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The word “collier” refers primarily to miners, though it could also refer to lower-status coal merchants. In the novel, most of the residents of Tevershall—and the towns that surround it—are colliers. The word is used in both British and American English, though it is especially popular in the Midlands region of England.
Collier Quotes in Lady Chatterley’s Lover
The Lady Chatterley’s Lover quotes below are all either spoken by Collier or refer to Collier. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 9
Quotes
[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.
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Chapter 11
Quotes
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!
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Collier Term Timeline in Lady Chatterley’s Lover
The timeline below shows where the term Collier appears in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 2
...stinking of sulfur and coal. And Tevershall village is no better, with its small, cramped colliers’ houses turning black from the haze. At night, Connie can see the mine’s furnaces glowing.
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Chapter 5
...it is beginning to spread to her, too. Connie also sees this bruising in the colliers at Tevershall, who are threatening to strike not out of passion but out of despair....
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Chapter 7
Mrs. Bolton feels a great deal of sympathy with the colliers, but she also feels superior to them. Similarly, she resents the wealthy classes even as...
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Chapter 11
...it is much prettier than Wragby. Still, Shipley is now bordered on all sides by colliers, and Winter feels that he is being pushed out by the very men that (in...
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Chapter 17
Soon, Clifford writes again, updating Connie on the scandal and saying that all the colliers’ wives are now on Bertha’s side. He mocks Mrs. Bolton as being a bottom-feeder, obsessed...
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Chapter 19
...war. Mellors also enjoys farming, though this new town, too, is filled with mines and colliers. Mellors continues to rail against these “apathetic” men, worked to the bone and always anxious...
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