Contents


The Spike (1931)
A Hanging (1931)
Bookshop Memories (1936)
Shooting an Elephant (1936)
Down the Mine (1937) (From "The Road to Wigan Pier")
North and South (1937) (From "The Road to Wigan Pier")
Spilling the Spanish Beans (1937)
Marrakech (1939)
Boys' Weeklies and Frank Richards's Reply (1940)
Charles Dickens (1940)
Charles Reade (1940)
Inside the Whale (1940)
The Art of Donald McGill (1941)
The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (1941)
Wells, Hitler and the World State (1941)
Looking Back on the Spanish War (1942)
Rudyard Kipling (1942)
Mark Twain--The Licensed Jester (1943)
Poetry and the Microphone (1943)
W B Yeats (1943)
Arthur Koestler (1944)
Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali (1944)
Raffles and Miss Blandish (1944)
Antisemitism in Britain (1945)
Freedom of the Park (1945)
Future of a Ruined Germany (1945)
Good Bad Books (1945)
In Defence Of P. G. Wodehouse (1945)
Nonsense Poetry (1945)
Notes on Nationalism (1945)
Revenge is Sour (1945)
The Sporting Spirit (1945)
You and the Atomic Bomb (1945)
A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray (1946)
A Nice Cup of Tea (1946)
Books vs. Cigarettes (1946)
Confessions of a Book Reviewer (1946)
Decline of the English Murder (1946)
How the Poor Die (1946)
James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution (1946)
Pleasure Spots (1946)
Politics and the English Language (1946)
Politics vs. Literature: an Examination of Gulliver's Travels (1946)
Riding Down from Bangor (1946)
Some Thoughts on the Common Toad (1946)
The Prevention of Literature (1946)
Why I Write (1946)
Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool (1947)
Such, Such were the Joys (1947)
Writers and Leviathan (1948)
Reflections on Gandhi (1949)




THE SPIKE



It was late-afternoon. Forty-nine of us, forty-eight men and one woman,
lay on the green waiting for the spike to open. We were too tired to talk
much. We just sprawled about exhaustedly, with home-made cigarettes stick-
ing out of our scrubby faces. Overhead the chestnut branches were covered
with blossom, and beyond that great woolly clouds floated almost motion-
less in a clear sky. Littered on the grass, we seemed dingy, urban riff-
raff. We defiled the scene, like sardine-tins and paper bags on the sea-
shore.

What talk there was ran on the Tramp Major of this spike. He was a devil,
everyone agreed, a tartar, a tyrant, a bawling, blasphemous, uncharitable
dog. You couldn't call your soul your own when he was about, and many a
tramp had he kicked out in the middle of the night for giving a back an-
swer. When You, came to be searched, he fair held you upside down and
shook you. If you were caught with tobacco there was hell to. Pay, and if
you went in with money (which is against the law) God help you.

I had eightpence on me. 'For the love of Christ, mate,' the old hands ad-
vised me, 'don't you take it in. You'd get seven days for going into the
spike with eightpence!'

So I buried my money in a hole under the hedge, marking the spot with a
lump of flint. Then we set about smuggling our matches and tobacco, for
it is forbidden to take these into nearly all spikes, and one is supposed
to surrender them at the gate. We hid them in our socks, except for the
twenty or so per cent who had no socks, and had to carry the tobacco in
their boots, even under their very toes. We stuffed our ankles with con-
traband until anyone seeing us might have imagined an outbreak of elephant-
iasis. But is an unwritten law that even the sternest Tramp Majors do not
search below the knee, and in the end only one man was caught. This was
Scotty, a little hairy tramp with a bastard accent sired by cockney out
of Glasgow. His tin of cigarette ends fell out of his sock at the wrong
moment, and was impounded.

At six, the gates swung open and we shuffled in. An official at the gate
entered our names and other particulars in the register and took our bun-
dles away from us. The woman was sent off to the workhouse, and we others
into the spike. It was a gloomy, chilly, limewashed place, consisting only
of a bathroom and dining-room and about a hundred narrow stone cells. The
terrible Tramp Major met us at the door and herded us into the bathroom to
be stripped and searched. He was a gruff, soldierly man of forty, who gave
the tramps no more ceremony than sheep at the dipping-pond, shoving them
this way and that and shouting oaths in their faces. But when he came to
myself, he looked hard at me, and said:

'You are a gentleman?'

'I suppose so,' I said.

He gave me another long look. 'Well, that's bloody bad luck, guv'nor,' he
said, 'that's bloody bad luck, that is.' And thereafter he took it into
his head to treat me with compassion, even with a kind of respect.

It was a disgusting sight, that bathroom. All the indecent secrets of our
underwear were exposed; the grime, the rents and patches, the bits of
string doing duty for buttons, the layers upon layers of fragmentary gar-
ments, some of them mere collections of holes, held together by dirt. The
room became a press of steaming nudity, the sweaty odours of the tramps
competing with the sickly, sub-faecal stench native to the spike. Some of
the men refused the bath, and washed only their 'toe-rags', the horrid,
greasy little clouts which tramps bind round their feet. Each of us had
three minutes in which to bathe himself. Six greasy, slippery roller towels
had to serve for the lot of us.

When we had bathed our own clothes were taken away from us, and we were
dressed in the workhouse shirts, grey cotton things like nightshirts, reach-
ing to the middle of the thigh. Then we were sent into the dining-room,
where supper was set out on the deal tables. It was the invariable spike
meal, always the same, whether breakfast, dinner or supper--half a pound of
bread, a bit of margarine, and a pint of so-called tea. It took us five min-
utes to gulp down the cheap, noxious food. Then the Tramp Major served us
with three cotton blankets each, and drove us off to our cells for the night.
The doors were locked on the outside a little before seven in the evening,
and would stay locked for the next twelve hours.

The cells measured eight feet by five, and, had no lighting apparatus except
a tiny, barred window high up in the wall, and a spyhole in the door. There
were no bugs, and we had bedsteads and straw palliasses, rare luxuries both.
In many spikes one sleeps on a wooden shelf, and in some on the bare floor,
with a rolled-up coat for pillow. With a cell to myself, and a bed, I was hop-
ing for a sound night's rest. But I did not get it, for there is always some-
thing wrong in the spike, and the peculiar shortcoming here, as I discovered
immediately, was the cold. May had begun, and in honour of the season--a lit-
tle sacrifice to the gods of spring, perhaps--the authorities had cut off the
steam from the hot pipes. The cotton blankets were almost useless. One spent
the night in turning from side to side, falling asleep for ten minutes and
waking half frozen, and watching for dawn.

As always happens in the spike, I had at last managed to fall comfortably
asleep when it was time to get up. The Tramp Major came marching down the
passage with his heavy tread, unlocking the doors and yelling to us to show
a leg. Promptly the passage was full of squalid shirt-clad figures rushing
for the bathroom, for there was only one tub full of water between us all in
the morning, and it was first come first served. When I arrived twenty tramps
had already washed their faces. I gave one glance at the black scum on top
of the water, and decided to go dirty for the day.

We hurried into our clothes, and then went to the dining-room to bolt our
breakfast. The bread was much worse than usual, because the military-minded
idiot of a Tramp Major had cut it into slices overnight, so that it was as
hard as ship's biscuit. But we were glad of our tea after the cold, restless
night. I do not know what tramps would do without tea, or rather the stuff
they miscall tea. It is their food, their medicine, their panacea for all e-
vils. Without the half gallon or so of it that they suck down a day, I truly
believe they could not face their existence.

After breakfast we had to undress again for the medical inspection, which is
a precaution against smallpox. It was three quarters of an hour before the
doctor arrived, and one had time now to look about him and see what manner of
men we were. It was an instructive sight. We stood shivering naked to the
waist in two long ranks in the passage. The filtered light, bluish and cold,
lighted us up with unmerciful clarity. No one can imagine, unless he has seen
such a thing, what pot-bellied, degenerate curs we looked. Shock heads, hairy,
crumpled faces, hollow chests, flat feet, sagging muscles--every kind of mal-
formation and physical rottenness were there. All were flabby and discoloured,
as all tramps are under their deceptive sunburn. Two or three figures seen
there stay ineradicably in my mind. Old 'Daddy', aged seventy-four, with his
truss, and his red, watering eyes, a herring-gutted starveling with sparse
beard and sunken cheeks, looking like the corpse of Lazarus in some primitive
picture: an imbecile, wandering hither and thither with vague giggles, coyly
pleased because his trousers constantly slipped down and left him nude. But
few of us were greatly better than these; there were not ten decently built
men among us, and half, I believe, should have been in hospital.

This being Sunday, we were to be kept in the spike over the week-end. As soon
as the doctor had gone we were herded back to the dining-room, and its door
shut upon us. It was a lime-washed, stone-floored room, unspeakably dreary
with its furniture of deal boards and benches, and its prison smell. The win-
dows were so high up that one could not look outside, and the sole ornament
was a set of Rules threatening dire penalties to any casual who misconducted
himself. We packed the room so tight that one could not move an elbow without
jostling somebody. Already, at eight o'clock in the morning, we were bored
with our captivity. There was nothing to talk about except the petty gossip
of the road, the good and bad spikes, the charitable and uncharitable counties,
the iniquities of the police and the Salvation Army. Tramps hardly ever get
away from these subjects; they talk, as it were, nothing but shop. They have
nothing worthy to be called conversation, because emptiness of belly leaves no
speculation in their souls. The world is too much with them. Their next meal
is never quite secure, and so they cannot think of anything except the next
meal.

Two hours dragged by. Old Daddy, witless with age, sat silent, his back bent
like a bow and his inflamed eyes dripping slowly on to the floor. George, a
dirty old tramp notorious for the queer habit of sleeping in his hat, grumbled
about a parcel of tommy that he had lost on the road. Bill the moocher, the
best built man of us all, a Herculean sturdy beggar who smelt of beer even af-
ter twelve hours in the spike, told tales of mooching, of pints stood him in
the boozers, and of a parson who had peached to the police and got him seven
days. William and, Fred, two young, ex-fishermen from Norfolk, sang a sad song
about Unhappy Bella, who was betrayed and died in the snow. The imbecile drive-
lled, about an imaginary toff, who had once given him two hundred and fifty-
seven golden sovereigns. So the time passed, with dun talk and dull obscenities.
Everyone was smoking, except Scotty, whose tobacco had been seized, and he was
so miserable in his smokeless state that I stood him the makings of a cigarette.
We smoked furtively, hiding our cigarettes like schoolboys when we heard the
Tramp Major's step, for smoking though connived at, was officially forbidden.

Most of the tramps spent ten consecutive hours in this dreary room. It is hard
to imagine how they put up with it. I have come to think that boredom is the
worst of all a tramp's evils, worse than hunger and discomfort, worse even than
the constant feeling of being socially disgraced. It is a silly piece of cruelty
to confine an ignorant man all day with nothing to do; it is like chaining a dog
in a barrel. Only an educated man, who has consolations within himself, can en-
dure confinement. Tramps, unlettered types as nearly all of them are, face their
poverty with blank, resourceless minds. Fixed for ten hours on a comfortless
bench, they know no way of occupying themselves, and if they think at all it is
to whimper about hard luck and pine for work. They have not the stuff in them to
endure the horrors of idleness. And so, since so much of their lives is spent in
doing nothing, they suffer agonies from boredom.

I was much luckier than the others, because at ten o'clock the Tramp Major pick-
ed me out for the most coveted of all jobs in the spike, the job of helping in
the workhouse kitchen. There was not really any work to be done there, and I was
able to make off and hide in a shed used for storing potatoes, together with some
workhouse paupers who were skulking to avoid the Sunday-morning service. There
was a stove burning there, and comfortable packing cases to sit on, and back num-
bers of the Family Herald, and even a copy of Raffles from the workhouse library.
It was paradise after the spike.

Also, I had my dinner from the workhouse table, and it was one of the biggest
meals I have ever eaten. A tramp does not see such a meal twice in the year, in
the spike or out of it. The paupers told me that they always gorged to the burst-
ing point on Sundays, and went hungry six days of the week. When the meal was over
the cook set me to do the washing-up, and told me to throw away the food that re-
mained. The wastage was astonishing; great dishes of beef, and bucketfuls of bread
and vegetables, were pitched away like rubbish, and then defiled with tea-leaves.
I filled five dustbins to overflowing with good food. And while I did so my follow
tramps were sitting two hundred yards away in the spike, their bellies half filled
with the spike dinner of the everlasting bread and tea, and perhaps two cold boil-
ed potatoes each in honour of Sunday. It appeared that the food was thrown away
from deliberate policy, rather than that it should be given to the tramps.

At three I left the workhouse kitchen and went back to the spike. The, boredom in
that crowded, comfortless room was now unbearable. Even smoking had ceased, for
a tramp's only tobacco is picked-up cigarette ends, and, like a browsing beast,
he starves if he is long away from the pavement-pasture. To occupy the time I talk-
ed with a rather superior tramp, a young carpenter who wore a collar and tie, and
was on the road, he said, for lack of a set of tools. He kept a little aloof from
the other tramps, and held himself more like a free man than a casual. He had
literary tastes, too, and carried one of Scott's novels on all his wanderings.
He told me he never entered a spike unless driven there by hunger, sleeping under
hedges and behind ricks in preference. Along the south coast he had begged by day
and slept in bathing-machines for weeks at a time.

We talked of life on the road. He criticized the system which makes a tramp spend
fourteen hours a day in the spike, and the other ten in walking and dodging the
police. He spoke of his own case--six months at the public charge for want of
three pounds' worth of tools. It was idiotic, he said.

Then I told him about the wastage of food in the workhouse kitchen, and what I
thought of it. And at that he changed his tune immediately. I saw that I had awa-
kened the pew-renter who sleeps in every English workman. Though he had been fam-
ished, along with the rest, he at once saw reasons why the food should have been
thrown away rather than given to the tramps. He admonished me quite severely.

'They have to do it,' he said. 'If they made these places too pleasant you'd have
all the scum of the country flocking into them. It's only the bad food as keeps
all that scum away. These tramps are too lazy to work, that's all that's wrong
with them. You don't want to go encouraging of them. They're scum.'

I produced arguments to prove him wrong, but he would not listen. He kept repeat-
ing:

'You don't want to have any pity on these tramps--scum, they are. You don't want
to judge them by the same standards as men like you and me. They're scum, just
scum.'

It was interesting to see how subtly he disassociated himself from his fellow
tramps. He has been on the road six months, but in the sight of God, he seemed to
imply, he was not a tramp. His body might be in the spike, but his spirit soared
far away, in the pure aether of the middle classes.

The clock's hands crept round with excruciating slowness. We were too bored even
to talk now, the only sound was of oaths and reverberating yawns. One would force
his eyes away from the clock for what seemed an age, and then look back again to
see that the hands had advanced three minutes. Ennui clogged our souls like cold
mutton fat. Our bones ached because of it. The clock's hands stood at four, and
supper was not till six, and there was nothing left remarkable beneath the visit-
ing moon.

At last six o'clock did come, and the Tramp Major and his assistant arrived with
supper. The yawning tramps brisked up like lions at feeding-time. But the meal was
a dismal disappointment. The bread, bad enough in the morning, was now positively
uneatable; it was so hard that even the strongest jaws could make little impression
on it. The older men went almost supperless, and not a man could finish his portion,
hungry though most of us were. When we had finished, the blankets were served out
immediately, and we were hustled off once more to the bare, chilly cells.

Thirteen hours went by. At seven we were awakened, and rushed forth to squabble
over the water in the bathroom, and bolt our ration of bread and tea. Our time in
the spike was up, but we could not go until the doctor had examined us again, for
the authorities have a terror of smallpox and its distribution by tramps. The doc-
tor kept us waiting two hours this time, and it was ten o'clock before we finally
escaped.

At last it was time to go, and we were let out into the yard. How bright everything
looked, and how sweet the winds did blow, after the gloomy, reeking spike! The
Tramp Major handed each man his bundle of confiscated possessions, and a hunk of
bread and cheese for midday dinner, and then we took the road, hastening to get
out of sight of the spike and its discipline, This was our interim of freedom. Af-
ter a day and two nights of wasted time we had eight hours or so to take our recre-
ation, to scour the roads for cigarette ends, to beg, and to look for work. Also,
we had to make our ten, fifteen, or it might be twenty miles to the next spike,
where the game would begin anew.

I disinterred my eightpence and took the road with Nobby, a respectable, downheart-
ed tramp who carried a spare pair of boots and visited all the Labour Exchanges.
Our late companions were scattering north, south, east and west, like bugs into a
mattress. Only the imbecile loitered at the spike gates, until the Tramp Major had
to chase him away.

Nobby and I set out for Croydon. It was a quiet road, there were no cars passing,
the blossom covered the chestnut trees like great wax candles. Everything was so
quiet and smelt so clean, it was hard to realize that only a few minutes ago we
had been packed with that band of prisoners in a stench of drains and soft soap.
The others had all disappeared; we two seemed to be the only tramps on the road.

Then I heard a hurried step behind me, and felt a tap on my arm. It was little
Scotty, who had run panting after us. He pulled a rusty tin box from his pocket.
He wore a friendly smile, like a man who is repaying an obligation.

'Here y'are, mate,' he said cordially. 'I owe you some fag ends. You stood me a
smoke yesterday. The Tramp Major give me back my box of fag ends when we come out
this morning. One good turn deserves another--here y'are.'

And he put four sodden, debauched, loathly cigarette ends into my hand.

First published in Adelphi, April 1931. Later reduced and reshaped to form
Chapters 27 and 35 of Down and Out in Paris and London
c


A HANGING



It was in Burma, a sodden morning of the rains. A sickly light, like yellow tin-
foil, was slanting over the high walls into the jail yard. We were waiting outside
the condemned cells, a row of sheds fronted with double bars, like small animal
cages. Each cell measured about ten feet by ten and was quite bare within except
for a plank bed and a pot of drinking water. In some of them brown silent men were
squatting at the inner bars, with their blankets draped round them. These were the
condemned men, due to be hanged within the next week or two.

