Report of the Forty-Eighth Meeting of the London D. H. Lawrence Group
Philip Chester, Fiona Fleming, Jonathan Long
‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’: Three Approaches
December 18th 2025, by Zoom, 18.30-20.00 UK time
ATTENDERS
33 people attended including, from outside the UK, Philip Chester in Deep River, Ontario, Fiona Fleming and Robert Bullock in Paris, Shirley Bricout in Brittany, T. E. Shaw in Darmstadt, Germany, and Jim Phelps in Capetown,
INTRODUCTION
The London Lawrence Group was founded in September 2019. A few months later the UK entered lockdown due to Covid and the group pivoted online, where (for the most part) it has remained ever since. One of the early online meetings concerned Lawrence on film. I observed that seventy-four adaptations of Lawrence’s works had been released between 1949 and 2018 (comparing to fifty-six for Thomas Hardy, fifty-four for James Joyce, forty-one for Aldous Huxley, and seventeen each for Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster). Of the thirteen adaptations which belonged to the twenty-first century, three – Pharaoh’s Heart (2002), The Rocking Horse Winner (2010) and Lady Luck (2013) – were adaptations of the same, 1925-26 short story, ‘The Rocking Horse Winner’. The meeting focused on the 1977 version (30 minutes) directed by Peter Medak, which is set in the film’s present as the story is set in its own. The film had yielded rich discussion, and the very fact that this story had been adapted so repeatedly suggested its persistent interest. I therefore invited three speakers to address the December 2025 meeting from different perspectives. They chose trauma theory, publication and reception history, and a British film adaptation made in 1949.
BIOGRAPHIES
Philip Chester is a retired teacher, poet, independent scholar, and avid canoeman who writes, paddles, and portages in Deep River, Ontario, Canada. His previous DHL London Group talk “Tit and Tat: A Tale of Two Alley Cats” investigated the conflicted relationship between D.H. Lawrence and Richard Aldington.
Jonathan Long is a solicitor who practised in the East of England, specialising in agricultural law, now only working part-time as a consultant. A Lawrence enthusiast for over 50 years, his work has been published in The Journal of D.H. Lawrence Studies, Journal of the D. H. Lawrence Society of Australia, D.H. Lawrence Review and Etudes Lawrenciennes. He has written a chapter on Lawrence and book design for The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts (2020) and one on the various editions of Sea and Sardinia in Insights into D. H. Lawrence’s Sardinia (2022).
Fiona Fleming is a Teaching Fellow at Paris Nanterre University. Her research interests include D. H. Lawrence’s fiction, essays and poems, Thomas Hardy’s fiction, British travel writing, and ecocriticism. She is a regular contributor to the journal Études Lawrenciennes and other international Lawrence-related journals. She is currently co-director of the Paris Nanterre D. H. Lawrence Conference.
READING/WATCHING
‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’ by D. H. Lawrence
‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’ film by Anthony Pelissier, 1949
PRESENTATIONS
Philip Chester started by acknowledging that he was speaking on the unceded traditional territory of the Alonquin nation. He said that ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’ had attracted a range of readings, including Freudian, Marxist, Christian and feminist. Approaching it as a psychologically realistic case study of a dysfunctional family traumatised by a ‘problem’ (a lack of money) and a ‘secret’ (a transgenerational gambling addiction), it is apparent that all three children are neglected (one is not even named), and that Paul suffers from obsessive-compulsive behaviour and auditory hallucinations before being driven driven to a coma and death by chronic toxic stress experienced in prepubescence. This psychological and physiological realism exists alongside cast of archetypes: an emotionally paralyzed mother, an absent father, and the enablers Bassett and Uncle Oscar – whilst Paul (out of the available roles of scapegoat, golden child, clown, mascot, rebel and caretaker) takes on the role of hero in his effort to make the family’s chronic pain go away.
He noted that Randy Colton Rolfe makes the point in his 2011 Adult Children Raising Children that ‘children are often the barometer of our relationship with ourselves’, and that a south-east Asian perspective posits that children are our ‘karmic teachers’. Lawrence’s story, Philip concluded, is both realistic and an Aesop’s fable for adults. One of four sacred laws amongst Native Americans, he noted, is to do no harm to children.
Jonathan Long noted that the story was probably written in the Villa Bernarda, Spotorno, in the first half of 1926. It was published in Harper’s Bazaar in July, and that September in The Ghost-Book, a collection of ghost stories by Lawrence’s friend Lady Cynthia Asquith (daughter-in-law of the Prime Minister of 1908-16). She had previously found Lawrence’s suggested story ‘Glad Ghosts’ unsuitable, but accepted ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’ instead. The story was also scheduled for inclusion in Lawrence’s 1928 collection The Woman Who Rode Away, but in the event it was only published again after his death in Martin Secker’s 1932 collection of Lawrence’s stories, The Lovely Lady, and again in Secker’s 1934 collection The Tales of D. H. Lawrence. It did not receive particularly positive reviews, but has since appeared in many short story anthologies, and from the 1930s onwards was translated into many languages, including Czech, German, Greek, Portuguese, Spanish and Russian (the 1985 Russian translation was only the eighth translation of Lawrence into Russian). The 1949 film adaptation was the first adaptation of Lawrence onto film, since when there have been even more adaptations of this story to film than of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The 1977 film is 30 minutes long; 1983 30 minutes; 1998 23 minutes (an experimental art film set in 1990s California); 2002 30 minutes; 2010 11 minutes; 2013 18 minutes; and 2015 29 minutes. In 2002 there was a chamber opera adaptation with a libretto by Bethan Jones, and in 2016 there was a chamber opera by Canadian composer Gareth Williams and librettist Anna Chatterton, of which an excerpt may be watched here. In 1941 Auden made a radio adaptation with music by Benjamin Britten conducted by Bernard Hermann, and there was a stage version in 1990. Overall, the drift has been towards adaptations set in the present time and place.
