'No Meaning for Anybody': D. H. Lawrence's Use of Hans Christian Andersen's The Fir Tree in the Original Version of Odour of Chrysanthemums (1910)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
IN March 1910 the original, uncorrected proofs of Odour of Chrysanthemums, which constitute the earliest and longest version of this well-known story, were sent to D. H. Lawrence for his approval by Ballantyne & Co. Ltd, printers for the English Review magazine. In July, however, Lawrence was asked by the editor, Ford Madox Hueffer (Ford), to cut five pages of the text, almost 20 per cent of the entire work. Lawrence described this challenge as a ‘devilish business’, but eventually opted to eliminate most of the early part of the narrative in which Elizabeth Bates and her two children attempt to pass the time while anxiously awaiting the overdue return of her husband, Walter, from the mine.1 In retrospect this was a wise editorial decision since, as Keith Cushman has observed, the ‘children’s games material’ is fascinating but ‘peripheral to the main thrust of the narrative’; the ‘lengthy and elaborate passage in which the children play first at being gypsies and then at being colliers’ takes on a life of its own and consequently ‘distracts attention from the central situation’.2 While Cushman’s critical assessment is valid, his plot summary is somewhat incomplete since it omits the final, thematically important phase of the children’s activities: their mother’s bed-time reading of Hans Christian Andersen’s short story, The Fir Tree. Because of the required deletions this section did not figure in either the 1911 English Review or 1918 Prussian Officer versions of the story, and was only made available to readers, albeit to a limited extent, in 1969.3 Unfortunately, even today, its existence is not well-known despite its greater accessibility.4 This is particularly regrettable since the episode illuminates several interesting aspects of D. H. Lawrence’s early literary development.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.029 | 0.006 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".