One prisoner had been brought out of his cell. He was a Hindu, a puny wisp of a
man, with a shaven head and vague liquid eyes. He had a thick, sprouting moustache,
absurdly too big for his body, rather like the moustache of a comic man on the films.
Six tall Indian warders were guarding him and getting him ready for the gallows.
Two of them stood by with rifles and fixed bayonets, while the others handcuffed
him, passed a chain through his handcuffs and fixed it to their belts, and lashed
his arms tight to his sides. They crowded very close about him, with their hands al-
ways on him in a careful, caressing grip, as though all the while feeling him to
make sure he was there. It was like men handling a fish which is still alive and
may jump back into the water. But he stood quite unresisting, yielding his arms limp-
ly to the ropes, as though he hardly noticed what was happening.

Eight o'clock struck and a bugle call, desolately thin in the wet air, floated from
the distant barracks. The superintendent of the jail, who was standing apart from
the rest of us, moodily prodding the gravel with his stick, raised his head at the
sound. He was an army doctor, with a grey toothbrush moustache and a gruff voice.
"For God's sake hurry up, Francis," he said irritably. "The man ought to have been
dead by this time. Aren't you ready yet?"

Francis, the head jailer, a fat Dravidian in a white drill suit and gold spectacles,
waved his black hand. "Yes sir, yes sir," he bubbled. "All iss satisfactorily prepar-
ed. The hangman iss waiting. We shall proceed."

"Well, quick march, then. The prisoners can't get their breakfast till this job's o-
ver."

We set out for the gallows. Two warders marched on either side of the prisoner, with
their rifles at the slope; two others marched close against him, gripping him by arm
and shoulder, as though at once pushing and supporting him. The rest of us, magis-
trates and the like, followed behind. Suddenly, when we had gone ten yards, the pro-
cession stopped short without any order or warning. A dreadful thing had happened--a
dog, come goodness knows whence, had appeared in the yard. It came bounding among us
with a loud volley of barks, and leapt round us wagging its whole body, wild with
glee at finding so many human beings together. It was a large woolly dog, half Aire-
dale, half pariah. For a moment it pranced round us, and then, before anyone could
stop it, it had made a dash for the prisoner, and jumping up tried to lick his face.
Everyone stood aghast, too taken aback even to grab at the dog.

“Who let that bloody brute in here?” said the superintendent angrily. “Catch it,
someone!”

A warder, detached from the escort, charged clumsily after the dog, but it danced and
gambolled just out of his reach, taking everything as part of the game. A young Eur-
asian jailer picked up a handful of gravel and tried to stone the dog away, but it
dodged the stones and came after us again. Its yaps echoed from the jail walls. The
prisoner, in the grasp of the two warders, looked on incuriously, as though this was
another formality of the hanging. It was several minutes before someone managed to
catch the dog. Then we put my handkerchief through its collar and moved off once
more, with the dog still straining and whimpering.

It was about forty yards to the gallows. I watched the bare brown back of the prisoner
marching in front of me. He walked clumsily with his bound arms, but quite steadily,
with that bobbing gait of the Indian who never straightens his knees. At each step his
muscles slid neatly into place, the lock of hair on his scalp danced up and down, his
feet printed themselves on the wet gravel. And once, in spite of the men who gripped
him by each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path.

It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a
healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw
the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide.
This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body
were working –bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues form-
ing – all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood
on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His
eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw,
reasoned – reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together,
seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sud-
den snap, one of us would be gone – one mind less, one world less.

The gallows stood in a small yard, separate from the main grounds of the prison, and o-
vergrown with tall prickly weeds. It was a brick erection like three sides of a shed,
with planking on top, and above that two beams and a crossbar with the rope dangling.
The hangman, a grey-haired convict in the white uniform of the prison, was waiting be-
side his machine. He greeted us with a servile crouch as we entered. At a word from Fran-
cis the two warders, gripping the prisoner more closely than ever, half led, half pushed
him to the gallows and helped him clumsily up the ladder. Then the hangman limbed up and
fixed the rope round the prisoner’s neck.

We stood waiting, five yards away. The warders had formed in a rough circle round the gal-
lows. And then, when the noose was fixed, the prisoner began crying out on his god. It
was a high, reiterated cry of “Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram!”, not urgent and fearful like a pray-
er or a cry for help, but steady, rhythmical, almost like the tolling of a bell. The dog
answered the sound with a whine. The hangman, still standing on the gallows, produced a
small cotton bag like a flour bag and drew it down over the prisoner’s face. But the
sound, muffled by the cloth, still persisted, over and over again: “Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram!
Ram!”

The hangman climbed down and stood ready, holding the lever. Minutes seemed to pass. The
steady, muffled crying from the prisoner went on and on, “Ram! Ram! Ram!” never falter-
ing for an instant. The superintendent, his head on his chest, was slowly poking the
ground with his stick; perhaps he was counting the cries, allowing the prisoner a fixed
number – fifty, perhaps, or a hundred. Everyone had changed colour. The Indians had gone
grey like bad coffee, and one or two of the bayonets were wavering. We looked at the lash-
ed, hooded man on the drop, and listened to his cries – each cry another second of life;
the same thought was in all our minds: oh, kill him quickly, get it over, stop that abom-
inable noise!

Suddenly the superintendent made up his mind. Throwing up his head he made a swift motion
with his stick. “Chalo!” he shouted almost fiercely.

There was a clanking noise, and then dead silence. The prisoner had vanished, and the rope
was twisting on itself. I let go of the dog, and it galloped immediately to the back of
the gallows; but when it got there it stopped short, barked, and then retreated into a cor-
ner of the yard, where it stood among the weeds, looking timorously out at us. We went
round the gallows to inspect the prisoner’s body. He was dangling with his toes pointed
straight downwards, very slowly revolving, as dead as a stone.

The superintendent reached out with his stick and poked the bare body; it oscillated,
slightly. “He’s all right,” said the superintendent. He backed out from under the gal-
lows, and blew out a deep breath. The moody look had gone out of his face quite suddenly.
He glanced at his wrist-watch. “Eight minutes past eight. Well, that’s all for this morn-
ing, thank God.”

The warders unfixed bayonets and marched away. The dog, sobered and conscious of having
misbehaved itself, slipped after them. We walked out of the gallows yard, past the condemn-
ed cells with their waiting prisoners, into the big central yard of the prison. The con-
victs, under the command of warders armed with lathis, were already receiving their break-
fast. They squatted in long rows, each man holding a tin pannikin, while two warders with
buckets marched round ladling out rice; it seemed quite a homely, jolly scene, after the
hanging. An enormous relief had come upon us now that the job was done. One felt an im-
pulse to sing, to break into a run, to snigger. All at once everyone began chattering
gaily.

The Eurasian boy walking beside me nodded towards the way we had come, with a knowing
smile: “Do you know, sir, our friend (he meant the dead man), when he heard his appeal
had been dismissed, he pissed on the floor of his cell. From fright. Kindly take one
of my cigarettes, sir. Do you not admire my new silver case, sir? From the boxwallah,
two rupees eight annas. Classy European style.”

Several people laughed – at what, nobody seemed certain.

Francis was walking by the superintendent, talking garrulously. “Well, sir, all hass
passed off with the utmost satisfactoriness. It wass all finished – flick! like that.
It iss not always so – oah, no! I have known cases where the doctor wass obliged to go
beneath the gallows and pull the prisoner’s legs to ensure decease. Most disagreeable!”

“Wriggling about, eh? That’s bad,” said the superintendent.

“Ach, sir, it iss worse when they become refractory! One man, I recall, clung to the
bars of hiss cage when we went to take him out. You will scarcely credit, sir, that it
took six warders to dislodge him, three pulling at each leg. We reasoned with him. “My
dear fellow,” we said, “think of all the pain and trouble you are causing to us!” But
no, he would not listen! Ach, he wass very troublesome!”

I found that I was laughing quite loudly. Everyone was laughing. Even the superintend-
ent grinned in a tolerant way. “You’d better all come out and have a drink,” he
said quite genially. “I’ve got a bottle of whisky in the car. We could do with it.”

We went through the big double gates of the prison, into the road. “Pulling at his
legs!” exclaimed a Burmese magistrate suddenly, and burst into a loud chuckling. We
all began laughing again. At that moment Francis’s anecdote seemed extraordinarily
funny. We all had a drink together, native and European alike, quite amicably. The
dead man was a hundred yards away.



Bookshop Memories



When I worked in a second-hand bookshop — so easily pictured, if you don't work in one,
as a kind of paradise where charming old gentlemen browse eternally among calf-bound
folios — the thing that chiefly struck me was the rarity of really bookish people. Our
shop had an exceptionally interesting stock, yet I doubt whether ten per cent of our
customers knew a good book from a bad one. First edition snobs were much commoner than
lovers of literature, but oriental students haggling over cheap textbooks were commoner
still, and vague-minded women looking for birthday presents for their nephews were com-
monest of all.

Many of the people who came to us were of the kind who would be a nuisance anywhere
but have special opportunities in a bookshop. For example, the dear old lady who ‘wants a
book for an invalid' (a very common demand, that), and the other dear old lady who read
such a nice book in 1897 and wonders whether you can find her a copy. Unfortunately she
doesn't remember the title or the author's name or what the book was about, but she does
remember that it had a red cover. But apart from these there are two well-known types of
pest by whom every second-hand bookshop is haunted. One is the decayed person smelling of
old breadcrusts who comes every day, sometimes several times a day, and tries to sell you
worthless books. The other is the person who orders large quantities of books for which
he has not the smallest intention of paying. In our shop we sold nothing on credit, but
we would put books aside, or order them if necessary, for people who arranged to fetch
them away later. Scarcely half the people who ordered books from us ever came back. It
used to puzzle me at first. What made them do it? They would come in and demand some rare
and expensive book, would make us promise over and over again to keep it for them, and
then would vanish never to return. But many of them, of course, were unmistakable
paranoiacs. They used to talk in a grandiose manner about themselves and tell the most
ingenious stories to explain how they had happened to come out of doors without any money
— stories which, in many cases, I am sure they themselves believed. In a town like London
there are always plenty of not quite certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they
tend to gravitate towards bookshops, because a bookshop is one of the few places where
you can hang about for a long time without spending any money. In the end one gets to
know these people almost at a glance. For all their big talk there is something
moth-eaten and aimless about them. Very often, when we were dealing with an obvious
paranoiac, we would put aside the books he asked for and then put them back on the
shelves the moment he had gone. None of them, I noticed, ever attempted to take books
away without paying for them; merely to order them was enough — it gave them, I suppose,
the illusion that they were spending real money.

Like most second-hand bookshops we had various sidelines. We sold second-hand
typewriters, for instance, and also stamps — used stamps, I mean. Stamp-collectors
are a strange, silent, fish-like breed, of all ages, but only of the male sex; women,
apparently, fail to see the peculiar charm of gumming bits of coloured paper into albums.
We also sold sixpenny horoscopes compiled by somebody who claimed to have foretold the
Japanese earthquake. They were in sealed envelopes and I never opened one of them myself,
but the people who bought them often came back and told us how ‘true’ their horoscopes
had been. (Doubtless any horoscope seems ‘true’ if it tells you that you are highly
attractive to the opposite sex and your worst fault is generosity.) We did a good deal of
business in children's books, chiefly ‘remainders’. Modern books for children are rather
horrible things, especially when you see them in the mass. Personally I would sooner give
a child a copy of Petrenius Arbiter than Peter Pan, but even Barrie seems manly and
wholesome compared with some of his later imitators. At Christmas time we spent a
feverish ten days struggling with Christmas cards and calendars, which are tiresome
things to sell but good business while the season lasts. It used to interest me to see
the brutal cynicism with which Christian sentiment is exploited. The touts from the
Christmas card firms used to come round with their catalogues as early as June. A phrase
from one of their invoices sticks in my memory. It was: ‘2 doz. Infant Jesus with
rabbits’.

But our principal sideline was a lending library — the usual ‘twopenny no-deposit’
library of five or six hundred volumes, all fiction. How the book thieves must love those
libraries! It is the easiest crime in the world to borrow a book at one shop for
twopence, remove the label and sell it at another shop for a shilling. Nevertheless
booksellers generally find that it pays them better to have a certain number of books
stolen (we used to lose about a dozen a month) than to frighten customers away by
demanding a deposit.

Our shop stood exactly on the frontier between Hampstead and Camden Town, and we were
frequented by all types from baronets to bus-conductors. Probably our library subscribers
were a fair cross-section of London's reading public. It is therefore worth noting that
of all the authors in our library the one who ‘went out’ the best was — Priestley?
Hemingway? Walpole? Wodehouse? No, Ethel M. Dell, with Warwick Deeping a good second
and Jeffrey Farnol, I should say, third. Dell's novels, of course, are read solely by women,
but by women of all kinds and ages and not, as one might expect, merely by wistful
spinsters and the fat wives of tobacconists. It is not true that men don't read novels,
but it is true that there are whole branches of fiction that they avoid. Roughly
speaking, what one might call the average novel — the ordinary, good-bad, Gals-
worthy-and-water stuff which is the norm of the English novel — seems to exist only
for women. Men read either the novels it is possible to respect, or detective stories.
But their consumption of detective stories is terrific. One of our subscribers to my
knowledge read four or five detective stories every week for over a year, besides others
which he got from another library. What chiefly surprised me was that he never read the
same book twice. Apparently the whole of that frightful torrent of trash (the pages read
every year would, I calculated, cover nearly three quarters of an acre) was stored for
ever in his memory. He took no notice of titles or author's names, but he could tell by
merely glancing into a book whether be had ‘had it already’.

In a lending library you see people's real tastes, not their pretended ones, and one
thing that strikes you is how completely the ‘classical’ English novelists have dropped
out of favour. It is simply useless to put Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen, Trollope,
etc. into the ordinary lending library; nobody takes them out. At the mere sight of a
nineteenth-century novel people say, ‘Oh, but that's old!’ and shy away immediately. Yet
it is always fairly easy to sell Dickens, just as it is always easy to sell Shakespeare.
Dickens is one of those authors whom people are ‘always meaning to’ read, and, like the
Bible, he is widely known at second hand. People know by hearsay that Bill Sikes was a
burglar and that Mr Micawber had a bald head, just as they know by hearsay that Moses was
found in a basket of bulrushes and saw the ‘back parts’ of the Lord. Another thing that
is very noticeable is the growing unpopularity of American books. And another — the
publishers get into a stew about this every two or three years — is the unpopularity of
short stories. The kind of person who asks the librarian to choose a book for him nearly
always starts by saying ‘I don't want short stories’, or ‘I do not desire little
stories’, as a German customer of ours used to put it. If you ask them why, they
sometimes explain that it is too much fag to get used to a new set of characters with
every story; they like to ‘get into’ a novel which demands no further thought after the
first chapter. I believe, though, that the writers are more to blame here than the
readers. Most modern short stories, English and American, are utterly lifeless and
worthless, far more so than most novels. The short stories which are stories are popular
enough, vide D. H. Lawrence, whose short stories are as popular as his novels.

Would I like to be a bookseller de métier? On the whole — in spite of my employer's
kindness to me, and some happy days I spent in the shop — no.

Given a good pitch and the right amount of capital, any educated person ought to be able
to make a small secure living out of a bookshop. Unless one goes in for ‘rare’ books it
is not a difficult trade to learn, and you start at a great advantage if you know
anything about the insides of books. (Most booksellers don't. You can get their measure
by having a look at the trade papers where they advertise their wants. If you don't see
an ad. for Boswell's Decline and Fall you are pretty sure to see one for The Mill on the
Floss by T. S. Eliot.) Also it is a humane trade which is not capable of being vulgarized
beyond a certain point. The combines can never squeeze the small independent bookseller
out of existence as they have squeezed the grocer and the milkman. But the hours of work
are very long — I was only a part-time employee, but my employer put in a seventy-hour
week, apart from constant expeditions out of hours to buy books — and it is an unheal-
thy life. As a rule a bookshop is horribly cold in winter, because if it is too warm the
windows get misted over, and a bookseller lives on his windows. And books give off more
and nastier dust than any other class of objects yet invented, and the top of a book is
the place where every bluebottle prefers to die.

But the real reason why I should not like to be in the book trade for life is that while
I was in it I lost my love of books. A bookseller has to tell lies about books, and that
gives him a distaste for them; still worse is the fact that he is constantly dusting them
and hauling them to and fro. There was a time when I really did love books — loved the
sight and smell and feel of them, I mean, at least if they were fifty or more years old.
Nothing pleased me quite so much as to buy a job lot of them for a shilling at a country
auction. There is a peculiar flavour about the battered unexpected books you pick up in
that kind of collection: minor eighteenth-century poets, out-of-date gazeteers, odd
volumes of forgotten novels, bound numbers of ladies’ magazines of the sixties. For
casual reading — in your bath, for instance, or late at night when you are too tired to
go to bed, or in the odd quarter of an hour before lunch — there is nothing to touch a
back number of the Girl's Own Paper. But as soon as I went to work in the bookshop I
stopped buying books. Seen in the mass, five or ten thousand at a time, books were boring
and even slightly sickening. Nowadays I do buy one occasionally, but only if it is a book
that I want to read and can't borrow, and I never buy junk. The sweet smell of decaying
paper appeals to me no longer. It is too closely associated in my mind with paranoiac
customers and dead bluebottles.



Shooting an Elephant



In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people – the only time in
my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me. I was sub-divis-
ional police officer of the town, and in an aimless, petty kind of way anti-European
feeling was very bitter. No one had the guts to raise a riot, but if a European woman
went through the bazaars alone somebody would probably spit betel juice over her dress.
As a police officer I was an obvious target and was baited whenever it seemed safe to
do so. When a nimble Burman tripped me up on the football field and the referee (ano-
ther Burman) looked the other way, the crowd yelled with hideous laughter. This hap-
pened more than once. In the end the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me
everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on
my nerves. The young Buddhist priests were the worst of all. There were several thou-
sands of them in the town and none of them seemed to have anything to do except stand
on street corners and jeer at Europeans.

