Addiction In The Rocking-Horse Winner By D. H. Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence’s depiction of gambling in “The Rocking-Horse Winner” is one of obsession. The obsession manifests itself through each character in different ways; Paul’s obsession manifests itself as the desire to find “the winner,” his mother’s obsession is with spending the winnings, while uncle Oscar and Basset, two men of opposing classes, are obsessed with both winning the races and the sport itself. This obsession is Lawrence’s attempt to reflect post-war British society’s obsession with gambling through the medium of literature. And by portraying post-war gambling in a negative light, he parallels the view of the Protestant church, which viewed gambling as a sinful act.
This parallel becomes evident when reading Ross McKibben’s 1979 article, “Working-Class Gambling in Britain 1880-1939.” McKibben asserts that gambling existed as the predominant leisure activity
The church viewed it as their “vocational interest” to equate gambling with “sin,” thus keeping with the puritan tradition of labeling working-class material desires as immoral (158). The church’s view, however, was a false portrayal of the realities of gambling. Their assertion of gambling being an immoral indulgence, one equal to the “sins” of drinking, smoking, and other such heathenistic entertainments, was, in reality, false. By observing figures from a Royal Commission report taken later in the century, we see that gambling accounted for only 4 percent of total personal expenditure among the working-class (159). This is not to say that gambling did not ruin the lives of the truly obsessed, but the picture of British gambling as presented by both Lawrence and the church portrays the act as being wholly destructive to whoever is unlucky enough to fall into the