Collier Term Analysis

[Mrs. Bolton] was coming bit by bit into possession of all that the gentry knew, all that made them upper class: apart from the money […].

She was thrilled by her contact with a man of the upper class, this tidal gentleman, this author who could write books and poems, and whose photograph appeared in the illustrated newspapers. She was thrilled to a weird passion. And his educating her roused in her passion of excitement and response much deeper than any love affair could have done. In truth the very fact that there could be no love affair left her free to thrill to her very marrow with this other passion, the peculiar passion of knowing, knowing as he knew.

Yet Mellors had come from such a father. Not quite. Forty years had made difference, an appalling difference in manhood. The iron and the coal had eaten deep into the bodies and souls of men […]

Creatures of another reality, they were elementals, serving the elements of coal, as the metal workers were elementals, serving the element of iron. Men not men, but animus of coal and iron and clay. Fauna of the elements, carbon, iron, silicon: elementals. They had perhaps some of the weird, inhuman beauty of minerals, the lustre of coal, the weight and blueness and resistance of iron, the transparency of glass. Elemental creatures, weird and distorted, of the mineral world! They belong to the coal, the iron, the clay, as fish belonged to the sea and worms to dead wood. The anima of mineral disintegration!