All this was perplexing and upsetting. For at that time I had already made up my mind
that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it
the better. Theoretically – and secretly, of course – I was all for the Burmese and all
against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more
bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of
Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the
lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the
men who had been Bogged with bamboos – all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense
of guilt. But I could get nothing into perspective. I was young and ill-educated and I
had had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman
in the East. I did not even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know
that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it.
All I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage
against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible. With one
part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something
clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another
part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a
Buddhist priest’s guts. Feelings like these are the normal by-products of imperialism;
ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty.

One day something happened which in a roundabout way was enlightening. It was a tiny
incident in itself, but it gave me a better glimpse than I had had before of the real
nature of imperialism – the real motives for which despotic governments act. Early one
morning the sub-inspector at a police station the other end of the town rang me up on
the phone and said that an elephant was ravaging the bazaar. Would I please come and
do something about it? I did not know what I could do, but I wanted to see what was
happening and I got on to a pony and started out. I took my rifle, an old 44 Winchester
and much too small to kill an elephant, but I thought the noise might be useful in
terrorem. Various Burmans stopped me on the way and told me about the elephant’s doings.
It was not, of course, a wild elephant, but a tame one which had gone “must.” It had been
chained up, as tame elephants always are when their attack of “must” is due, but on the
previous night it had broken its chain and escaped. Its mahout, the only person who could
manage it when it was in that state, had set out in pursuit, but had taken the wrong
direction and was now twelve hours’ journey away, and in the morning the elephant had
suddenly reappeared in the town. The Burmese population had no weapons and were quite
helpless against it. It had already destroyed somebody’s bamboo hut, killed a cow and
raided some fruit-stalls and devoured the stock; also it had met the municipal rubbish
van and, when the driver jumped out and took to his heels, had turned the van over and
inflicted violences upon it.

The Burmese sub-inspector and some Indian constables were waiting for me in the quarter
where the elephant had been seen. It was a very poor quarter, a labyrinth of squalid
bamboo huts, thatched with palmleaf, winding all over a steep hillside. I remember that
it was a cloudy, stuffy morning at the beginning of the rains. We began questioning the
people as to where the elephant had gone and, as usual, failed to get any definite
information. That is invariably the case in the East; a story always sounds clear enough
at a distance, but the nearer you get to the scene of events the vaguer it becomes. Some
of the people said that the elephant had gone in one direction, some said that he had
gone in another, some professed not even to have heard of any elephant. I had almost made
up my mind that the whole story was a pack of lies, when we heard yells a little distance
away. There was a loud, scandalized cry of “Go away, child! Go away this instant!” and an
old woman with a switch in her hand came round the corner of a hut, violently shooing
away a crowd of naked children. Some more women followed, clicking their tongues and
exclaiming; evidently there was something that the children ought not to have seen. I
rounded the hut and saw a man’s dead body sprawling in the mud. He was an Indian, a black
Dravidian coolie, almost naked, and he could not have been dead many minutes. The people
said that the elephant had come suddenly upon him round the corner of the hut, caught him
with its trunk, put its foot on his back and ground him into the earth. This was the
rainy season and the ground was soft, and his face had scored a trench a foot deep and a
couple of yards long. He was lying on his belly with arms crucified and head sharply
twisted to one side. His face was coated with mud, the eyes wide open, the teeth bared
and grinning with an expression of unendurable agony. (Never tell me, by the way, that
the dead look peaceful. Most of the corpses I have seen looked devilish.) The friction of
the great beast’s foot had stripped the skin from his back as neatly as one skins a
rabbit. As soon as I saw the dead man I sent an orderly to a friend’s house nearby to
borrow an elephant rifle. I had already sent back the pony, not wanting it to go mad with
fright and throw me if it smelt the elephant.

The orderly came back in a few minutes with a rifle and five cartridges, and meanwhile
some Burmans had arrived and told us that the elephant was in the paddy fields below,
only a few hundred yards away. As I started forward practically the whole population of
the quarter flocked out of the houses and followed me. They had seen the rifle and were
all shouting excitedly that I was going to shoot the elephant. They had not shown much
interest in the elephant when he was merely ravaging their homes, but it was different
now that he was going to be shot. It was a bit of fun to them, as it would be to an
English crowd; besides they wanted the meat. It made me vaguely uneasy. I had no
intention of shooting the elephant – I had merely sent for the rifle to defend myself if
necessary – and it is always unnerving to have a crowd following you. I marched down the
hill, looking and feeling a fool, with the rifle over my shoulder and an ever-growing
army of people jostling at my heels. At the bottom, when you got away from the huts,
there was a metalled road and beyond that a miry waste of paddy fields a thousand yards
across, not yet ploughed but soggy from the first rains and dotted with coarse grass. The
elephant was standing eight yards from the road, his left side towards us. He took not
the slightest notice of the crowd’s approach. He was tearing up bunches of grass, beating
them against his knees to clean them and stuffing them into his mouth.

I had halted on the road. As soon as I saw the elephant I knew with perfect certainty
that I ought not to shoot him. It is a serious matter to shoot a working elephant – it is
comparable to destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery – and obviously one ought
not to do it if it can possibly be avoided. And at that distance, peacefully eating, the
elephant looked no more dangerous than a cow. I thought then and I think now that his
attack of “must” was already passing off; in which case he would merely wander harmlessly
about until the mahout came back and caught him. Moreover, I did not in the least want to
shoot him. I decided that I would watch him for a little while to make sure that he did
not turn savage again, and then go home.

But at that moment I glanced round at the crowd that had followed me. It was an immense
crowd, two thousand at the least and growing every minute. It blocked the road for a long
distance on either side. I looked at the sea of yellow faces above the garish
clothes-faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, all certain that the elephant
was going to be shot. They were watching me as they would watch a conjurer about to
perform a trick. They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in my hands I was
momentarily worth watching. And suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the
elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel
their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as
I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the
futility of the white man’s dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun,
standing in front of the unarmed native crowd – seemingly the leading actor of the piece;
but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow
faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his
own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the
conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall
spend his life in trying to impress the “natives,” and so in every crisis he has got to
do what the “natives” expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. I had
got to shoot the elephant. I had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle.
A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind
and do definite things. To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people
marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing – no, that was
impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man’s life in the
East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at.

But I did not want to shoot the elephant. I watched him beating his bunch of grass
against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have. It seemed
to me that it would be murder to shoot him. At that age I was not squeamish about killing
animals, but I had never shot an elephant and never wanted to. (Somehow it always seems
worse to kill a large animal.) Besides, there was the beast’s owner to be considered.
Alive, the elephant was worth at least a hundred pounds; dead, he would only be worth the
value of his tusks, five pounds, possibly. But I had got to act quickly. I turned to some
experienced-looking Burmans who had been there when we arrived, and asked them how the
elephant had been behaving. They all said the same thing: he took no notice of you if you
left him alone, but he might charge if you went too close to him.

It was perfectly clear to me what I ought to do. I ought to walk up to within, say,
twenty-five yards of the elephant and test his behavior. If he charged, I could shoot; if
he took no notice of me, it would be safe to leave him until the mahout came back. But
also I knew that I was going to do no such thing. I was a poor shot with a rifle and the
ground was soft mud into which one would sink at every step. If the elephant charged and
I missed him, I should have about as much chance as a toad under a steam-roller. But even
then I was not thinking particularly of my own skin, only of the watchful yellow faces
behind. For at that moment, with the crowd watching me, I was not afraid in the ordinary
sense, as I would have been if I had been alone. A white man mustn’t be frightened in
front of “natives”; and so, in general, he isn’t frightened. The sole thought in my mind
was that if anything went wrong those two thousand Burmans would see me pursued, caught,
trampled on and reduced to a grinning corpse like that Indian up the hill. And if that
happened it was quite probable that some of them would laugh. That would never do.

There was only one alternative. I shoved the cartridges into the magazine and lay down on
the road to get a better aim. The crowd grew very still, and a deep, low, happy sigh, as
of people who see the theatre curtain go up at last, breathed from innumerable throats.
They were going to have their bit of fun after all. The rifle was a beautiful German
thing with cross-hair sights. I did not then know that in shooting an elephant one would
shoot to cut an imaginary bar running from ear-hole to ear-hole. I ought, therefore, as
the elephant was sideways on, to have aimed straight at his ear-hole, actually I aimed
several inches in front of this, thinking the brain would be further forward.

When I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or feel the kick – one never does when
a shot goes home – but I heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the crowd. In
that instant, in too short a time, one would have thought, even for the bullet to get
there, a mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant. He neither stirred nor
fell, but every line of his body had altered. He looked suddenly stricken, shrunken,
immensely old, as though the frightful impact of the bullet had paralysed him without
knocking him down. At last, after what seemed a long time – it might have been five
seconds, I dare say – he sagged flabbily to his knees. His mouth slobbered. An enormous
senility seemed to have settled upon him. One could have imagined him thousands of years
old. I fired again into the same spot. At the second shot he did not collapse but climbed
with desperate slowness to his feet and stood weakly upright, with legs sagging and head
drooping. I fired a third time. That was the shot that did for him. You could see the
agony of it jolt his whole body and knock the last remnant of strength from his legs. But
in falling he seemed for a moment to rise, for as his hind legs collapsed beneath him he
seemed to tower upward like a huge rock toppling, his trunk reaching skyward like a tree.
He trumpeted, for the first and only time. And then down he came, his belly towards me,
with a crash that seemed to shake the ground even where I lay.

I got up. The Burmans were already racing past me across the mud. It was obvious that the
elephant would never rise again, but he was not dead. He was breathing very rhythmically
with long rattling gasps, his great mound of a side painfully rising and falling. His
mouth was wide open – I could see far down into caverns of pale pink throat. I waited a
long time for him to die, but his breathing did not weaken. Finally I fired my two
remaining shots into the spot where I thought his heart must be. The thick blood welled
out of him like red velvet, but still he did not die. His body did not even jerk when the
shots hit him, the tortured breathing continued without a pause. He was dying, very
slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet could
damage him further. I felt that I had got to put an end to that dreadful noise. It seemed
dreadful to see the great beast lying there, powerless to move and yet powerless to die,
and not even to be able to finish him. I sent back for my small rifle and poured shot
after shot into his heart and down his throat. They seemed to make no impression. The
tortured gasps continued as steadily as the ticking of a clock.

In the end I could not stand it any longer and went away. I heard later that it took him
half an hour to die. Burmans were bringing dash and baskets even before I left, and I was
told they had stripped his body almost to the bones by the afternoon.

Afterwards, of course, there were endless discussions about the shooting of the elephant.
The owner was furious, but he was only an Indian and could do nothing. Besides, legally I
had done the right thing, for a mad elephant has to be killed, like a mad dog, if its
owner fails to control it. Among the Europeans opinion was divided. The older men said I
was right, the younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a
coolie, because an elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie. And afterwards
I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it
gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of
the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.

Published by New Writing, 2, Autumn 1936



Down the Mine



Our civilization, pace Chesterton, is founded on coal, more completely than one
realizes until one stops to think about it. The machines that keep us alive, and
the machines that make machines, are all directly or indirectly dependent upon
coal. In the metabolism of the Western world the coal-miner is second in importance
only to the man who ploughs the soil. He is a sort of caryatid upon whose shoulders
nearly everything that is not grimy is supported. For this reason the actual
process by which coal is extracted is well worth watching, if you get the chance
and are willing to take the trouble.

When you go down a coal-mine it is important to try and get to the coal face when
the ‘fillers’ are at work. This is not easy, because when the mine is working
visitors are a nuisance and are not encouraged, but if you go at any other time, it
is possible to come away with a totally wrong impression. On a Sunday, for
instance, a mine seems almost peaceful. The time to go there is when the machines
are roaring and the air is black with coal dust, and when you can actually see what
the miners have to do. At those times the place is like hell, or at any rate like
my own mental picture of hell. Most of the things one imagines in hell are if there
— heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and, above all, unbearably cramped
space. Everything except the fire, for there is no fire down there except the
feeble beams of Davy lamps and electric torches which scarcely penetrate the
clouds of coal dust.

When you have finally got there — and getting there is a job in itself: I will explain
that in a moment — you crawl through the last line of pit props and see opposite
you a shiny black wall three or four feet high. This is the coal face. Overhead is
the smooth ceiling made by the rock from which the coal has been cut; underneath is
the rock again, so that the gallery you are in is only as high as the ledge of coal
itself, probably not much more than a yard. The first impression of all,
overmastering everything else for a while, is the frightful, deafening din from the
conveyor belt which carries the coal away. You cannot see very far, because the fog
of coal dust throws back the beam of your lamp, but you can see on either side of
you the line of half-naked kneeling men, one to every four or five yards, driving
their shovels under the fallen coal and flinging it swiftly over their left
shoulders. They are feeding it on to the conveyor belt, a moving rubber belt a
couple of feet wide which runs a yard or two behind them. Down this belt a
glittering river of coal races constantly. In a big mine it is carrying away
several tons of coal every minute. It bears it off to some place in the main roads
where it is shot into tubs holding half a tun, and thence dragged to the cages and
hoisted to the outer air.

It is impossible to watch the ‘fillers’ at work without feelling a pang of envy for
their toughness. It is a dreadful job that they do, an almost superhuman job by the
standard of an ordinary person. For they are not only shifting monstrous quantities
of coal, they are also doing it in a position that doubles or trebles the work.
They have got to remain kneeling all the while — they could hardly rise from their
knees without hitting the ceiling — and you can easily see by trying it what a
tremendous effort this means. Shovelling is comparatively easy when you are
standing up, because you can use your knee and thigh to drive the shovel along;
kneeling down, the whole of the strain is thrown upon your arm and belly muscles.
And the other conditions do not exactly make things easier. There is the heat — it
varies, but in some mines it is suffocating — and the coal dust that stuffs up your
throat and nostrils and collects along your eyelids, and the unending rattle of the
conveyor belt, which in that confined space is rather like the rattle of a machine
gun. But the fillers look and work as though they were made of iron. They really do
look like iron hammered iron statues — under the smooth coat of coal dust which
clings to them from head to foot. It is only when you see miners down the mine and
naked that you realize what splendid men, they are. Most of them are small (big men
are at a disadvantage in that job) but nearly all of them have the most noble
bodies; wide shoulders tapering to slender supple waists, and small pronounced
buttocks and sinewy thighs, with not an ounce of waste flesh anywhere. In the
hotter mines they wear only a pair of thin drawers, clogs and knee-pads; in the
hottest mines of all, only the clogs and knee-pads. You can hardly tell by the look
of them whether they are young or old. They may be any age up to sixty or even
sixty-five, but when they are black and naked they all look alike. No one could do
their work who had not a young man's body, and a figure fit for a guardsman at
that, just a few pounds of extra flesh on the waist-line, and the constant bending
would be impossible. You can never forget that spectacle once you have seen it —
the line of bowed, kneeling figures, sooty black all over, driving their, huge
shovels under the coal with stupendous force and speed. They are on the job for
seven and a half hours, theoretically without a break, for there is no time ‘off’.
Actually they, snatch a quarter of an hour or so at some time during the shift to
eat the food they have brought with them, usually a hunk of bread and dripping and
a bottle of cold tea. The first time I was watching the ‘fillers’ at work I put my
hand upon some dreadful slimy thing among the coal dust. It was a chewed quid of
tobacco. Nearly all the miners chew tobacco, which is said to be good against
thirst.

Probably you have to go down several coal-mines before you can get much grasp of
the processes that are going on round you. This is chiefly because the mere effort
of getting from place to place; makes it difficult to notice anything else, In some
ways it is even disappointing, or at least is unlike what you have, expected. You
get into the cage, which is a steel box about as wide as a telephone box and two
or three times as long. It holds ten men, but they pack it like pilchards in a tin,
and a tall man cannot stand upright in it. The steel door shuts upon you, and
somebody working the winding gear above drops you into the void. You have the usual
momentary qualm in your belly and a bursting sensation in the cars, but not much
sensation of movement till you get near the bottom, when the cage slows down so
abruptly that you could swear it is going upwards again. In the middle of the run
the cage probably touches sixty miles an hour; in some of the deeper mines it
touches even more. When you crawl out at the bottom you are perhaps four hundred
yards underground. That is to say you have a tolerable-sized mountain on top of
you; hundreds of yards of solid rock, bones of extinct beasts, subsoil, flints,
roots of growing things, green grass and cows grazing on it — all this suspended
over your head and held back only by wooden props as thick as the calf of your leg.
But because of the speed at which the cage has brought you down, and the complete
blackness through which you have travelled, you hardly feel yourself deeper down
than you would at the bottom of the Piccadilly tube.

What is surprising, on the other hand, is the immense horizontal distances that
have to be travelled underground. Before I had been down a mine I had vaguely
imagined the miner stepping out of the cage and getting to work on a ledge of coal
a few yards away. I had not realized that before he even gets to work he may have
had to creep along passages as long as from London Bridge to Oxford Circus. In the
beginning, of course, a mine shaft is sunk somewhere near a seam of coal; But as
that seam is worked out and fresh seams are followed up, the workings get further
and further from the pit bottom. If it is a mile from the pit bottom to the coal
face, that is probably an average distance; three miles is a fairly normal one;
there are even said to be a few mines where it is as much as five miles. But these
distances bear no relation to distances above ground. For in all that mile or three
miles as it may be, there is hardly anywhere outside the main road, and not many
places even there, where a man can stand upright.

You do not notice the effect of this till you have gone a few hundred yards. You
start off, stooping slightly, down the dim-lit gallery, eight or ten feet wide and
about five high, with the walls built up with slabs of shale, like the stone walls
in Derbyshire. Every yard or two there are wooden props holding up the beams and
girders; some of the girders have buckled into fantastic curves under which you
have to duck. Usually it is bad going underfoot — thick dust or jagged chunks of
shale, and in some mines where there is water it is as mucky as a farm-yard. Also
there is the track for the coal tubs, like a miniature railway track with sleepers
a foot or two apart, which is tiresome to walk on. Everything is grey with shale
dust; there is a dusty fiery smell which seems to be the same in all mines. You see
mysterious machines of which you never learn the purpose, and bundles of tools
slung together on wires, and sometimes mice darting away from the beam of the
lamps. They are surprisingly common, especially in mines where there are or have
been horses. It would be interesting to know how they got there in the first place;
possibly by falling down the shaft — for they say a mouse can fall any distance
uninjured, owing to its surface area being so large relative to its weight. You
press yourself against the wall to make way for lines of tubs jolting slowly
towards the shaft, drawn by an endless steel cable operated from the surface. You
creep through sacking curtains and thick wooden doors which, when they are opened,
let out fierce blasts of air. These doors are an important part of the ventilation
system. The exhausted air is sucked out of one shaft by means of fans, and the
fresh air enters the other of its own accord. But if left to itself the air will
take the shortest way round, leaving the deeper workings unventilated; so all the
short cuts have to be partitioned off.