The early editions were not illustrated; later versions and films, however, heavily featured the eponymous rocking horse.
This is a book cover from 1982:
This is a poster advertising the 1949 film by Anthony Pelissier.
Fiona Fleming concentrated on the 90-minute 1949 film by Anthony Pelissier. Made only 23 years after the story’s writing, it used many phrases from the text verbatim. However, it made certain innovations. The characters are developed by added scenes. The mother is less cold and dismissive of her children than in the story; she is shown putting the children to bed and taking them out to shop, and she is kind and patient with Paul. That said, her obsession with appearances is heightened, and she becomes more detached once she starts to receive large sums of money. Moreover, whereas she is the protagonist of the beginning of the story, in the film Paul is the protagonist from the start. In the story the father is nameless and bodiless; in the film he is present in his connection with the mother and uncle, but has no real connection to Paul. The story’s familial gambling addiction is attributed to the mother, whereas the film attributes it to the father, who is made redundant from his employment. The film is set at Christmas, allowing a heightened emphasis on impecuniousness and consumption as symbolised by the scrawny Christmas tree and its glittering ornaments. The character of Bassett is also developed far more strongly, with many added scenes. It is Bassett who shows Paul how to ride the horse. Oscar lends the family money, lectures to them, and is less affectionate towards Paul than in the story, placing a bet on Paul’s final tip for his own profit. The character with the least modulation from the story is Paul himself.
Fiona further noted the story’s dramatization of the uncanny and of madness. The whispers are rendered as the house’s echo of Hester’s words, fanned up the stairs by the following camera, and amplified by the toys, the dollhouse and the rocking horse. When the whispers recur, a door swings open as though pushed by them. One of the scenes of Paul riding madly is accompanied by a storm outside, as the camera rocks back and forth with his face, and emphasises his bare chest. The film’s final scene is more sombre than that of the story, as Pelissier puts the blame more strongly onto the adults.
DISCUSSION
Stephen Alexander (as adumbrated in his blog post on the story) found it hard to treat as anything other than a straightforward morality tale: ‘Lawrence, who at other times goes out of his way to prove himself anti-Freudian, anti-Bolshevist, and anti-Christian, gives us so little else to work or play with in this story.’
Shanee Stepakoff emphasised the Freudian reading, and the sexual aspect of Paul’s ecstatic riding of his horse. John Worthen agreed that: ‘Paul is riding to get there; the sex has a result’. At the same time, the son is replacing the father in giving money to his mother. Catherine (I) considered the story to have kinship with Peter Shaffer’s Equus, which is also the story of a boy with a quasi-religious and masturbatory obsession with his horse. She also noted that repression of the explicit discussion of money was and is very English, an element of the story which translates less well to the United States, where there are also far greater restrictions on gambling. She noted that the story’s mention of £80,000 is retained in the 1949 and 1977 film adaptations, although by the latter (which is set in the present) it might have been inflated to well over £6 million.
Terry Gifford pointed out the irony that Cynthia Asquith’s project of a book of ghost stories was itself an attempt to raise money for a family that needed more of it (Cynthia had married a man poorer than herself), and that her family was itself a model for the story. Dudley Nicholas noted that Lawrence had written much advice to Cynthia on how to handle her autistic first son John (see for example L2 335-8, 14th May 1915). John was finally put in an institution in August 1926, the year that this story was published.
Jim Phelps, however, argued that the story constituted psychological footnotes to the ‘Paul’ Morel of Sons and Lovers, as Lawrence, late in his life, relived elements of his own early life, and translated them to a different class. The mother’s dreams are not fulfilled by the man she married, and the son tries to fill the father’s place.
Dudley Nicholas added that Lawrence wrote the story at a time when his own family was being dysfunctional; he was being visited by Frieda’s daughter Barbie, and by his own sister Ada, and there was significant tension between them. John Worthen added that Ada’s visit may have contributed to the story’s racing plot. Ada’s son Bert had told John in person that his parents had been regular race goers, and that their gardener Betts (with whom Lawrence would often speak on his visits to them) frequently gave his parents racing tips. Ada, too, needed more money.
Michael Bell speculated on the nature of the changes made by the film; were they a necessary function of the difference of the medium, did they render the film a distinct work of art, or did they constitute an interpretation of the story? Fiona thought that the film was distinct in its attempt to be kinder to the mother than Lawrence was; she is initially a better mother, and later experiences greater guilt. In the attempt to rehabilitate her, however, the greater blame falls on the character of Oscar. Michael also wondered about the nature of luck in the story and the film: Paul turns out not to be personally lucky, but to possess luck; how far is luck, then, a phenomenon of subjectivity? Some characters hear the voices in the house; others, including the mother, do not. At the story’s end, the narrative says that the mother heard her brother Oscar saying: ‘poor devil, poor devil, he’s best gone out of a life where he rides his rocking-horse to find a winner’. These words could, however, have been hallucinated.
Andrew Harrison pointed out how obliquely Lawrence’s two suggested contributions to Cynthia Asquith’s collections stood in relation to the genre of the ghost story, and Jonathan Long agreed that Lawrence would have been conscious that he was not offering her what she was expecting. With regard to the ‘ghostly’ aspect of the story, Terry Gifford noted that other cultures have explanations for phenomena unexplained by Western science, and that Lawrence seems to be representing an actual phenomenon, known to shamans, of being able to predict the future. However, being a bourgeois boy, he cannot sustain the effort, and dies. Catherine responded that Lawrence himself suffered physical and psychological harm in his struggles towards prophecy – and had recently nearly died after the effort of finishing his prophetic novel The Plumed Serpent in 1925.
