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This essay assesses the “relational pedagogy” depicted and theorized in two fictional sketches D. H. Lawrence composed late in 1909: “A Lesson on a Tortoise” and “Lessford’s Rabbits,” both narrated by working schoolteachers and both of which theorize a range of teacher-student problematics. Though these sketches are touched on in critical biographies of Lawrence, left untouched by critics and biographers are additional insights that the sketches provide about Lawrence’s pedagogical theory and practice. In reading these obscure Croydon sketches in sympathy with Raymond Williams’s accounts of Lawrence and his concept “structures of feeling”" the essay articulates several relational and pedagogical problematics that Lawrence elaborates and studies through his fiction writing. The sketches give insight to Lawrence’s concern with the texture, complexity, and ambivalences of teacher–student relations, especially with regard to classroom-situated affects like exhaustion and distrust. His concern with the affective dimensions of pedagogical relations prefigures Lawrence’s dramatic and conceptual attention to other kinds of relations later in his writing career―between lovers, parents and children, siblings, strangers, and friends―where pedagogy also structures the sustained effort of human beings to develop and to look after the development of others to whom they are attached but around whom it is difficult to tell who is teaching whom.