At the start to walk stooping is rather a joke, but it is a joke that soon wears
off. I am handicapped by being exceptionally tall, but when the roof falls to four
feet or less it is a tough job for anybody except a dwarf or a child. You not only
have to bend double, you have also got to keep your head up all the while so as to
see the beams and girders and dodge them when they come. You have, therefore, a
constant crick in the neck, but this is nothing to the pain in your knees and
thighs. After half a mile it becomes (I am not exaggerating) an unbearable agony.
You begin to wonder whether you will ever get to the end — still more, how on earth
you are going to get back. Your pace grows slower and slower. You come to a stretch
of a couple of hundred yards where it is all exceptionally low and you have to work
yourself along in a squatting position. Then suddenly the roof opens out to a
mysterious height — scene of and old fall of rock, probably — and for twenty whole
yards you can stand upright. The relief is overwhelming. But after this there is
another low stretch of a hundred yards and then a succession of beams which you
have to crawl under. You go down on all fours; even this is a relief after the
squatting business. But when you come to the end of the beams and try to get up
again, you find that your knees have temporarily struck work and refuse to lift
you. You call a halt, ignominiously, and say that you would like to rest for a
minute or two. Your guide (a miner) is sympathetic. He knows that your muscles are
not the same as his. ‘Only another four hundred yards,’ he says encouragingly; you
feel that he might as well say another four hundred miles. But finally you do
somehow creep as far as the coal face. You have gone a mile and taken the best part
of an hour; a miner would do it in not much more than twenty minutes. Having got
there, you have to sprawl in the coal dust and get your strength back for several
minutes before you can even watch the work in progress with any kind of
intelligence.

Coming back is worse than going, not only because you are already tired out but
because the journey back to the shaft is slightly uphill. You get through the low
places at the speed of a tortoise, and you have no shame now about calling a halt
when your knees give way. Even the lamp you are carrying becomes a nuisance and
probably when you stumble you drop it; whereupon, if it is a Davy lamp, it goes
out. Ducking the beams becomes more and more of an effort, and sometimes you forget
to duck. You try walking head down as the miners do, and then you bang your
backbone. Even the miners bang their backbones fairly often. This is the reason why
in very hot mines, where it is necessary to go about half naked, most of the miners
have what they call ‘buttons down the back’ — that is, a permanent scab on each
vertebra. When the track is down hill the miners sometimes fit their clogs, which
are hollow under-neath, on to the trolley rails and slide down. In mines where the
‘travelling’ is very bad all the miners carry sticks about two and a half feet
long, hollowed out below the handle. In normal places you keep your hand on top of
the stick and in the low places you slide your hand down into the hollow. These
sticks are a great help, and the wooden crash-helmets — a comparatively recent
invention — are a godsend. They look like a French or Italian steel helmet, but
they are made of some kind of pith and very light, and so strong, that you can take
a violent blow on the head without feeling it. When finally you get back to the
surface you have been perhaps three hours underground and travelled two miles, and
you are more exhausted than you would be by a twenty-five-mile walk above ground.
For a week afterwards your thighs are so stiff that coming downstairs is quite a
difficult feat; you have to work your way down in a peculiar sidelong manner,
without bending the knees. Your miner friends notice the stiffness of your walk and
chaff you about it. (‘How'd ta like to work down pit, eh?’ etc.) Yet even a miner
who has been long away from work — from illness, for instance — when he comes back
to the pit, suffers badly for the first few days.

It may seem that I am exaggerating, though no one who has been down an
old-fashioned pit (most of the pits in England are old-fashioned) and actually gone
as far as the coal face, is likely to say so. But what I want to emphasize is this.
Here is this frightful business of crawling to and fro, which to any normal person
is a hard day's work in itself; and it is not part of the miner's work at all, it
is merely an extra, like the City man's daily ride in the Tube. The miner does that
journey to and fro, and sandwiched in between there are seven and a half hours of
savage work. I have never travelled much more than a mile to the coal face; but
often it is three miles, in which case I and most people other than coal-miners
would never get there at all. This is the kind of point that one is always liable
to miss. When you think of the coal-mine you think of depth, heat, darkness,
blackened figures hacking at walls of coal; you don't think, necessarily, of those
miles of creeping to and fro. There is the question of time, also. A miner's
working shift of seven and a half hours does not sound very long, but one has got
to add on to it at least an hour a day for ‘travelling’, more often two hours and
sometimes three. Of course, the ‘travelling’ is not technically work and the miner
is not paid for it; but it is as like work as makes no difference. It is easy to
say that miners don't mind all this. Certainly, it is not the same for them as it
would be for you or me. They have done it since childhood, they have the right
muscles hardened, and they can move to and fro underground with a startling and
rather horrible agility. A miner puts his head down and runs, with a long swinging
stride, through places where I can only stagger. At the workings you see them on
all fours, skipping round the pit props almost like dogs. But it is quite a mistake
to think that they enjoy it. I have talked about this to scores of miners and they
all admit that the ‘travelling’ is hard work; in any case when you hear them
discussing a pit among themselves the ‘travelling’ is always one of the things they
discuss. It is said that a shift always returns from work faster than it goes;
nevertheless the miners all say that it is the coming away after a hard day's work,
that is especially irksome. It is part of their work and they are equal to it, but
certainly it is an effort. It is comparable, perhaps, to climbing a smallish
mountain before and after your day's work.

When you have been down in two or three pits you begin to get some grasp of the
processes that are going on underground. (I ought to say, by the way, that I know
nothing whatever about the technical side of mining: I am merely describing what I
have seen.) Coal lies in thin seams between enormous layers of rock, so that
essentially the process of getting it out is like scooping the central layer from a
Neapolitan ice. In the old days the miners used to cut straight into the coal with
pick and crowbar — a very slow job because coal, when lying in its virgin state, is
almost as hard as rock. Nowadays the preliminary work is done by an
electrically-driven coal-cutter, which in principle is an immensely tough and
powerful band-saw, running horizontally instead of vertically, with teeth a couple
of inches long and half an inch or an inch thick. It can move backwards or forwards
on its own power, and the men operating it can rotate it this way or that.
Incidentally it makes one of the most awful noises I have ever heard, and sends
forth clouds of coal dust which make it impossible to see more than two to three
feet and almost impossible to breathe. The machine travels along the coal face
cutting into the base of the coal and undermining it to the depth of five feet or
five feet and a half; after this it is comparatively easy to extract the coal to
the depth to which it has been undermined. Where it is ‘difficult getting’,
however, it has also to be loosened with explosives. A man with an electric drill,
like a rather small version of the drills used in street-mending, bores holes at
intervals in the coal, inserts blasting powder, plugs it with clay, goes round the
corner if there is one handy (he is supposed to retire to twenty-five yards
distance) and touches off the charge with an electric current. This is not intended
to bring the coal out, only to loosen it. Occasionally, of course, the charge is
too powerful, and then it not only brings the coal out but brings the roof down as
well.

After the blasting has been done the ‘fillers’ can tumble the coal out, break it up
and shovel it on to the conveyor belt. It comes out first in monstrous boulders
which may weigh anything up to twenty tons. The conveyor belt shoots it on to tubs,
and the tubs are shoved into the main road and hitched on to an endlessly revolving
steel cable which drags them to the cage. Then they are hoisted, and at the surface
the coal is sorted by being run over screens, and if necessary is washed as well.
As far as possible the ‘dirt’ — the shale, that is — is used for making the roads
below. All what cannot be used is sent to the surface and dumped; hence the
monstrous ‘dirt-heaps’, like hideous grey mountains, which are the characteristic
scenery of the coal areas. When the coal has been extracted to the depth to which
the machine has cut, the coal face has advanced by five feet. Fresh props are put
in to hold up the newly exposed roof, and during the next shift the conveyor belt
is taken to pieces, moved five feet forward and re-assembled. As far as possible
the three operations of cutting, blasting and extraction are done in three separate
shifts, the cutting in the afternoon, the blasting at night (there is a law, not
always kept, that forbids its being done when other men are working near by), and
the ‘filling’ in the morning shift, which lasts from six in the morning until half
past one.

Even when you watch the process of coal-extraction you probably only watch it
for a short time, and it is not until you begin making a few calculations that you
realize what a stupendous task the ‘fillers’ are performing. Normally each man
has to clear a space four or five yards wide. The cutter has undermined the coal
to the depth of five feet, so that if the seam of coal is three or four feet high,
each man has to cut out, break up and load on to the belt something between seven
and twelve cubic yards of coal. This is to say, taking a cubic yard as weighing
twenty-seven hundred-weight, that each man is shifting coal at a speed approaching
two tons an hour. I have just enough experience of pick and shovel work to be able
to grasp what this means. When I am digging trenches in my garden, if I shift two
tons of earth during the afternoon, I feel that I have earned my tea. But earth is
tractable stuff compared with coal, and I don't have to work kneeling down, a
thousand feet underground, in suffocating heat and swallowing coal dust with every
breath I take; nor do I have to walk a mile bent double before I begin. The miner's
job would be as much beyond my power as it would be to perform on a flying trapeze
or to win the Grand National. I am not a manual labourer and please God I never
shall be one, but there are some kinds of manual work that I could do if I had to.
At a pitch I could be a tolerable road-sweeper or an inefficient gardener or even a
tenth-rate farm hand. But by no conceivable amount of effort or training could I
become a coal-miner, the work would kill me in a few weeks.

Watching coal-miners at work, you realize momentarily what different universes
people inhabit. Down there where coal is dug is a sort of world apart which one
can quite easily go through life without ever hearing about. Probably majority of
people would even prefer not to hear about it. Yet it is the absolutely necessary
counterpart of our world above. Practically everything we do, from eating an ice to
crossing the Atlantic, and from baking a loaf to writing a novel, involves the use
of coal, directly or indirectly. For all the arts of peace coal is needed; if war
breaks out it is needed all the more. In time of revolution the miner must go on
working or the revolution must stop, for revolution as much as reaction needs coal.
Whatever may be happening on the surface, the hacking and shovelling have got to
continue without a pause, or at any rate without pausing for more than a few weeks
at the most. In order that Hitler may march the goose-step, that the Pope may
denounce Bolshevism, that the cricket crowds may assemble at Lords, that the poets
may scratch one another's backs, coal has got to be forthcoming. But on the whole
we are not aware of it; we all know that we ‘must have coal’, but we seldom or
never remember what coal-getting involves. Here am I sitting writing in front of my
comfortable coal fire. It is April but I still need a fire. Once a fortnight the
coal cart drives up to the door and men in leather jerkins carry the coal indoors
in stout sacks smelling of tar and shoot it clanking into the coal-hole under the
stairs. It is only very rarely, when I make a definite mental-effort, that I
connect this coal with that far-off labour in the mines. It is just ‘coal’ —
something that I have got to have; black stuff that arrives mysteriously from
nowhere in particular, like manna except that you have to pay for it. You could
quite easily drive a car right across the north of England and never once remember
that hundreds of feet below the road you are on the miners are hacking at the coal.
Yet in a sense it is the miners who are driving your car forward. Their lamp-lit
world down there is as necessary to the daylight world above as the root is to the
flower.

It is not long since conditions in the mines were worse than they are now. There
are still living a few very old women who in their youth have worked underground,
with the harness round their waists, and a chain that passed between their legs,
crawling on all fours and dragging tubs of coal. They used to go on doing this even
when they were pregnant. And even now, if coal could not be produced without
pregnant women dragging it to and fro, I fancy we should let them do it rather than
deprive ourselves of coal. But-most of the time, of course, we should prefer to
forget that they were doing it. It is so with all types of manual work; it keeps us
alive, and we are oblivious of its existence. More than anyone else, perhaps, the
miner can stand as the type of the manual worker, not only because his work is so
exaggeratedly awful, but also because it is so vitally necessary and yet so remote
from our experience, so invisible, as it were, that we are capable of forgetting it
as we forget the blood in our veins. In a way it is even humiliating to watch
coal-miners working. It raises in you a momentary doubt about your own status as an
‘intellectual’ and a superior person generally. For it is brought home to you, at
least while you are watching, that it is only because miners sweat their guts out
that superior persons can remain superior. You and I and the editor of the Times
Lit. Supp., and the poets and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Comrade X, author of
Marxism for Infants — all of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to
poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of coal
dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel.



North And South



As you travel northward your eye, accustomed to the South or East, does not notice
much difference until you are beyond Birmingham. In Coventry you might as well be
in Finsbury Park, and the Bull Ring in Birmingham is not unlike Norwich Market, and
between all the towns of the Midlands there stretches a villa-civilization
indistinguishable from that of the South. It is only when you get a little further
north, to the pottery towns and beyond, that you begin to encounter the real
ugliness of industrialism — an ugliness so frightful and so arresting that you are
obliged, as it were, to come to terms with it.

A slag-heap is at best a hideous thing, because it is so planless and functionless.
It is something just dumped on the earth, like the emptying of a giant's dust-bin.
On the outskirts of the mining towns there are frightful landscapes where your
horizon is ringed completely round by jagged grey mountains, and underfoot is mud
and ashes and over-head the steel cables where tubs of dirt travel slowly across
miles of country. Often the slag-heaps are on fire, and at night you can see the
red rivulets of fire winding this way and that, and also the slow-moving blue
flames of sulphur, which always seem on the point of expiring and always spring out
again. Even when a slag-heap sinks, as it does ultimately, only an evil brown grass
grows on it, and it retains its hummocky surface. One in the slums of Wigan, used
as a playground, looks like a choppy sea suddenly frozen; 'the flock mattress', it
is called locally. Even centuries hence when the plough drives over the places
where coal was once mined, the sites of ancient slag-heaps will still be
distinguishable from an aeroplane.

I remember a winter afternoon in the dreadful environs of Wigan. All round was the
lunar landscape of slag-heaps, and to the north, through the passes, as it were,
between the mountains of slag, you could see the factory chimneys sending out
their plumes of smoke. The canal path was a mixture of cinders and frozen mud,
criss-crossed by the imprints of innumerable clogs, and all round, as far as the
slag-heaps in the distance, stretched the 'flashes'—pools of stagnant water that
had seeped into the hollows caused by the subsidence of ancient pits. It was
horribly cold. The 'flashes' were covered with ice the colour of raw umber, the
bargemen were muffled to the eyes in sacks, the lock gates wore beards of ice. It
seemed a world from which vegetation had been banished; nothing existed except
smoke, shale, ice, mud, ashes, and foul water. But even Wigan is beautiful compared
with Sheffield. Sheffield, I suppose, could justly claim to be called the ugliest
town in the Old World: its inhabitants, who want it to be pre-eminent in
everything, very likely do make that claim for it. It has a population of half a
million and it contains fewer decent buildings than the average East Anglian
village of five hundred. And the stench! If at rare moments you stop smelling
sulphur it is because you have begun smelling gas. Even the shallow river that runs
through the town is-usually bright yellow with some chemical or other. Once I
halted in the street and counted the factory chimneys I could see; there were
thirty-three of them, but there would have been far more if the air had not been
obscured by smoke. One scene especially lingers in my mind. A frightful patch of
waste ground (somehow, up there, a patch of waste ground attains a squalor that
would be impossible even in London) trampled bare of grass and littered with
newspapers and old saucepans. To the right an isolated row of gaunt four-roomed
houses, dark red, blackened by smoke. To the left an interminable vista of factory
chimneys, chimney beyond chimney, fading away into a dim blackish haze. Behind me
a railway embankment made of the slag from furnaces. In front, across the patch of
waste ground, a cubical building of red and yellow brick, with the sign 'Thomas
Grocock, Haulage Contractor'.

At night, when you cannot see the hideous shapes of the houses and the black-
ness of everything, a town like Sheffield assumes a kind of sinister magnificence.
Sometimes the drifts of smoke are rosy with sulphur, and serrated flames, like
circular saws, squeeze themselves out from beneath the cowls of the foundry
chimneys. Through the open doors of foundries you see fiery serpents of iron being
hauled to and fro by redlit boys, and you hear the whizz and thump of steam hammers
and the scream of the iron under the blow. The pottery towns are almost equally
ugly in a pettier way. Right in among the rows of tiny blackened houses, part of
the street as it were, are the 'pot banks'—conical brick chimneys like gigantic
burgundy bottles buried in the soil and belching their smoke almost in your face.
You come upon monstrous clay chasms hundreds of feet across and almost as deep,
with little rusty tubs creeping on chain railways up one side, and on the other
workmen clinging like samphire-gatherers and cutting into the face of the cliff
with their picks. I passed that way in snowy weather, and even the snow was black.
The best thing one can say for the pottery towns is that they are fairly small and
stop abruptly. Less than ten miles away you can stand in un-defiled country, on the
almost naked hills, and the pottery towns are only a smudge in the distance.

When you contemplate such ugliness as this, there are two questions that strike
you. First, is it inevitable? Secondly, does it matter?

