"The people lived entirely by instinct, men of may father's age could not really read. And the pit did not mechanize men. On the contrary. Under the butty system, the miners worked underground as a sort of intimate community, they knew each other practically naked, and with a curious close intimacy and the darkness and the underground remoteness of the pit 'stall', and the continual presence of danger, made the physical, instinctive, and intuitional contact between men very highly developed, a contact almost as close as touch, very real and very powerful. This physical awareness and intimate togetherness was at its strongest down pit. When the men came up into the light, they blinked. They had, in a measure, to change their flow. Nevertheless, they brought with them above ground the curious dark intimacy of the mine, the naked sort of contact, and if I think of my childhood, it was always as if there was a lustrous sort of inner darkness, like the gloss of coal, in which we moved and had our real being. My father loved the pit. He was hurt badly, more than once, but he could never stay away. He loved the contact, the intimacy, as men in the war loved the intense male comradeship of the dark days. They did not know what they had lost till they lost it. And I think it is the same with the young collier of today."--GET REF!

"Surely this is the kind of drive and intimacy that Lawrence is attempting to depict in his painting Accident in a Mine--that inexplicable attraction that draws the miners back into the pit even after a severe accident. Lawrence's father felt it. Walter Morel felt it. Tom Brangwen of The Rainbow showed an awareness of the magnetic qualities of the mine when he commented: 'Marriage and home is a little sideshow. The women know it right enough, and take it for what it's worth. One man or another, it doesn't matter all the world. The pit matters.'"--Robert W. Millett, The Vultures and the Phoenix, GET REF!

"Accident in a Mine" was one of the paintings included in Lawrence's infamous one-man show in 1929 at the Dorothy Warren Gallery in London, which caused an hysterical reaction among the public and critics. The gallery was raided and thirteen of the paintings were removed and were only returned with the stipulation that they would remain unexhibited in England. During the furor many of Lawrence's paintings were destroyed.

[With:] JOYCE, JAMES. Typed document signed ("James Joyce") below typed form letter which reads: "Form for Signature. On the principle set forth above, I protest against the destruction of D. H. Lawrence's pictures. Signed: ..." 127 x 100 mm. (5 x 4 in.), remnants from paper mounts in each corner, some tape remnants (with minor abrasions where removed) along sides.

These documents were apparently sent out to rally support from the artistic community in defense to the angry response directed at Lawrence's paintings. This signed document was affixed to the back of this painting seemingly to help insure its protection from possible destruction.