Asquith had two sons, Michael and John, both of whom were well known to Lawrence. According to one of Lawrence’s biographers, Michael, the younger son, “was critical, even resentful, of the glamorous yet elusive figure who, like many women of her class, neglected her children and was not a good mother” (Meyers, p. 121). Such a sentiment seems to be echoed in the aloof narrator’s voice of “The Rocking-Horse Winner.” The older Asquith son, John—the model for Paul, the “hero” of the short story—suffered from an undiagnosed mental condition that was probably autism; he could be at times unmanageable, violent, and frenetic. Lawrence took a deep interest in John, speaking of him as the warped product of his parents’ marriage, an opinion that the author shared with Cynthia:

Your own soul is deficient, so it fights for the love of the child... he is a direct outcome of repression and falsification of the living spirit, in many generations of the Charterises [Cynthia’s family] and Asquiths. He is possessed by an evil spirit that you have kept safely inside yourself, cynic and unbelieving.... John will come out all right.
(Lawrence in Meyers, p. 122)

John did not, in fact, “come out all right”; like Paul in “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” he met an early death. He died in an institution at age twenty-Six.

Reviews

“The Rocking-Horse Winner” was singled out in a contemporary review on The Ghost Book, in which the story was first collected. “There are two ail-but first-raters in the present volume,” judged the review, “one by Miss May Sinclair, and one, The Rocking-Horse Winner,’ by Mr. D. H. Lawrence. The rest reach a praise-worthy rather than an exciting level” (Knight, p. 27). The story has since been praised as one that comes close to reaching literary perfection.