I do not believe that there is anything inherently and unavoidably ugly about
industrialism. A factory or even a gasworks is not obliged of its own nature to be
ugly, any more than a palace or a dog-kennel or a cathedral. It all depends on the
architectural tradition of the period. The industrial towns of the North are ugly
because they happen to have been built at a time when modern methods of
steel-construction and smoke-abatement were unknown, and when everyone was
too busy making money to think about anything else. They go on being ugly largely
because the Northerners have got used to that kind of thing and do not notice it.
Many of the people in Sheffield or Manchester, if they smelled the air along the
Cornish cliffs, would probably declare that it had no taste in it. But since the war,
industry has tended to shift southward and in doing so has grown almost comely. The
typical post-war factory is not a gaunt barrack or an awful chaos of blackness and
belching chimneys; it is a glittering white structure of concrete, glass, and
steel, surrounded by green lawns and beds of tulips. Look at the factories you pass
as you travel out of London on the G.W.R.; they may not be aesthetic triumphs but
certainly they are not ugly in the same way as the Sheffield gasworks. But in any
case, though the ugliness of industrialism is the most obvious thing about it and
the thing every newcomer exclaims against, I doubt whether it is centrally
important. And perhaps it is not even desirable, industrialism being what it is,
that it should learn to disguise itself as something else. As Mr Aldous Huxley has
truly remarked, a dark Satanic mill ought to look like a dark Satanic mill and not
like the temple of mysterious and splendid gods. Moreover, even in the worst of
the industrial towns one sees a great deal that is not ugly in the narrow aesthetic
sense. A belching chimney or a stinking slum is repulsive chiefly because it
implies warped lives and ailing children. Look at it from a purely aesthetic
standpoint and it may, have a certain macabre appeal. I find that anything out-
rageously strange generally ends by fascinating me even when I abominate it. The
landscapes of Burma, which, when I was among them, so appalled me as to assume
the qualities of nightmare, afterwards stayed so hauntingly in my mind that I was
obliged to write a novel about them to get rid of them. (In all novels about the
East the scenery is the real subject-matter.) It would probably be quite easy to
extract a sort of beauty, as Arnold Bennett did, from the blackness of the
industrial towns; one can easily imagine Baudelaire, for instance, writing a poem
about a slag-heap. But the beauty or ugliness of industrialism hardly matters. Its
real evil lies far deeper and is quite uneradicable. It is important to remember
this, because there is always a temptation to think that industrialism is harmless
so long as it is clean and orderly.

But when you go to the industrial North you are conscious, quite apart from the
unfamiliar scenery, of entering a strange country. This is partly because of
certain real differences which do exist, but still more because of the North-South
antithesis which has been rubbed into us for such a long time past. There exists
in England a curious cult of Northernness, sort of Northern snobbishness. A
Yorkshireman in the South will always take care to let you know that he regards
you as an inferior. If you ask him why, he will explain that it is only in the North
that life is 'real' life, that the industrial work done in the North is the only
'real' work, that the North is inhabited by 'real' people, the South merely by
rentiers and their parasites. The Northerner has 'grit', he is grim, 'dour',
plucky, warm-hearted, and democratic; the Southerner is snobbish, effeminate, and
lazy — that at any rate is the theory. Hence the Southerner goes north, at any rate
for the first time, with the vague inferiority-complex of a civilized man venturing
among savages, while the Yorkshireman, like the Scotchman, comes to London in the
spirit of a barbarian out for loot. And feelings of this kind, which are the result
of tradition, are not affected by visible facts. Just as an Englishman five feet
four inches high and twenty-nine inches round the chest feels that as an Englishman
he is the physical superior of Carnera (Carnera being a Dago), so also with the
Northerner and the Southerner. I remember a weedy little Yorkshireman, who would
almost certainly have run away if a fox-terrier had snapped at him, telling me that
in the South of England he felt 'like a wild invader'. But the cult is often
adopted by people who are not by birth Northerners themselves. A year or two ago a
friend of mine, brought up in the South but now living in the North, was driving me
through Suffolk in a car. We passed through a rather beautiful village. He glanced
disapprovingly at the cottages and said:

'Of course most of the villages in Yorkshire are hideous; but the Yorkshiremen are
splendid chaps. Down here it's just the other way about—beautiful villages and
rotten people. All the people in those cottages there are worthless, absolutely
worthless.'

I could not help inquiring whether he happened to know anybody in that village. No,
he did not know them; but because this was East Anglia they were obviously
worthless. Another friend of mine, again a Southerner by birth, loses no
opportunity of praising the North to the detriment of the South. Here is an extract
from one of his letters to me:

I am in Clitheroe, Lancs...I think running water is much more attractive in moor
and mountain country than in the fat and sluggish South. 'The smug and silver
Trent,' Shakespeare says; and the South-er the smugger, I say.

Here you have an interesting example of the Northern cult. Not only are you and I
and everyone else in the South of England written off as 'fat and sluggish', but
even water when it gets north of a certain latitude, ceases to be H2O and becomes
something mystically superior. But the interest of this passage is that its writer
is an extremely intelligent man of 'advanced' opinions who would have nothing but
con-tempt for nationalism in its ordinary form. Put to him some such proposition as
'One Britisher is worth three foreigners', and he would repudiate it with horror.
But when it is a question of North versus South, he is quite ready to generalize.
All nationalistic distinctions — all claims to be better than somebody else because
you have a different-shaped skull or speak a different dialect—are entirely
spurious, but they are important so long as people believe in them. There is no
doubt about the Englishman's inbred conviction that those who live to the south of
him are his inferiors; even our foreign policy is governed by it to some extent. I
think, therefore, that it is worth pointing out when and why it came into being.

When nationalism first became a religion, the English looked at the map, and,
noticing that their island lay very high in the Northern Hemisphere, evolved the
pleasing theory that the further north you live the more virtuous you become. The
histories I was given when I was a little boy generally started off by explaining
in the naivest way that a cold climate made people energetic while a hot one made
them lazy, and hence the defeat of the Spanish Armada. This nonsense about the
superior energy of the English (actually the laziest people in Europe) has been
current for at least a hundred years. 'Better is it for us', writes a Quarterly
Reviewer of 1827, 'to be condemned to labour for our country's good than to
luxuriate amid olives, vines, and vices.' 'Olives, vines, and vices' sums up the
normal English attitude towards the Latin races. In the mythology of Carlyle,
Creasey, etc., the Northerner ('Teutonic', later 'Nordic') is pictured as a hefty,
vigorous chap with blond moustaches and pure morals, while the Southerner is sly,
cowardly, and licentious. This theory was never pushed to its logical end, which
would have meant assuming that the finest people in the world were the Eskimos,
but it did involve admitting that the people who lived to the north of us were su-
perior to ourselves. Hence, partly, the cult of Scotland and of Scotch things
which has so deeply marked English life during the past fifty years. But it was the
industrialization of the North that gave the North-South antithesis its peculiar
slant. Until comparatively recently the northern part of England was the backward
and feudal part, and such industry as existed was concentrated in London and the
South-East. In the Civil War for instance, roughly speaking a war of money versus
feudalism, the North and West were for the King and the South and East for the
Parliament. But with the increasing use of coal industry passed to the North, and
there grew up a new type of man, the self-made Northern business man—the Mr
Rouncewell and Mr Bounderby of Dickens. The Northern business man, with his hateful
'get on or get out' philosophy, was the dominant figure of the nineteenth century,
and as a sort of tyrannical corpse he rules us still. This is the type edified by
Arnold Bennett — the type who starts off with half a crown and ends up with fifty
thousand pounds, and whose chief pride is to be an even greater boor after he has
made his money than before. On analysis his sole virtue turns out to be a talent
for making money. We were bidden to admire him because though he might be
narrow-minded, sordid, ignorant, grasping, and uncouth, he had 'grit', he 'got on';
in other words, he knew how to make money.

This kind of cant is nowadays a pure anachronism, for the Northern business man
is no longer prosperous. But traditions are not killed by facts, and the tradition
of Northern' grit' lingers. It is still dimly felt that a Northerner will 'get on', i.e.
make money, where a Southerner will fail. At the back of the mind of every York-
shireman and every Scotchman who comes to London is a sort of Dick Whittington
picture of himself as the boy who starts off by selling newspapers and ends up as
Lord Mayor. And that, really, is at the bottom of his bumptiousness. But where one
can make a great mistake is in imagining that this feeling extends to the genuine
working class. When I first went to Yorkshire, some years ago, I imagined that I
was going to a country of boors. I was used to the London Yorkshireman with his
interminable harangues and his pride in the supposed raciness of his dialect ('"A
stitch in time saves nine", as we say in the West Riding'), and I expected to meet
with a good deal of rudeness. But I met with nothing of the kind, and least of all
among the miners. Indeed the Lancashire and Yorkshire miners treated me with a
kindness and courtesy that were even embarrassing; for if there is one type of man
to whom I do feel myself inferior, it is a coal-miner. Certainly no one showed any
sign of despising me for coming from a different part of the country. This has its
importance when one remembers that the English regional snobberies are nation-
alism in miniature; for it suggests that place-snobbery is not a working-class
characteristic.

There is nevertheless a real difference between North and South, and there is at
least a tinge of truth in that picture of Southern England as one enormous Brighton
inhabited by lounge-lizards. For climatic reasons the parasitic dividend-drawing
class tend to settle in the South. In a Lancashire cotton-town you could probably
go for months on end without once hearing an 'educated' accent, whereas there can
hardly be a town in the South of England where you could throw a brick without
hitting the niece of a bishop. Consequently, with no petty gentry to set the pace,
the bourgeoisification of the working class, though it is taking place in the
North, is taking place more slowly. All the Northern accents, for instance, persist
strongly, while the Southern ones are collapsing before the movies and the B.B.C.
Hence your 'educated' accent stamps you rather as a foreigner than as a chunk of
the petty gentry; and this is an immense advantage, for it makes it much easier to
get into contact with the working class.

But is it ever possible to be really intimate with the working class? I shall have
to discuss that later; I will only say here that I do not think it is possible. But
undoubtedly it is easier in the North than it would be in the South to meet
working-class people on approximately equal terms. It is fairly easy to live in a
miner's house and be accepted as one of the family; with, say, a farm labourer in
the Southern counties it probably would be impossible. I have seen just enough of
the working class to avoid idealizing them, but I do know that you can learn a
great deal in a working-class home, if only you can get there. The essential point
is that your middle-class ideals and prejudices are tested by contact with others
which are not necessarily better but are certainly different.

Take for instance the different attitude towards the family. A working-class family
hangs together as a middle-class one does, but the relationship is far less
tyrannical. A working man has not that deadly weight of family prestige hanging
round his neck like a millstone. I have pointed out earlier that a middle-class
person goes utterly to pieces under the influence of poverty; and this is generally
due to the behaviour of his family—to the fact that he has scores of relations
nagging and badgering him night and day for failing to 'get on'. The fact that the
working class know how to combine and the middle class don't is probably due to
their different conceptions of family loyalty. You cannot have an effective trade
union of middle-class workers, because in times of strikes almost every
middle-class wife would be egging her husband on to blackleg and get the other
fellow's job. Another working-class characteristic, disconcerting at first, is
their plain-spokenness towards anyone they regard as an equal. If you offer a
working man something he doesn't want, he tells you that he doesn't want it; a
middle-class person would accept it to avoid giving offence. And again, take the
working-class attitude towards 'education'. How different it is from ours, and how
immensely sounder! Working people often have a vague reverence for learning in
others, but where 'education' touches their own lives they see through it and
reject it by a healthy instinct. The time was when I used to lament over quite
imaginary pictures of lads of fourteen dragged protesting from their lessons and
set to work at dismal jobs. It seemed to me dreadful that the doom of a 'job'
should descend upon anyone at fourteen. Of course I know now that there is not one
working-class boy in a thousand who does not pine for the day when he will leave
school. He wants to be doing real work, not wasting his time on ridiculous rubbish
like history and geography. To the working class, the notion of staying at school
till you are nearly grown-up seems merely contemptible and unmanly. The idea of a
great big boy of eighteen, who ought to be bringing a pound a week home to his
parents, going to school in a ridiculous uniform and even being caned for not doing
his lessons! Just fancy a working-class boy of eighteen allowing himself to be
caned! He is a man when the other is still a baby. Ernest Pontifex, in Samuel
Butler's Way of All Flesh, after he had had a few glimpses of real life, looked
back on his public school and university education and found it a 'sickly,
debilitating debauch'. There is much in middle-class life that looks sickly and
debilitating when you see it from a working-class angle.

In a working-class home — I am not thinking at the moment of the unemployed,
but of comparatively prosperous homes—you breathe a warm, decent, deeply hu-
man atmosphere which it is not so easy to find elsewhere. I should say that a
manual worker, if he is in steady work and drawing good wages—an 'if which gets
bigger and bigger—has a better chance of being happy than an 'educated' man.
His home life seems to fall more naturally into a sane and comely shape. I have
often been struck by the peculiar easy completeness, the perfect symmetry as it
were, of a working-class interior at its best. Especially on winter evenings after
tea, when the fire glows in the open range and dances mirrored in the steel fen-
der, when Father, in shirt-sleeves, sits in the rocking chair at one side of the fire
reading the racing finals, and Mother sits on the other with her sewing, and the
children are happy with a pennorth of mint humbugs, and the dog lolls roasting
himself on the rag mat—it is a good place to be in, provided that you can be not
only in it but sufficiently of it to be taken for granted.

This scene is still reduplicated in a majority of English homes, though not in so
many as before the war. Its happiness depends mainly upon one question—whether
Father is in work. But notice that the picture I have called up, of a working-class
family sitting round the coal fire after kippers and strong tea, belongs only to
our own moment of time and could not belong either to the future or the past. Skip
forward two hundred years into the Utopian future, and the scene is totally
different. Hardly one of the things I have imagined will still be there. In that
age when there is no manual labour and everyone is 'educated', it is hardly likely
that Father will still be a rough man with enlarged hands who likes to sit in
shirt-sleeves and says 'Ah wur coomin' oop street'. And there won't be a coal fire
in the grate, only some kind of invisible heater. The furniture will be made of
rubber, glass, and steel. If there are still such things as evening papers there
will certainly be no racing news in them, for gambling will be meaningless in a
world where there is no poverty and the horse will have vanished from the face of
the earth. Dogs, too, will have been suppressed on grounds of hygiene. And there
won't be so many children, either, if the birth-controllers have their way. But
move backwards into the Middle Ages and you are in a world almost equally foreign.
A windowless hut, a wood fire which smokes in your face because there is no
chimney, mouldy bread, 'Poor John', lice, scurvy, a yearly child-birth and a yearly
child-death, and the priest terrifying you with tales of Hell.

Curiously enough it is not the triumphs of modern engineering, nor the radio, nor
the cinematograph, nor the five thousand novels whiich are published yearly, nor
the crowds at Ascot and the Eton and Harrow match, but the memory of working-
class interiors—especially as I sometimes saw them in my childhood before the war,
when England was still prosperous—that reminds me that our age has not been al-
together a bad one to live in.



Spilling the Spanish Beans


I

The Spanish war has probably produced a richer crop of lies than any event since
the Great War of 1914-18, but I honestly doubt, in spite of all those hecatombs of
nuns who have been raped and crucified before the eyes of “Daily Mail” reporters,
whether it is the pro-Fascist newspapers that have done the most harm. It is the
left-wing papers, the “News Chronicle” and the “Daily Worker,” with their far
subtler methods of distortion, that have prevented the British public from grasping
the real nature of the struggle.

The fact which these papers have so carefully obscured is that the Spanish
Government (including the semi-autonomous Catalan Government) is far more afraid
of the revolution than of the Fascists. It is now almost certain that the war will end
with some kind of compromise, and there is even reason to doubt whether the
Government, which let Bilbao fail without raising a finger, wishes to be too
victorious; but there is no doubt whatever about the thoroughness with which it is
crushing its own revolutionaries. For some time past a reign of terror – forcible
suppression of political parties, a stifling censorship of the Press, ceaseless
espionage and mass-imprisonment without trial – has been in progress. When I left
Barcelona in late June the jails were bulging; indeed, the regular jails had long
since overflowed and the prisoners were being huddled into empty shops and any
other temporary dump that could be found for them. But the point to notice is that
the people who are in prison now are not Fascists but revolutionaries; they are
there not because their opinions are too much to the Right, but because they are
too much to the Left. And the people responsible for putting them there are those
dreadful revolutionaries at whose very name Garvin quakes in his galoshes – the
Communists.

Meanwhile the war against Franco continues, but, except for the poor devils in the
front-line trenches, nobody in Government Spain thinks of it as the real war. The
real struggle is between revolution and counter-revolution; between the workers
who are vainly trying to hold on to a little of what they won in 1936, and the
Liberal-Communist bloc who are so successfully taking it away from them. It is
unfortunate that so few people in England have yet caught up with the fact that
Communism is now a counter-revolutionary force; that Communists everywhere are in
alliance with bourgeois reformism and using the whole of their powerful machinery
to crush or discredit any party that shows signs of revolutionary tendencies. Hence
the grotesque spectacle of Communists assailed as wicked ‘Reds’ by right-wing
intellectuals who are in essential agreement with them. Mr Wyndham Lewis, for
instance, ought to love the Communists, at least temporarily. In Spain the
Communist-Liberal alliance has been almost completely victorious. Of all that the
Spanish workers won for themselves in 1936 nothing solid remains, except for a few
collective farms and a certain amount of land seized by the peasants last year; and
presumably even the peasants will be sacrificed later, when there is no longer any
need to placate them. To see how the present situation arose, one has got to look
back to the origins of the civil war.

Franco’s bid for power differed from those of Hitler and Mussolini in that it was a
military insurrection, comparable to a foreign invasion, and therefore had not much
mass backing, though Franco has since been trying to acquire one. Its chief
supporters, apart from certain sections of Big Business, were the land-owning
aristocracy and the huge, parasitic Church. Obviously a rising of this kind will
array against it various forces which are not in agreement on any other point. The
peasant and the worker hate feudalism and clericalism; but so does the “liberal”
bourgeois, who is not in the least opposed to a more modern version of Fascism, at
least so long as it isn’t called Fascism. The “liberal” bourgeois is genuinely
liberal up to the point where his own interests stop. He stands for the degree of
progress implied in the phrase “la carrière ouverte aux talents.” For clearly he
has no chance to develop in a feudal society where the worker and the peasant are
too poor to buy goods, where industry is burdened with huge taxes to pay for
bishops’ vestments, and where every lucrative job is given as a matter of course to
the friend of the catamite of the duke’s illegitimate son. Hence, in the face of
such a blatant reactionary as Franco, you get for a while a situation in which the
worker and the bourgeois, in reality deadly enemies, are fighting side by side.
This uneasy alliance is known as the Popular Front (or, in the Communist Press, to
give it a spuriously democratic appeal, People’s Front). It is a combination with
about as much vitality, and about as much right to exist, as a pig with two heads
or some other Barnum and Bailey monstrosity.

