Only 10 of these were (nominally) for general sale and priced at a prohibitive US$500,000 each. When "The Mint" finally achieved general publication in 1955 there were two editions, the expurgated edition and a limited edition containing the full uncensored text. The delay in publication and sensitivity surrounding the full text mainly concerned its barrack-room language (i.e., lots of "four-letter words") and frank references to bodily functions, which some people might still find offensive. However, social mores have changed since the 1950s with the result that the original text is now widely available. For example, Chapter 19: 'SHIT-CART' was published under the clipped and apparently obscure title '    -CART' (see illustration). However any doubt as to the missing word is soon resolved as the chapter begins:  A few lines later, '352087 A/c Ross' treats his readers to an even rougher word in common RAF usage:  The novelist E. M. Forster corresponded with Lawrence, and in 1929 Forster wrote two detailed letters, as a sharply literary friend, criticising "The Mint". There were many features that Forster liked, including the word picture of the drill sergeant "Stiffy" and the energy and style of parts I and II. Forster was not happy with the conclusion to the book which he felt to be insipid and trying too hard to be fair. But he much liked chapters 9 and 10 of part III, on the day of Queen Alexandra's funeral, and "Dance Night", when a soldier has his first sexual encounter. Reviewing Forster's letters, Jeffrey Meyers writes that "Forster rightly judged "The Mint" unequal to "Seven Pillars"". The critic Irving Howe described Lawrence's "The Mint" in "The Hudson Review" as a "severely chiselled picture of barrack life: Joycean in style, sometimes brilliant in evocation, structured as a series of set-pieces, showing a decided advance in control over "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom" but too markedly an exercise, a self-conscious effort to "write"." Jeremy Wilson writes that ""The Mint", written in a very different style to "Seven Pillars", is, like Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", a work of observation written by a highly intelligent man who found himself effectively imprisoned. Lawrence distilled its spare descriptions from events that he had witnessed over and over again.