When was lawson born

He returned to Sydney on 29 July to take a position on the newly formed Daily Worker only to see it wound up three days later. He consoled himself with drink and Bohemian exploits with a circle of friends that now included J. Le Gay Brereton. The release in December of Short Stories in Prose and Verse , did little to lift his spirits or his income. Within a year, however, Lawson seemed poised to achieve both the recognition and the stability he had been seeking.

After a brief and, on Lawson's part, characteristically intense and impulsive courtship, they were married on 15 April Following an abortive trip to Western Australia in search of gold, the Lawsons returned to Sydney where Henry, now a writer and public figure of some note, embarked on a colourful round of escapades in which large amounts of alcohol and the company of his Dawn and Dusk Club friends, including Fred Broomfield , Victor Daley and Bertram Stevens , were central ingredients.

The Lawsons' move to Mangamaunu in the South Island of New Zealand was arranged by Bertha with the express intention of removing him from this kind of life. They left on 31 March , but the venture was not a success, creatively or otherwise. Lawson's initial enthusiasm for the Maoris whom he taught at the lonely, primitive settlement soon waned. As well, there is evidence in some of his verse of that time 'Written Afterwards', 'The Jolly Dead March' that he was realizing, for perhaps the first time since their romantically rushed courtship and marriage and subsequent boisterous, crowded life in Western Australia and Sydney, both the responsibilities and the ties of his situation.

Lawson's growing restiveness was deepened by promising letters from English publishers. Bertha's pregnancy strengthened his resolve and they left Mangamaunu in November , returning to Sydney in March after Bertha's confinement. Lawson spent the enforced wait in Wellington writing a play 'Pinter's Son Jim' commissioned by Bland Holt ; it turned out to be too unwieldy to stage. Lawson went back to old friends and old ways in Sydney.

He had returned with one overriding aim: to get to London, where he felt certain there would be more opportunity for him to live by his pen. He expressed a mounting sense of frustration and bitterness by drinking heavily—he entered a home for inebriates in November —and by writing a personal statement to the Bulletin.

This appeared in the January issue under the title 'Pursuing Literature in Australia'. But he would probably not have realized his goal of 'seeking London' had it not been for the generous help of David Scott Mitchell , the governor Earl Beauchamp and George Robertson.

He set off on 20 April for England. With him went his wife, his son Joseph and his daughter of just over two months, Bertha. But he had some successes in London, the opportunity was certainly there for him to establish himself upon the literary scene and he may have been in some ways simply unlucky. On arrival he retained the services of J. Pinker, one of the best literary agents in England, and was soon receiving enthusiastic encouragement from critic and publisher's reader Edward Garnett and William Blackwood, editor of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine.

The four Joe Wilson stories—generally regarded by critics as the peak of his achievement—were written in London, and Blackwood published two new Lawson collections in two years: Joe Wilson and his Mates and Children of the Bush But the strain of family life in unfamiliar surrounds and an unkind climate, his wife's serious illness she spent three months from May in Bethlem Royal Hospital as a mental patient and the consequent return to the soul-destroying task of writing under pressure to pay the bills, all sapped Lawson's early resilience and affected his health, the quality of his work and the nature of his literary aspirations and plans.

By April he was arranging for Bertha to return home with the children. He followed soon after and they were all back in Sydney before the end of July. From that time Lawson's personal and creative life entered upon a ghastly decline. A reconciliation with Bertha soon after their return was short lived. In December he attempted suicide. In April next year Bertha sought and obtained a decree for judicial separation.

He wrote a great deal despite his often squalid circumstances but his work alternated between desperate revivals of old themes and inspirations and equally desperate and unsuccessful attempts to break new ground. Maudlin sentimentality and melodrama, often incipient even in some earlier work, invaded both his prose and poetry.

He was frequently gaoled for failure to pay maintenance for his children and, after , was several times in a mental hospital. Though cared for by the loyal Mrs Byers, he became a frail, haunted and pathetic figure well known on the streets of Sydney; in his writing, images of ghostliness proliferated and increasingly a sense of insubstantiality blurred action and characters.

Loyal friends arranged spells at Mallacoota, Victoria, with Brady in and at Leeton in In his first collection was published and Lawson met Bertha Bredt who became his wife in Bertha Bredt was the step daughter of Sydney bookseller and radical, W. McNamara as well as the sister-in-law of the politician Jack Lang. Lawson and Bertha had two children, their son Jim, was born 10 February, and baby Bertha in Lawson, always a heavy drinker, had struggled with alcoholism since but was not troubled by it during his stay in New Zealand despite the solitude.

After his return from New Zealand in however, his alcoholism recurred. Lawson published two more prose collections but was becoming more disenchanted with Australia and in , the family travelled to England, helped financially by Earl Beauchamp, the governor of NSW, David Scott Mitchell and the publisher, George Robertson.

They rented a house at Harpeden, 40 km north of London. Lawson continued to write some of his best work in England but by decided to return to Australia because of financial problems and illness. After his return from England on 21 May, , Lawson and his wife separated and Lawson became increasingly unstable. Bertha and the two children moved into Bertha's mother's place when he failed to pay the maintenance to her and Bertha issued a summons for him because she was afraid of Lawson's behaviour.

On 31 December, the magistrate ordered Henry to pay Bertha 2 pounds weekly. His mother Louisa also suffered mental problems after her publication "Dawn", a woman's magazine with a strong suffragette bias, finally closed in She died in the Gladesville Hospital for the Insane on 12 August, Between and , Lawson was regularly in prison for non-payment of maintenance and inebriation.

He was also in mental and rehabilitation sanatoriums and gradually progressed into a pathetic, dissolute, alcoholic wandering the Sydney streets, begging for money for alcohol. He even tried to commit suicide by jumping off a cliff but survived despite serious injuries. His friends, J. Henry Lawson was an Australian poet and short-story writer. His many stories typify the nationalist period in Australian writing. Henry Lawson was born near the gold-mining center of Grenfell, New South Wales, on June 17, , the son of Peter Hertzberg Larsen; the family adopted the name Lawson when the birth was registered.

In his parents took up a small farm. Having suffered a severe loss of hearing as a lad, Henry Lawson grew up with little education beyond that gained from reading.

Bret Harte's stories attracted his interest and influenced him considerably. At 14 he left school and began work. The homesteaders' endless struggle to earn a living from the impoverished land colored the youth's outlook, and his unhappiness was intensified by strained relationships at home. Finally the depredation of droughts in the early s drove the disunited family to Sydney, where young Lawson worked as a house painter.

He had developed an ambition to write and at the urging of his mother, Louisa Lawson, began attending night school to further his education. At this point his mother bought out a small journal and trained him to edit it. In mid Lawson's first scrap of verse was published by the Bulletin, a radical weekly that had attracted an avid readership among rural workers. Within a few months three more poems were used—one with an editorial note identifying the writer as a youth of "poetic genius.