In any serious emergency the contradiction implied in the Popular Front is bound to
make itself felt. For even when the worker and the bourgeois are both fighting
against Fascism, they are not fighting for the same things; the bourgeois is
fighting for bourgeois democracy, i.e., capitalism, the worker, in so far as he
understands the issue, for Socialism. And in the early days of the revolution the
Spanish workers understood the issue very well. In the areas where Fascism was
defeated they did not content themselves with driving the rebellious troops out of
the towns; they also took the opportunity of seizing land and factories and setting
up the rough beginnings of a workers’ government by means of local committees,
workers’ militias, police forces, and so forth. They made the mistake, however
(possibly because most of the active revolutionaries were Anarchists with a
mistrust of all parliaments), of leaving the Republican Government in nominal
control. And, in spite of various changes in personnel, every subsequent Government
had been of approximately the same bourgeois-reformist character. At the beginning
this seemed not to matter, because the Government, especially in Cataloñia, was
almost powerless and the bourgeoisie had to lie low or even (this was still
happening when I reached Spain in December) to disguise themselves as workers.
Later, as power slipped from the hands of the Anarchists into the hands of the
Communists and right-wing Socialists, the Government was able to reassert itself,
the bourgeoisie came out of hiding and the old division of society into rich and
poor reappeared, not much modified. Henceforward every move, except a few dictated
by military emergency, was directed towards undoing the work of the first few
months of revolution. Out of the many illustrations I could choose, I will cite
only one, the breaking-up of the old workers’ militias, which were organized on a
genuinely democratic system, with officers and men receiving the same pay and
mingling on terms of complete equality, and the substitution of the Popular Army
(once again, in Communist jargon, “People’s Army”), modelled as far as possible on
an ordinary bourgeois army, with a privileged officer-caste, immense differences of
pay, etc., etc. Needless to say, this is given out as a military necessity, and
almost certainly it does make for military efficiency, at least for a short period.
But the undoubted purpose of the change was to strike a blow at equalitarianism. In
every department the same policy has been followed, with the result that only a
year after the outbreak of war and revolution you get what is in effect an ordinary
bourgeois State, with, in addition, a reign of terror to preserve the status quo.

This process would probably have gone less far if the struggle could have taken
place without foreign interference. But the military weakness of the Government
made this impossible. In the face of Franco’s foreign mercenaries they were obliged
to turn to Russia for help, and though the quantity of arms supplied by Russia has
been greatly exaggerated (in my first three months in Spain I saw only one Russian
weapon, a solitary machine-gun), the mere fact of their arrival brought the
Communists into power. To begin with, the Russian aeroplanes and guns, and the good
military qualities of the International Brigades (not necessarily Communist but
under Communist control), immensely raised the Communist prestige. But, more
important, since Russia and Mexico were the only countries openly supplying arms,
the Russians were able not only to get money for their weapons, but to extort terms
as well. Put in their crudest form, the terms were: “Crush the revolution or you
get no more arms.” The reason usually given for the Russian attitude is that if
Russia appeared to be abetting the revolution, the Franco-Soviet pact (and the
hoped-for alliance with Great Britain) would be imperilled; it may be, also, that
the spectacle of a genuine revolution in Spain would rouse unwanted echoes in
Russia. The Communists, of course, deny that any direct pressure has been exerted
by the Russian Government. But this, even if true, is hardly relevant, for the
Communist Parties of all countries can be taken as carrying out Russian policy; and
it is certain that the Spanish Communist Party, plus the right-wing Socialists whom
they control, plus the Communist Press of the whole world, have used all their
immense and ever-increasing influence upon the side of counter-revolution.

II

In the first half of this article I suggested that the real struggle in Spain, on
the Government side, has been between revolution and counter-revolution; that the
Government, though anxious enough to avoid being beaten by Franco, has been even
more anxious to undo the revolutionary changes with which the outbreak of war was
accompanied.

Any Communist would reject this suggestion as mistaken or wilfully dishonest. He
would tell you that it is nonsense to talk of the Spanish Government crushing the
revolution, because the revolution never happened; and that our job at present is
to defeat Fascism and defend democracy. And in this connection it is most important
to see just how the Communist anti-revolutionary propaganda works. It is a mistake
to think that this has no relevance in England, where the Communist Party is small
and comparatively weak. We shall see its relevance quickly enough if England enters
into an alliance with the U.S.S.R.; or perhaps even earlier, for the influence of
the Communist Party is bound to increase – visibly is increasing – as more and more
of the capitalist class realise that latter-day Communism is playing their game.

Broadly speaking, Communist propaganda depends upon terrifying people with the
(quite real) horrors of Fascism. It also involves pretending – not in so many
words, but by implication – that Fascism has nothing to do with capitalism. Fascism
is just a kind of meaningless wickedness, an aberration, “mass sadism,” the sort of
thing that would happen if you suddenly let loose an asylum-ful of homicidal
maniacs. Present Fascism in this form, and you can mobilise public opinion against
it, at any rate for a while, without provoking any revolutionary movement. You can
oppose Fascism by bourgeois “democracy,” meaning capitalism. But meanwhile you have
got to get rid of the troublesome person who points out that Fascism and bourgeois
‘democracy’ are Tweedledum and Tweedledee. You do it at the beginning by calling
him an impracticable visionary. You tell him that he is confusing the issue, that
he is splitting the anti-Fascist forces, that this is not the moment for
revolutionary phrase-mongering, that for the moment we have got to fight against
Fascism without inquiring too closely what we are fighting for. Later, if he still
refuses to shut up, you change your tune and call him a traitor. More exactly, you
call him a Trotskyist.

And what is a Trotskyist? This terrible word – in Spain at this moment you can be
thrown into jail and kept there indefinitely, without trial, on the mere rumour
that you are a Trotskyist – is only beginning to be bandied to and fro in England.
We shall be hearing more of it later. The word “Trotskyist” (or “Trotsky-Fascist”)
is generally used to mean a disguised Fascist who poses as an ultra-revolutionary
in order to split the Left-wing forces. But it derives its peculiar power from the
fact that it means three separate things. It can mean one who, like Trotsky, wishes
for world revolution; or a member of the actual organization of which Trotsky is
head (the only legitimate use of the word); or the disguised Fascist already
mentioned. The three meanings can be telescoped one into the other at will. Mean-
ing No. 1 may or may not carry with it meaning No. 2, and meaning No. 2 almost
invariably carries with it meaning No. 3. Thus: “XY. has been heard to speak
favourably of world-revolution; therefore he is a Trotskyist; therefore he is a
Fascist.” In Spain, to some extent even in England, anyone professing revolutionary
Socialism (i.e., professing the things the Communist Party professed until a few
years ago) is under suspicion of being a Trotskyist in the pay of Franco or Hitler.

The accusation is a very subtle one, because in any given case, unless one happened
to know the contrary, it might be true. A Fascist spy probably would disguise
himself as a revolutionary. In Spain, everyone whose opinions are to the Left of
those of the Communist Party is sooner or later discovered to be a Trotskyist, or
at least, a traitor. At the beginning of the war the P.O.U.M., an Opposition
Communist party roughly corresponding to the English I.L.P., was an accepted party
and supplied a minister to the Catalan Government; later it was expelled from the
Government; then it was denounced as Trotskyist; then it was suppressed, every
member that the police could lay their hands on being flung into jail.

Until a few months ago the Anarcho-Syndicalists were described as “working loyally”
beside the Communists. Then the Anarcho-Syndicalists were levered out of the
Government; then it appeared that they were not working so loyally; now they are in
the process of becoming traitors. After that will come the turn of the Left-wing
Socialists. Caballero, the Left-wing Socialist ex-premier, until May, 1937, the
idol of the Communist Press, is already in outer darkness, a Trotskyist and “enemy
of the people”. And so the game continues. The logical end is a régime in which
every opposition party and newspaper is suppressed and every dissentient of any
importance is in jail. Of course, such a régime will be Fascism. It will not be the
same as the Fascism Franco would impose, it will even be better than Franco’s
Fascism to the extent of being worth fighting for, but it will be Fascism. Only,
being operated by Communists and Liberals, it will be called something different.

Meanwhile, can the war be won? The Communist influence has been against
revolutionary chaos and has therefore, apart from the Russian aid, tended to
produce greater military efficiency. If the Anarchists saved the Government from
August to October, 1936, the Communists have saved it from October onwards. But in
organizing the defence they have succeeded in killing enthusiasm (inside Spain, not
outside). They made a militarized conscript army possible, but they also made it
necessary. It is significant that as early as January of this year voluntary
recruiting had practically ceased. A revolutionary army can sometimes win by
enthusiasm, but a conscript army has got to win with weapons, and it is unlikely
that the Government will ever have a large preponderance of arms unless France
intervenes or unless Germany and Italy decide to make off with the Spanish colonies
and leave Franco in the lurch. On the whole, a deadlock seems the likeliest thing.

And does the Government seriously intend to win? It does not intend to lose, that
is certain. On the other hand, an outright victory, with Franco in flight and the
Germans and Italians driven into the sea, would raise difficult problems, some of
them too obvious to need mentioning. There is no real evidence and one can only
judge by the event, but I suspect that what the Government is playing for is a
compromise that would leave the war situation essentially in being. All prophecies
are wrong, therefore this one will be wrong, but I will take a chance and say that
though the war may end quite soon or may drag on for years, it will end with Spain
divided up, either by actual frontiers or into economic zones. Of course, such a
compromise might be claimed as a victory by either side, or by both.

All that I have said in this article would seem entirely commonplace in Spain, or
even in France. Yet in England, in spite of the intense interest the Spanish war
has aroused, there are very few people who have even heard of the enormous struggle
that is going on behind the Government lines. Of course, this is no accident. There
has been a quite deliberate conspiracy (I could give detailed instances) to prevent
the Spanish situation from being understood. People who ought to know better have
lent themselves to the deception on the ground that if you tell the truth about
Spain it will be used as Fascist propaganda.

It is easy to see where such cowardice leads. If the British public had been given
a truthful account of the Spanish war they would have had an opportunity of
learning what Fascism is and how it can be combatted. As it is, the “News
Chronicle” version of Fascism as a kind of homicidal mania peculiar to Colonel
Blimps bombinating in the economic void has been established more firmly than ever.
And thus we are one step nearer to the great war “against Fascism” (cf. 1914,
“against militarism”) which will allow Fascism, British variety, to be slipped over
our necks during the first week.

New English Weekly, 29 July and 2 September 1937



Marrakech



As the corpse went past the flies left the restaurant table in a cloud and rushed
after it, but they came back a few minutes later.

The little crowd of mourners - all men and boys, no women — threaded their way across
the market-place between the piles of pomegranates and the taxis and the camels,
wailing a short chant over and over again. What really appeals to the flies is that
the corpses here are never put into coffins, they are merely wrapped in a piece of
rag and carried on a rough wooden bier on the shoulders of four friends. When the
friends get to the burying-ground they hack an oblong hole a foot or two deep, dump
the body in it and fling over it a little of the dried-up, lumpy earth, which is
like broken brick. No gravestone, no name, no identifying mark of any kind. The
burying-ground is merely a huge waste of hummocky earth, like a derelict
building-lot. After a month or two no one can even be certain where his own
relatives are buried.

When you walk through a town like this — two hundred thousand inhabitants, of whom
at least twenty thousand own literally nothing except the rags they stand up in —
when you see how the people live, and still more how easily they die, it is always
difficult to believe that you are walking among human beings. All colonial empires
are in reality founded upon that fact. The people have brown faces — besides, there
are so many of them! Are they really the same flesh as yourself? Do they even have
names? Or are they merely a kind of undifferentiated brown stuff, about as
individual as bees or coral insects? They rise out of the earth, they sweat and
starve for a few years, and then they sink back into the nameless mounds of the
graveyard and nobody notices that they are gone. And even the graves themselves
soon fade back into the soil. Sometimes, out for a walk, as you break your way
through the prickly pear, you notice that it is rather bumpy underfoot, and only a
certain regularity in the bumps tells you that you are walking over skeletons.

I was feeding one of the gazelles in the public gardens.

Gazelles are almost the only animals that look good to eat when they are still
alive, in fact, one can hardly look at their hindquarters without thinking of mint
sauce. The gazelle I was feeding seemed to know that this thought was in my mind,
for though it took the piece of bread I was holding out it obviously did not like
me. It nibbled rapidly at the bread, then lowered its head and tried to butt me,
then took another nibble and then butted again. Probably its idea was that if it
could drive me away the bread would somehow remain hanging in mid-air.

An Arab navvy working on the path nearby lowered his heavy hoe and sidled towards
us. He looked from the gazelle to the bread and from the bread to the gazelle, with
a sort of quiet amazement, as though he had never seen anything quite like this
before. Finally he said shyly in French:

‘I could eat some of that bread.’

I tore off a piece and he stowed it gratefully in some secret place under his rags.
This man is an employee of the Municipality.

When you go through the Jewish quarters you gather some idea of what the medieval
ghettoes were probably like. Under their Moorish rulers the Jews were only allowed
to own land in certain restricted areas, and after centuries of this kind of
treatment they have ceased to bother about overcrowding. Many of the streets are a
good deal less than six feet wide, the houses are completely windowless, and
sore-eyed children cluster everywhere in unbelievable numbers, like clouds of
flies. Down the centre of the street there is generally running a little river of
urine.

In the bazaar huge families of Jews, all dressed in the long black robe and little
black skull-cap, are working in dark fly-infested booths that look like caves. A
carpenter sits cross-legged at a prehistoric lathe, turning chair-legs at lightning
speed. He works the lathe with a bow in his right hand and guides the chisel with
his left foot, and thanks to a lifetime of sitting in this position his left leg is
warped out of shape. At his side his grandson, aged six, is already starting on the
simpler parts of the job.

I was just passing the coppersmiths’ booths when somebody noticed that I was
lighting a cigarette. Instantly, from the dark holes all round, there was a
frenzied rush of Jews, many of them old grandfathers with flowing grey beards, all
clamouring for a cigarette. Even a blind man somewhere at the back of one of the
booths heard a rumour of cigarettes and came crawling out, groping in the air with
his hand. In about a minute I had used up the whole packet. None of these people, I
suppose, works less than twelve hours a day, and every one of them looks on a
cigarette as a more or less impossible luxury.

As the Jews live in self-contained communities they follow the same trades as the
Arabs, except for agriculture. Fruit-sellers, potters, silversmiths, blacksmiths,
butchers, leather-workers, tailors, water-carriers, beggars, porters — whichever
way you look you see nothing but Jews. As a matter of fact there are thirteen
thousand of them, all living in the space of a few acres. A good job Hitler isn't
here. Perhaps he is on his way, however. You hear the usual dark rumours about the
Jews, not only from the Arabs but from the poorer Europeans.

‘Yes, mon vieux, they took my job away from me and gave it to a Jew. The Jews!
They're the real rulers of this country, you know. They've got all the money. They
control the banks, finance — everything.’

‘But,’ I said, ‘isn't it a fact that the average Jew is a labourer working for
about a penny an hour?’

‘Ah, that's only for show! They're all money-lenders really. They're cunning, the
Jews.’

In just the same way, a couple of hundred years ago, poor old women used to be
burned for witchcraft when they could not even work enough magic to get themselves
a square meal.

All people who work with their hands are partly invisible, and the more important
the work they do, the less visible they are. Still, a white skin is always fairly
conspicuous. In northern Europe, when you see a labourer ploughing a field, you
probably give him a second glance. In a hot country, anywhere south of Gibraltar or
east of Suez, the chances are that you don't even see him. I have noticed this
again and again. In a tropical landscape one's eye takes in everything except the
human beings. It takes in the dried-up soil, the prickly pear, the palm-tree and
the distant mountain, but it always misses the peasant hoeing at his patch. He is
the same colour as the earth, and a great deal less interesting to look at.

It is only because of this that the starved countries of Asia and Africa are
accepted as tourist resorts. No one would think of running cheap trips to the
Distressed Areas. But where the human beings have brown skins their poverty is
simply not noticed. What does Morocco mean to a Frenchman? An orange-grove or a
job in government service. Or to an Englishman? Camels, castles, palm-trees, For-
eign Legionnaires, brass trays and bandits. One could probably live here for years
without noticing that for nine-tenths of the people the reality of life is an
endless, back-breaking struggle to wring a little food out of an eroded soil.

Most of Morocco is so desolate that no wild animal bigger than a hare can live on
it. Huge areas which were once covered with forest have turned into a treeless
waste where the soil is exactly like broken-up brick. Nevertheless a good deal of
it is cultivated, with frightful labour. Everything is done by hand. Long lines of
women, bent double like inverted capital Ls, work their way slowly across the
fields, tearing up the prickly weeds with their hands, and the peasant gathering
lucerne for fodder pulls it up stalk by stalk instead of reaping it, thus saving an
inch or two on each stalk. The plough is a wretched wooden thing, so frail that one
can easily carry it on one's shoulder, and fitted underneath with a rough iron
spike which stirs the soil to a depth of about four inches. This is as much as the
strength of the animals is equal to. It is usual to plough with a cow and a donkey
yoked together. Two donkeys would not be quite strong enough, but on the other hand
two cows would cost a little more to feed. The peasants possess no harrows, they
merely plough the soil several times over in different directions, finally leaving
it in rough furrows, after which the whole field has to be shaped with hoes into
small oblong patches, to conserve water. Except for a day or two after the rare
rainstorms there is never enough water. Along the edges of the fields channels are
hacked out to a depth of thirty or forty feet to get at the tiny trickles which run
through the subsoil.

