05/03/2026
A *long* review (by Facebook standards) from the Journal of DH Lawrence Studies.
John Pateman, Willie Hopkin: D. H. Lawrence’s Socialist
Friend.
Nottingham: Five Leaves Publications, 2024.
Pp. 154. £10 (paperback). ISBN 978 1 9154 3421 0
Reviewed by Charlie Pullen
Friendship, like much else, was a complicated matter for D. H.
Lawrence. On the one hand, we can think of the powerful
depictions of vital, passionate attachments – often between men
– in his novels: amongst schoolboys, like Tom Brangwen and his
gentle buddy – parallels of the biblical David and Jonathan – at
the start of The Rainbow; or modern literature’s first and most
brilliant toxic bromance, Gerald Crich and Rupert Birkin in
Women in Love. On the other hand, when we look to Lawrence’s
life, we can find similarly passionate but also deeply troubled and
troubling relationships with friends – exemplified most
obviously in his sometimes-hostile treatment of Katherine
Mansfield and John Middleton Murry. John Pateman’s sprightly
volume tells of another, less ambivalent, but still profound bond
for Lawrence – that with Willie Hopkin, a stalwart of Eastwood’s
political and intellectual culture, a mentor to Lawrence, and,
above all, his “socialist friend”.
Born some twenty-three years before Lawrence, in 1862,
William Edward Hopkin observed the rise of this great writer as
well as his fall (outliving him by another two decades). Hopkin
was at the heart of Eastwood society, as Pateman shows with
clarity and efficiency in this primer to the life of one significant,
but mostly overlooked, influence on the growth of Lawrence’s
character, outlook, and work. A devoted librarian, Pateman has
immersed himself in the letters that Lawrence and Hopkin
exchanged from 1910 until 1929, the longevity of which speaks
for itself: Hopkin was Lawrence’s longest non-family
correspondent. He first encountered Lawrence as a baby, and –
as a man with a habit of collecting and supporting bright children
(his close friend Jean Temple called him a ‘Pied Piper’) –
watched over Bert as a clever, sensitive schoolboy who was
bullied for being “effeminate” (147, 28).
Hopkin was a writer, a local politician, a shopkeeper, a
Sunday School teacher, amongst other facilitating roles. Most
importantly, as Pateman is right to focus on, he was a crucial
conduit connecting the young Lawrence through his work at the
local Mechanics Institute library to a network of writers and
thinkers; indeed a whole climate of radical ideas that would come
to colour Lawrence’s critique of modernity’s alienating qualities
and his utopian urge for different ways of being. Pateman
foregrounds Hopkin’s links with the Fellowship of the New Life,
his place in the late nineteenth-century culture of aesthetic
socialism, and his friendship with Edward Carpenter. It was
associations like these, as well as his turn to agnosticism in 1900,
that led Lawrence’s mother to hope her son would not “get too
friendly” with Hopkin (53). She would be disappointed.
The book belongs to that important tradition of work in
Lawrence studies that shows him, far from being an untutored
genius who sprung alone from out of nowhere, as coming of age
within a complex and dynamic cultural context. Throughout,
Pateman keeps a dual focus, revealing the life of Hopkin in order
to cast light on Lawrence and a variety of his texts, including his
first novel The White Peacock, his essay ‘Art and the Individual’,
the play Touch and Go, and the various Chatterley novels
towards the end of his life. Some sections suggest which
characters in Lawrence’s fiction correspond to Hopkin (the
handsome Lewis Goddard, reading his New Age, in Mr Noon, for
example). Other, more interesting portions, trace some of
Lawrence’s most animating and persistent ideas – the utopian scheme, for instance – back to Hopkin and his socialist
politics. The latter sections of the book, on Lady Chatterley’s
Lover, are especially fascinating, as we read of the close
interaction between Hopkin and Lawrence during the 1926
General Strike, when Lawrence was working through his deeply
ambivalent feelings towards England, the working class, and the
mining industry in the novel and in their friendship. Pateman
neatly sums up the significance of this last period of Lawrence’s
writing, arguing that Lady Chatterley’s Lover brought “a savage
anger with the middle and upper classes, a completely new
sympathy with the working class” into British culture (105).
For someone who helped to nurture Lawrence as a fledgling
writer, and who spent the years after Lawrence’s death
championing his reputation, there are some surprising points of
misalignment between Hopkin and his mentee – and it is helpful
that Pateman includes these. We learn, for example, that Hopkin
tried to steer Lawrence away from his early use – what would
become his very distinctive style – of rhythmic repetition in The
White Peacock. As Hopkin’s daughter wryly observes, it is clear
that Lawrence did not always listen “too closely” to Hopkin’s
advice (66). While Pateman does not say so explicitly, we can
surely be glad, on this occasion at least, that Hopkin’s influence
was not total – that Lawrence could still go his own way.
Much of the book’s strength comes from the way Pateman
centres the rich primary material – the voices of Hopkin,
Lawrence, and their loved ones coming to the fore, bringing all
manner of intimate, idiosyncratic detail with them. What a joy,
for instance, to read of the culinary Lawrence from Hopkin’s
perspective – “Lawrence was indoors preparing a wonderful
concoction consisting chiefly of salmon and chopped onion”, he
recalled from a meeting in 1918: “he was a fine cook and a
persistent experimenter in weird mixtures” (86). It must be said,
however, that at times this very strength of the book comes at the
cost of losing a sense of Pateman’s own voice. Some sections
slump into long lists of quotations that would have benefited
from Pateman’s otherwise very effective ability to narrate and
guide the reader through the story of these two characters. But,
aside from one unfortunate error on the first page (Carpenter’s
death being in 1929, not 1922), this is ultimately an
accomplished, assuredly economical biographical study. Upon
his death Hopkin was described as Lawrence’s “most loyal and
staunchest friend” one whose pen could be “sabre-like” when
coming to the defence of his former mentee’s reputation (143). It
feels right, therefore, that with Pateman’s book Hopkin’s
reputation should be celebrated too.
