Victor Gollancz also commissioned Eric Blair (George Orwell) to write The Road To Wigan Pier. I read that years ago and found that book far easier to read. JB Priestley travels around England visiting different towns and comments about the places and it's people.
He had fought in the First World War and soon realised he was living in a land not fit for heroes with slum houses and mass unemployment and his writing is amusing, shocking and some of it would be politically incorrect today.
However despite this I was left with the impression of a very patriotic writer who championed the working classes and a man who hated poverty and injustice. He talks of one scenario of there being coal mines in Westminister and the Miners being treated and paid like Stockbrokers. If only.
JB Priestley came from the North and it is that and the Midlands that he highlights the poverty but he also waxes lyrically about Southern places like the Cotswolds and Devon and Dorset where the water painting artists painted before the rise of the Industrial Revolution and he describes Norwich to be like a Dickens story with it's fine old buildings, ruddy cheekecd farmers and clerks that resembled a character from A Christmas Carol.
I have been unemployed and felt the depression and worthlessness of being thrown on the scrapheap and realized that hard manual and poorly paid work is better than no work. But I thank God that I never suffered like the post industrial revolution employees of the nineteen thirties.
However without being hopefully too negative. I will leave you a joke of his:
A weaver up Blackburn way had just lost her husband. She decided to have him cremated and put his ashes in a egg timer. Th'owd devil wouldn't ever work when 'e wer alive, so 'e can start doing a bit now 'e's deead."
I'm glad I finished reading the book but I didn't enjoy reading about poor people struggling. But I like how he championed all people especially ordinary folk like waiters or miners or barmaids..
There's no way to suger-coat poverty. I've recently read a series of depressing writings about children in poverty in the country i grew up in. It has made me question to what use i should put the rest of my life, and where.
ReplyDeleteGosh Tigger you write so well. I read the above book and sometimes think we don't know we are born. There all degrees of poverty and any governments first policies would be no unemployment and no homelessness and I would add no nuclear weapons. Like your friend Dick Whittingons cat found out Tigger. The streets aren't paved with gold.
ReplyDeleteSounds like my kind of book. Thanks for reviewing it so honestly Dave. Maybe one day I will also get round to reading it.
ReplyDeleteThanks YP. The first part of the twentieth century must have been a very harsh and worrying time to live in. JB Priestley was a very good writer with some wonderful prosaic descriptions. He also wrote warts and all and if he thought someone or a place was ugly, he wrote about it. It was heavy reading at times and I am glad I read it all.
ReplyDeleteI read this and several JBP books such as Good Companions a long time ago, and when you mentioned him a month or so ago I thought I must revisit them. Haven't got round to it yet. I used to work with someone called John B Priestley. Never knew what his B stood for but doubt it was Boynton. He did however once receive a telephone call from a woman who said how very much she enjoyed his books.
ReplyDeleteHi Tasker. I believe he was a prolific writer and he added Boynton later in life. He was a founder member of CND.
ReplyDeleteI read it once and liked his description of Norwich. I can't remember reading it as a book from start to finish though. I often confuse him with Betjeman.
ReplyDeleteYes Rachel the Norwich description is very good and he takes a great mental photograph of the fine architecture and the farmers and old market gardener tells him what the weather is like after viewing shrews burying activity and how they never dig their burrows where there are prevailing winds. He's got a fine eye for looking at people and places rather like Betjeman did.
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