Every afternoon a file of very old women passes down the road outside my house,
each carrying a load of firewood. All of them are mummified with age and the sun,
and all of them are tiny. It seems to be generally the case in primitive
communities that the women, when they get beyond a certain age, shrink to the size
of children. One day a poor old creature who could not have been more than four
feet tall crept past me under a vast load of wood. I stopped her and put a five-sou
piece (a little more than a farthing) into her hand. She answered with a shrill
wail, almost a scream, which was partly gratitude but mainly surprise. I suppose
that from her point of view, by taking any notice of her, I seemed almost to be
violating a law of nature. She accepted her status as an old woman, that is to say
as a beast of burden. When a family is travelling it is quite usual to see a father
and a grown-up son riding ahead on donkeys, and an old woman following on foot,
carrying the baggage.

But what is strange about these people is their invisibility. For several weeks,
always at about the same time of day, the file of old women had hobbled past the
house with their firewood, and though they had registered themselves on my eyeballs
I cannot truly say that I had seen them. Firewood was passing — that was how I saw
it. It was only that one day I happened to be walking behind them, and the curious
up-and-down motion of a load of wood drew my attention to the human being
underneath it. Then for the first time I noticed the poor old earth-coloured
bodies, bodies reduced to bones and leathery skin, bent double under the crushing
weight. Yet I suppose I had not been five minutes on Moroccan soil before I noticed
the overloading of the donkeys and was infuriated by it. There is no question that
the donkeys are damnably treated. The Moroccan donkey is hardly bigger than a St
Bernard dog, it carries a load which in the British army would be considered too
much for a fifteen-hands mule, and very often its pack-saddle is not taken off its
back for weeks together. But what is peculiarly pitiful is that it is the most
willing creature on earth, it follows its master like a dog and does not need
either bridle or halter. After a dozen years of devoted work it suddenly drops
dead, whereupon its master tips it into the ditch and the village dogs have torn
its guts out before it is cold.

This kind of thing makes one's blood boil, whereas — on the whole — the plight of
the human beings does not. I am not commenting, merely pointing to a fact. People
with brown skins are next door to invisible. Anyone can be sorry for the donkey
with its galled back, but it is generally owing to some kind of accident if one
even notices the old woman under her load of sticks.



As the storks flew northward the Negroes were marching southward — a long, dusty
column, infantry, screw-gun batteries and then more infantry, four or five thousand
men in all, winding up the road with a clumping of boots and a clatter of iron
wheels.

They were Senegalese, the blackest Negroes in Africa, so black that sometimes it is
difficult to see whereabouts on their necks the hair begins. Their splendid bodies
were hidden in reach-me-down khaki uniforms, their feet squashed into boots that
looked like blocks of wood, and every tin hat seemed to be a couple of sizes too
small. It was very hot and the men had marched a long way. They slumped under the
weight of their packs and the curiously sensitive black faces were glistening with
sweat.

As they went past a tall, very young Negro turned and caught my eye. But the look
he gave me was not in the least the kind of look you might expect. Not hostile, not
contemptuous, not sullen, not even inquisitive. It was the shy, wide-eyed Negro
look, which actually is a look of profound respect. I saw how it was. This wretched
boy, who is a French citizen and has therefore been dragged from the forest to
scrub floors and catch syphilis in garrison towns, actually has feelings of
reverence before a white skin. He has been taught that the white race are his
masters, and he still believes it.

But there is one thought which every white man (and in this connection it doesn't
matter twopence if he calls himself a Socialist) thinks when he sees a black army
marching past. ‘How much longer can we go on kidding these people? How long before
they turn their guns in the other direction?’

It was curious, really. Every white man there has this thought stowed somewhere or
other in his mind. I had it, so had the other onlookers, so had the officers on
their sweating chargers and the white NCOs marching in the ranks. It was a kind of
secret which we all knew and were too clever to tell; only the Negroes didn't know
it. And really it was almost like watching a flock of cattle to see the long
column, a mile or two miles of armed men, flowing peacefully up the road, while the
great white birds drifted over them in the opposite direction, glittering like
scraps of paper.



Boys' Weeklies and Frank Richards's Reply



You never walk far through any poor quarter in any big town without
coming upon a small newsagent's shop. The general appearance of these
shops is always very much the same: a few posters for the DAILY MAIL and
the NEWS OF THE WORLD outside, a poky little window with sweet-bottles
and packets of Players, and a dark interior smelling of liquorice allsorts
and festooned from floor to ceiling with vilely printed twopenny papers,
most of them with lurid cover-illustrations in three colours.

Except for the daily and evening papers, the stock of these shops hardly
overlaps at all with that of the big news-agents. Their main selling line
is the twopenny weekly, and the number and variety of these are almost
unbelievable. Every hobby and pastime--cage-birds, fretwork, carpen-
tering, bees, carrier-pigeons, home conjuring, philately, chess--has at
least one paper devoted to it, and generally several. Gardening and live-
stock-keeping must have at least a score between them. Then there
are the sporting papers, the radio papers, the children's comics, the
various snippet papers such as TIT-BITS, the large range of papers
devoted to the movies and all more or less exploiting women's legs, the
various trade papers, the women's story-papers (the ORACLE, SECRETS,
PEG'S PAPER, etc. etc.), the needlework papers--these so numerous that a
display of them alone will often fill an entire window--and in addition
the long series of 'Yank Mags' (FIGHT STORIES, ACTION STORIES, WESTERN
SHORT STORIES, etc.), which are imported shop-soiled from America and
sold at twopence halfpenny or threepence. And the periodical proper
shades off into the fourpenny novelette, the ALDINE BOXING NOVELS, the
BOYS' FRIEND LIBRARY, the SCHOOLGIRLS' OWN LIBRARY and many others.

Probably the contents of these shops is the best available indication of
what the mass of the English people really feels and thinks. Certainly
nothing half so revealing exists in documentary form. Best-seller novels,
for instance, tell one a great deal, but the novel is aimed almost exclu-
sively at people above the £4-a-week level. The movies are probably
a very unsafe guide to popular taste, because the film industry is
virtually a monopoly, which means that it is not obliged to study its
public at all closely. The same applies to some extent to the daily
papers, and most of all to the radio. But it does not apply to the weekly
paper with a smallish circulation and specialized subject-matter. Papers
like the EXCHANGE AND MART, for instance, or CAGE-BIRDS, or the ORACLE,
or the PREDICTION, or the MATRIMONIAL TIMES, only exist because there is
a definite demand for them, and they reflect the minds of their readers
as a great national daily with a circulation of millions cannot possibly
do.

Here I am only dealing with a single series of papers, the boys' twopenny
weeklies, often inaccurately described as 'penny dreadfuls'. Falling
strictly within this class there are at present ten papers, the GEM,
MAGNET, MODERN BOY, TRIUMPH and CHAMPION, all owned by the Amalgamated
Press, and the WIZARD, ROVER, SKIPPER, HOTSPUR and ADVENTURE, all owned
by D. C. Thomson & Co. What the circulations of these papers are, I do
not know. The editors and proprietors refuse to name any figures, and in
any case the circulation of a paper carrying serial stories is bound to
fluctuate widely. But there is no question that the combined public of
the ten papers is a very large one. They are on sale in every town in
England, and nearly every boy who reads at all goes through a phase of
reading one or more of them. The GEM and MAGNET, which are much the
oldest of these papers, are of rather different type from the rest, and
they have evidently lost some of their popularity during the past few
years. A good many boys now regard them as old fashioned and 'slow'.
Nevertheless I want to discuss them first, because they are more
interesting psychologically than the others, and also because the mere
survival of such papers into the nineteen-thirties is a rather startling
phenomenom.

The GEM and MAGNET are sister-papers (characters out of one paper
frequently appear in the other), and were both started more than thirty
years ago. At that time, together with Chums and the old B[oy's] O[wn]
P[aper], they were the leading papers for boys, and they remained domi-
nant till quite recently. Each of them carries every week a fifteen--or
twenty-thousand-word school story, complete in itself, but usually more
or less connected with the story of the week before. The Gem in addition
to its school story carries one or more adventure serial. Otherwise the
two papers are so much alike that they can be treated as one, though the
MAGNET has always been the better known of the two, probably because
it possesses a really first-rate character in the fat boy. Billy Bunter.

The stories are stories of what purports to be public-school life, and
the schools (Greyfriars in the MAGNET and St Jim's in the GEM) are
represented as ancient and fashionable foundations of the type of Eton or
Winchester. All the leading characters are fourth-form boys aged fourteen
or fifteen, older or younger boys only appearing in very minor parts.
Like Sexton Blake and Nelson Lee, these boys continue week after week
and year after year, never growing any older. Very occasionally a new boy
arrives or a minor character drops out, but in at any rate the last
twenty-five years the personnel has barely altered. All the principal
characters in both papers--Bob Cherry, Tom Merry, Harry Wharton, Johnny
Bull, Billy Bunter and the rest of them--were at Greyfriars or St Jim's
long before the Great War, exactly the same age as at present, having
much the same kind of adventures and talking almost exactly the same
dialect. And not only the characters but the whole atmosphere of both Gem
and Magnet has been preserved unchanged, partly by means of very
elaborate stylization. The stories in the Magnet are signed 'Frank
Richards' and those in the GEM, 'Martin Clifford', but a series lasting
thirty years could hardly be the work of the same person every week.
Consequently they have to be written in a style that is easily imitated
--an extraordinary, artificial, repetitive style, quite different from any-
thing else now existing in English literature. A couple of extracts will
do as illustrations. Here is one from the MAGNET:

Groan!

'Shutup, Bunter!'

Groan!

Shutting up was not really in Billy Bunter's line. He seldom shut up,
though often requested to do so. On the present awful occasion the fat
Owl of Greyfriars was less inclined than ever to shut up. And he did not
shut up! He groaned, and groaned, and went on groaning.

Even groaning did not fully express Bunter's feelings. His feelings, in
fact, were inexpressible.

There were six of them in the soup! Only one of the six uttered sounds of
woe and lamentation. But that one, William George Bunter, uttered enough
for the whole party and a little over.

Harry Wharton & Go. stood in a wrathy and worried group. They were landed
and stranded, diddled, dished and done! etc., etc., etc.


Here is one from the Gem:


'Oh cwumbsl'

'Oh gum!'

'Oooogh!'

'Urrggh!'

Arthur Augustus sat up dizzily. He grabbed his handkerchief and pressed
it to his damaged nose. Tom Merry sat up, gasping for breath. They looked
at one another.

'Bai Jove! This is a go, deah boy!' gurgled Arthur Augustus. 'I have been
thwown into quite a fluttah! Oogh! The wottahsl The wuffians! The feahful
outsidahs! Wow!' etc., etc., etc.


Both of these extracts are entirely typical: you would find something
like them in almost every chapter of every number, to-day or twenty-five
years ago. The first thing that anyone would notice is the extraordinary
amount of tautology (the first of these two passages contains a hundred
and twenty-five words and could be compressed into about thirty),
seemingly designed to spin out the story, but actually playing its part
in creating the atmosphere. For the same reason various facetious
expressions are repeated over and over again; 'wrathy', for instance, is
a great favourite, and so is 'diddled, dished and done'. 'Oooogh!',
'Grooo!' and 'Yaroo!' (stylized cries of pain) recur constantly, and so
does 'Ha! ha! ha!', always given a line to itself, so that sometimes a
quarter of a column or there-abouts consists of 'Ha! ha! ha!' The slang
('Go and cat coke!', 'What the thump!', 'You frabjous ass!', etc. etc.)
has never been altered, so that the boys are now using slang which is at
least thirty years out of date. In addition, the various nicknames are
rubbed in on every possible occasion. Every few lines we are reminded
that Harry Wharton & Co. are 'the Famous Five', Bunter is always 'the fat
Owl' or 'the Owl of the Remove', Vernon-Smith is always 'the Bounder of
Greyfriars', Gussy (the Honourable Arthur Augustus D'Arcy) is always 'the
swell of St Jim's', and so on and so forth. There is a constant, untiring
effort to keep the atmosphere intact and to make sure that every new
reader learns immediately who is who. The result has been to make
Greyfriars and St Jim's into an extraordinary little world of their own,
a world which cannot be taken seriously by anyone over fifteen, but which
at any rate is not easily forgotten. By a debasement of the Dickens
technique a series of stereotyped 'characters' has been built up, in
several cases very successfully. Billy Bunter, for instance, must be one
of the best-known figures in English fiction; for the mere number of
people who know him he ranks with Sexton Blake, Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes
and a handful of characters in Dickens.

Needless to say, these stories are fantastically unlike life at a real
public school. They run in cycles of rather differing types, but in
general they are the clean-fun, knock-about type of story, with interest
centring round horseplay, practical jokes, ragging roasters, fights,
canings, football, cricket and food. A constantly recurring story is one
in which a boy is accused of some misdeed committed by another and is
too much of a sportsman to reveal the truth. The 'good' boys are 'good' in
the clean-living Englishman tradition--they keep in hard training, wash
behind their ears, never hit below the belt etc., etc.,--and by way of
contrast there is a series of 'bad' boys, Racke, Crooke, Loder and others,
whose badness consists in betting, smoking cigarettes and frequenting
public-houses. All these boys are constantly on the verge of expulsion,
but as it would mean a change of personnel if any boy were actually
expelled, no one is ever caught out in any really serious offence.
Stealing, for instance, barely enters as a motif. Sex is completely
taboo, especially in the form in which it actually arises at public
schools. Occasionally girls enter into the stories, and very rarely there
is something approaching a mild flirtation, but it is entirely in the
spirit of clean fun. A boy and a girl enjoy going for bicycle rides
together--that is all it ever amounts to. Kissing, for instance, would
be regarded as 'soppy'. Even the bad boys are presumed to be completely
sexless. When the GEM and MAGNET were started, it is probable that there
was a deliberate intention to get away from the guilty sex-ridden
atmosphere that pervaded so much of the earlier literature for boys. In
the nineties the BOYS' OWN PAPER, for instance, used to have its
correspondence columns full of terrifying warnings against masturbation,
and books like ST WINIFRED'S and TOM BROWN'S SCHOOL-DAYS were
heavy with homosexual feeling, though no doubt the authors were not fully
aware of it. In the GEM and MAGNET sex simply does not exist as a pro-
blem. Religion is also taboo; in the whole thirty years' issue of the two
papers the word 'God' probably does not occur, except in 'God save the
King'. On the other hand, there has always been a very strong
'temperance' strain. Drinking and, by association, smoking are regarded
as rather disgraceful even in an adult ('shady' is the usual word), but
at the same time as something irresistibly fascinating, a sort of
substitute for sex. In their moral atmosphere the GEM and MAGNET have a
great deal in common with the Boy Scout movement, which started at about
the same time.

All literature of this kind is partly plagiarism. Sexton Blake, for
instance, started off quite frankly as an imitation of Sherlock Holmes,
and still resembles him fairly strongly; he has hawk-like features, lives
in Baker Street, smokes enormously and puts on a dressing-gown when he
wants to think. The GEM and MAGNET probably owe something to the old
school-story writers who were flourishing when they began, Gunby Hadath,
Desmond Coke and the rest, but they owe more to nineteenth-century
models. In so far as Greyfriars and St Jim's are like real schools at
all, they are much more like Tom Brown's Rugby than a modern public
school. Neither school has an O.T.G., for instance, games are not
compulsory, and the boys are even allowed to wear what clothes they like.
But without doubt the main origin of these papers is STALKY & CO. This
book has had an immense influence on boys' literature, and it is one of
those books which have a sort of traditional reputation among people who
have never even seen a copy of it. More than once in boys' weekly papers
I have come across a reference to STALKY & CO. in which the word was
spelt 'Storky'. Even the name of the chief comic among the Greyfriars
masters, Mr Prout, is taken from STALKY & CO., and so is much of the
slang; 'jape', 'merry','giddy', 'bizney' (business), 'frabjous', 'don't' for
'doesn't'--all of them out of date even when GEM and MAGNET started.
There are also traces of earlier origins. The name 'Greyfriars' is prob-
ably taken from Thackeray, and Gosling, the school porter in the
MAGNET, talks in an imitation of Dickens's dialect.

With all this, the supposed 'glamour' of public-school life is played for
all it is worth. There is all the usual paraphernalia--lock-up,
roll-call, house matches, fagging, prefects, cosy teas round the study
fire, etc. etc.--and constant reference to the 'old school', the 'old
grey stones' (both schools were founded in the early sixteenth century),
the 'team spirit' of the 'Greyfriars men'. As for the snob-appeal, it is
completely shameless. Each school has a titled boy or two whose titles
are constantly thrust in the reader's face; other boys have the names of
well-known aristocratic families, Talbot, Manners, Lowther. We are for
ever being reminded that Gussy is the Honourable Arthur A. D'Arcy, son of
Lord Eastwood, that Jack Blake is heir to 'broad acres', that Hurree
Jamset Ram Singh (nicknamed Inky) is the Nabob of Bhanipur, that
Vernon-Smith's father is a millionaire. Till recently the illustrations
in both papers always depicted the boys in clothes imitated from those of
Eton; in the last few years Greyfriars has changed over to blazers and
flannel trousers, but St Jim's still sticks to the Eton jacket, and Gussy
sticks to his top-hat. In the school magazine which appears every week as
part of the MAGNET, Harry Wharton writes an article discussing the
pocket-money received by the 'fellows in the Remove', and reveals that
some of them get as much as five pounds a week! This kind of thing is a
perfectly deliberate incitement to wealth-fantasy. And here it is worth
noticing a rather curious fact, and that is that the school story is a
thing peculiar to England. So far as I know, there are extremely few
school stories in foreign languages. The reason, obviously, is that in
England education is mainly a matter of status. The most definite
dividing line between the petite-bourgeoisie and the working class is
that the former pay for their education, and within the bourgeoisie there
is another unbridgeable gulf between the 'public' school and the
'private' school. It is quite clear that there are tens and scores of
thousands of people to whom every detail of life at a 'posh' public
school is wildly thrilling and romantic. They happen to be outside that
mystic world of quadrangles and house-colours, but they can yearn after
it, day-dream about it, live mentally in it for hours at a stretch. The
question is, Who are these people? Who reads the GEM and MAGNET?

Obviously one can never be quite certain about this kind of thing. All I
can say from my own observation is this. Boys who are likely to go to
public schools themselves generally read the GEM and MAGNET, but they
nearly always stop reading them when they are about twelve; they may
continue for another year from force of habit, but by that time they have
ceased to take them seriously. On the other hand, the boys at very cheap
private schools, the schools that are designed for people who can't
afford a public school but consider the Council schools 'common', con-
tinue reading the GEM and MAGNET for several years longer. A few years
ago I was a teacher at two of these schools myself. I found that not only
did virtually all the boys read the GEM and MAGNET, but that they were
still taking them fairly seriously when they were fifteen or even
sixteen. These boys were the sons of shopkeepers, office employees and
small business and professional men, and obviously it is this class that
the GEM and MAGNET are aimed at. But they are certainly read by
working-class boys as well. They are generally on sale in the poorest
quarters of big towns, and I have known them to be read by boys whom one
might expect to be completely immune from public-school 'glamour'. I have
seen a young coal miner, for instance, a lad who had already worked a
year or two underground, eagerly reading the GEM. Recently I offered a
batch of English papers to some British legionaries of the French Foreign
Legion in North Africa; they picked out the GEM and MAGNET first. Both
papers are much read by girls, and the Pen Pals department
of the GEM shows that it is read in every corner of the British Empire, by
Australians, Canadians, Palestine Jews, Malays, Arabs, Straits Chinese,
etc., etc. The editors evidently expect their readers to be aged round
about fourteen, and the advertisements (milk chocolate, postage stamps,
water pistols, blushing cured, home conjuring tricks, itching powder, the
Phine Phun Ring which runs a needle into your friend's hand, etc., etc.)
indicate roughly the same age; there are also the Admiralty
advertisements, however, which call for youths between seventeen and
twenty-two. And there is no question that these papers are also read by
adults. It is quite common for people to write to the editor and say that
they have read every number of the GEM or MAGNET for the past thirty
years. Here, for instance, is a letter from a lady in Salisbury:

I can say of your splendid yarns of Harry Wharton & Co. of Greyfriars,
that they never fail to reach a high standard. Without doubt they are the
finest stories of their type on the market to-day, which is saying a good
deal. They seem to bring you face to face with Nature. I have taken the
Magnet from the start, and have followed the adventures of Harry Wharton
& Co. with rapt interest. I have no sons, but two daughters, and there's
always a rush to be the first to read the grand old paper. My husband,
too, was a staunch reader of the Magnet until he was suddenly taken away
from us.

It is well worth getting hold of some copies of the GEM and MAGNET,
especially the GEM, simply to have a look at the correspondence columns.
What is truly startling is the intense interest with which the pettiest
details of life at Greyfriars and St Jim's are followed up. Here, for
instance, are a few of the questions sent in by readers:

What age is Dick Roylance?' 'How old is St Jim's?' 'Can you give me a
list of the Shell and their studies?' 'How much did D'Arcy's monocle
cost?' 'How is it that fellows like Crooke are in the Shell and decent
fellows like yourself are only in the Fourth?' 'What are the Form
captain's three chief duties?' 'Who is the chemistry master at St Jim's?'
(From a girl) 'Where is St Jim's situated? COULD you tell me how to get
there, as I would love to see the building? Are you boys just "phoneys",
as I think you are?'

It is clear that many of the boys and girls who write these letters are
living a complete fantasy-life. Sometimes a boy will write, for instance,
giving his age, height, weight, chest and bicep measurements and asking
which member of the Shell or Fourth Form he most exactly resembles. The
demand for a list of the studies on the Shell passage, with an exact
account of who lives in each, is a very common one. The editors, of
course, do everything in their power to keep up the illusion. In the GEM
Jack Blake is supposed to write answers to correspondents, and in the
MAGNET a couple of pages is always given up to the school magazine (the
GREYFRIARS HERALD, edited by Harry Wharton), and there is another page
in which one or other character is written up each week. The stories run
in cycles, two or three characters being kept in the foreground for
several weeks at a time. First there will be a series of rollicking
adventure stories, featuring the Famous Five and Billy Bunter; then a run
of stories turning on mistaken identity, with Wibley (the make-up wizard)
in the star part; then a run of more serious stories in which Vernon-
Smith is trembling on the verge of expulsion. And here one comes upon
the real secret of the GEM and MAGNET and the probable reason why
they continue to be read in spite of their obvious out-of-dateness.

It is that the characters are so carefully graded as to give almost every
type of reader a character he can identify himself with. Most boys'
papers aim at doing this, hence the boy-assistant (Sexton Blake's Tinker,
Nelson Lee's Nipper, etc.) who usually accompanies the explorer,
detective or what-not on his adventures. But in these cases there is only
one boy, and usually it is much the same type of boy. In the GEM and
MAGNET there is a model for very nearly everybody. There is the normal
athletic, high-spirited boy (Tom Merry, Jack Blake, Frank Nugent), a
slightly rowdier version of this type (Bob Cherry), a more aristocratic
version (Talbot, Manners), a quieter, more serious version (Harry
Wharton), and a stolid, 'bulldog' version (Johnny Bull). Then there is
the reckless, dare-devil type of boy (Vernon-Smith), the definitely
'clever', studious boy (Mark Linley, Dick Penfold), and the eccentric boy
who is not good at games but possesses some special talent (Skinner
Wibley). And there is the scholarship-boy (Tom Redwing), an important
figure in this class of story because he makes it possible for boys from
very poor homes to project themselves into the public-school atmosphere.
In addition there are Australian, Irish, Welsh, Manx, Yorkshire and
Lancashire boys to play upon local patriotism. But the subtlety of
characterization goes deeper than this. If one studies the correspondence
columns one sees that there is probably NO character in the GEM and
MAGNET whom some or other reader does not identify with, except the
out-and-out comics, Coker, Billy Bunter, Fisher T. Fish (the money-
grabbing American boy) and, of course, the masters. Bunter, though
in his origin he probably owed something to the fat boy in PICKWICK, is
a real creation. His tight trousers against which boots and canes are
constantly thudding, his astuteness in search of food, his postal order
which never turns up, have made him famous wherever the Union Jack
waves. But he is not a subject for day-dreams. On the other hand, another
seeming figure of fun, Gussy (the Honourable Arthur A. D'Arcy, 'the swell
of St Jim's'), is evidently much admired. Like everything else in the GEM
and MAGNET, Gussy is at least thirty years out of date. He is the 'knut'
of the early twentieth century or even the 'masher' of the nineties ('Bai
Jove, deah boy!' and 'Weally, I shall be obliged to give you a feahful
thwashin'!'), the monocled idiot who made good on the fields of Mons and
Le Gateau. And his evident popularity goes to show how deep the
snob-appeal of this type is. English people are extremely fond of the
titled ass (cf. Lord Peter Wimscy) who always turns up trumps in the
moment of emergency. Here is a letter from one of Gussy's girl admirers;

I think you're too hard on Gussy. I wonder he's still in existence, the
way you treat him. He's my hero. Did you know I write lyrics? How's this
--to the tune of 'Goody Goody'?

Gonna get my gas-mask, join the ARP.
'Cos I'm wise to all those bombs you drop on me.
Gonna dig myself a trench
Inside the garden fence;
Gonna seal my windows up with tin
So the tear gas can't get in;
Gonna park my cannon right outside the kerb
With a note to Adolf Hitler: 'Don't disturb!'
And if I never fall in Nazi hands
That's soon enough for me
Gonna get my gas-mask, join the ARP.

P.S.--Do you get on well with girls?

I quote this in full because (dated April 1939) it is interesting as
being probably the earliest mention of Hitler in the GEM. In the GEM
there is also a heroic fat boy. Fatty Wynn, as a set-off against Bunter.
Vernon-Smith, 'the Bounder of the Remove', a Byronic character, always on
the verge of the sack, is another great favourite. And even some of the
cads probably have their following. Loder, for instance, 'the rotter of
the Sixth', is a cad, but he is also a highbrow and given to saying
sarcastic things about football and the team spirit. The boys of the
Remove only think him all the more of a cad for this, but a certain type
of boy would probably identify with him. Even Racke, Grooke & Co. are
probably admired by small boys who think it diabolically wicked to smoke
cigarettes. (A frequent question in the correspondence column; 'What
brand of cigarettes does Racke smoke?')

Naturally the politics of the GEM and MAGNET are Conservative, but in a
completely pre-1914 style, with no Fascist tinge. In reality their basic
political assumptions are two: nothing ever changes, and foreigners are
funny. In the GEM of 1939 Frenchmen are still Froggies and Italians are
still Dagoes. Mossoo, the French master at Greyfriars, is the usual
comic-paper Frog, with pointed beard, pegtop trousers, etc. Inky, the
Indian boy, though a rajah, and therefore possessing snob-appeal, is also
the comic babu of the PUNCH tradition. ("The rowfulness is not the
proper caper, my esteemed Bob," said Inky. "Let dogs delight in the
barkfulness and bitefulness, but the soft answer is the cracked pitcher
that goes longest to a bird in the bush, as the English proverb remarks.")
Fisher T. Fish is the old-style stage Yankee ("Waal, I guess", etc.)
dating from a peroid of Anglo-American jealousy. Wun Lung, the
Chinese boy (he has rather faded out of late, no doubt because some of
the MAGNET'S readers are Straits Chinese), is the nineteenth-century
pantomime Chinaman, with saucer-shaped hat, pigtail and pidgin-English.
The assumption all along is not only that foreigners are comics who are
put there for us to laugh at, but that they can be classified in much the
same way as insects. That is why in all boys' papers, not only the GEM
and MAGNET, a Chinese is invariably portrayed with a pigtail. It is the
thing you recognize him by, like the Frenchman's beard or the Italian's
barrel-organ. In papers of this kind it occasionally happens that when
the setting of a story is in a foreign country some attempt is made to
describe the natives as individual human beings, but as a rule it is
assumed that foreigners of any one race are all alike and will conform
more or less exactly to the following patterns:


FRENCHMAN: Excitable. Wears beard, gesticulates wildly.
SPANIARD, Mexican, etc.: Sinister, treacherous.
ARAB, Afghan, etc.: Sinister, treacherous.
CHINESE: Sinister, treacherous. Wears pigtail.
ITALIAN: Excitable. Grinds barrel-organ or carries stiletto.
SWEDE, Dane, etc.: Kind-hearted, stupid.
NEGRO: Comic, very faithful.


The working classes only enter into the GEM and MAGNET as comics or
semi-villains (race-course touts, etc.). As for class-friction, trade
unionism, strikes, slumps, unemployment, Fascism and civil war--not a
mention. Somewhere or other in the thirty years' issue of the two papers
you might perhaps find the word 'Socialism', but you would have to look a
long time for it. If the Russian Revolution is anywhere referred to, it
will be indirectly, in the word 'Bolshy' (meaning a person of violent
disagreeable habits). Hitler and the Nazis are just beginning to make
their appearance, in the sort of reference I quoted above. The war-crisis
of September 1938 made just enough impression to produce a story in which
Mr Vernon-Smith, the Bounder's millionaire father, cashed in on the
general panic by buying up country houses in order to sell them to 'crisis
scuttlers'. But that is probably as near to noticing the European situation
as the GEM and MAGNET will come, until the war actually starts.
That does not mean that these papers are unpatriotic--quite the
contrary! Throughout the Great War the GEM and MAGNET were perhaps the
most consistently and cheerfully patriotic papers in England. Almost
every week the boys caught a spy or pushed a conchy into the army, and
during the rationing period 'EAT LESS BREAD' was printed in large type on
every page. But their patriotism has nothing whatever to do with
power-politics or 'ideological' warfare. It is more akin to family
loyalty, and actually it gives one a valuable clue to the attitude of
ordinary people, especially the huge untouched block of the middle class
and the better-off working class. These people are patriotic to the
middle of their bones, but they do not feel that what happens in foreign
countries is any of their business. When England is in danger they rally
to its defence as a matter of course, but in between-times they are not
interested. After all, England is always in the right and England always
wins, so why worry? It is an attitude that has been shaken during the
past twenty years, but not so deeply as is sometimes supposed. Failure to
understand it is one of the reasons why Left Wing political parties are
seldom able to produce an acceptable foreign policy.

The mental world of the GEM and MAGNET, therefore, is something like
this:

The year is 1910--or 1940, but it is all the same. You are at
Greyfriars, a rosy-cheeked boy of fourteen in posh tailor-made clothes,
sitting down to tea in your study on the Remove passage after an exciting
game of football which was won by an odd goal in the last half-minute.
There is a cosy fire in the study, and outside the wind is whistling. The
ivy clusters thickly round the old grey stones. The King is on his throne
and the pound is worth a pound. Over in Europe the comic foreigners are
jabbering and gesticulating, but the grim grey battleships of the British
Fleet are steaming up the Channel and at the outposts of Empire the
monocled Englishmen are holding the niggers at bay. Lord Mauleverer has
just got another fiver and we are all settling down to a tremendous tea
of sausages, sardines, crumpets, potted meat, jam and doughnuts. After
tea we shall sit round the study fire having a good laugh at Billy Bunter
and discussing the team for next week's match against Rook-wood.
Everything is safe, solid and unquestionable. Everything will be the
same for ever and ever. That approximately is the atmosphere.

But now turn from the GEM and MAGNET to the more up-to-date papers which
have appeared since the Great War. The truly significant thing is that
they have more points of resemblance to the GEM and MAGNET than points of
difference. But it is better to consider the differences first.

There are eight of these newer papers, the MODERN BOY, TRIUMPH, CHAMPION,
WIZARD, ROVER, SKIPPER, HOTSPUR and ADVENTURE. All of these have appeared
since the Great War, but except for the MODERN BOY none of them is less
than five years old. Two papers which ought also to be mentioned briefly
here; though they are not strictly in the same class as the rest, are the
DETECTIVE WEEKLY and the THRILLER, both owned by the Amalgamated Press.
The DETECTIVE WEEKLY has taken over Sexton Blake. Both of these papers
admit a certain amount of sex-interest into their stories, and though
certainly read by boys; they are not aimed at them exclusively. All the
others are boys' papers pure and simple, and they are sufficiently alike
to be considered together. There does not seem to be any notable
difference between Thomson's publications and those of the Amalgamated
Press.

As soon. as one looks at these papers one sees their technical
superiority to the GEM and MAGNET. To begin with, they have the great
advantage of not being written entirely by one person. Instead of one
long complete story, a number of the WIZARD or HOTSPUR consists of half a
dozen or more serials, none of which goes on for ever. Consequently there
is far more variety and far less padding, and none of the tiresome
stylization and facetiousness of the GEM and MAGNET. Look at these two
extracts, for example:


Billy Bunter groaned.

A quarter of an hour had elapsed out of the two hours that Bunter was
booked for extra French.

In a quarter of an hour there were only fifteen minutes! But every one of
those minutes seemed inordinately long to Bunter. They seemed to crawl by
like tired snails.

Looking at the clock in Classroom No. 10 the fat Owl could hardly believe
that only fifteen minutes had passed. It seemed more like fifteen hours,
if not fifteen days!

Other fellows were in extra French as well as Bunter. They did not
matter. Bunter did! (The Magnet)

* * *

After a terrible climb, hacking out handholds in the smooth ice every
step of the way up. Sergeant Lionheart Logan of the Mounties was now
clinging like a human fly to the face of an icy cliff, as smooth and
treacherous as a giant pane of glass.

An Arctic blizzard, in all its fury, was buffeting his body, driving the
blinding snow into his face, seeking to tear his fingers loose from their
handholds and dash him to death on the jagged boulders which lay at the
foot of the cliff a hundred feet below.

Crouching among those boulders were eleven villainous trappers who had
done their best to shoot down Lionheart and his companion, Constable Jim
Rogers--until the blizzard had blotted the two Mounties out of sight
from below. (The Wizard)


The second extract gets you some distance with the story, the first takes
a hundred words to tell you that Bunter is in the detention class.
Moreover, by not concentrating on school stories (in point of numbers the
school story slightly predominates in all these papers, except the
THRILLER and DETECTIVE WEEKLY), the WIZARD, HOTSPUR, etc., have
far greater opportunities for sensationalism. Merely looking at the cover
illustrations of the papers which I have on the table in front of me,
here are some of the things I see. On one a cowboy is clinging by his
toes to the wing of an aeroplane in mid-air and shooting down another
aeroplane with his revolver. On another a Chinese is swimming for his
life down a sewer with a swarm of ravenous-looking rats swimming after
him. On another an engineer is lighting a stick of dynamite while a steel
robot feels for him with its claws. On another a man in airman's costume
is fighting barehanded against a rat somewhat larger than a donkey. On
another a nearly naked man of terrific muscular development has just
seized a lion by the tail and flung it thirty yards over the wall of an
arena, with the words, 'Take back your blooming lion!' Clearly no school
story can compete with this kind of thing. From time to time the school
buildings may catch fire or the French master may turn out to be the head
of an international anarchist gang, but in a general way the interest
must centre round cricket, school rivalries, practical jokes, etc. There
is not much room for bombs, death-rays, sub-machine guns, aeroplanes,
mustangs, octopuses, grizzly bears or gangsters.

Examination of a large number of these papers shows that, putting aside
school stories, the favourite subjects are Wild West, Frozen North,
Foreign Legion, crime (always from the detective's angle), the Great War
(Air Force or Secret Service, not the infantry), the Tarzan motif in
varying forms, professional football, tropical exploration, historical
romance (Robin Hood, Cavaliers and Round-heads, etc.) and scientific
invention. The Wild West still leads, at any rate as a setting, though
the Red Indian seems to be fading out. The one theme that is really new
is the scientific one. Death-rays, Martians, invisible men, robots,
helicopters and interplanetary rockets figure largely: here and there
there are even far-off rumours of psychotherapy and ductless glands.
Whereas the GEM and MAGNET derive from Dickens and Kipling, the WIZARD,
CHAMPION, MODERN BOY, etc., owe a great deal to H. G. Wells, who, rather
than Jules Verne, is the father of 'Scientifiction'. Naturally it is the
magical Martian aspect of science that is most exploited, but one or two
papers include serious articles on scientific subjects, besides
quantities of informative snippets. (Examples: 'A Kauri tree in
Queensland, Australia, is over 12,000 years old'; 'Nearly 50,000
thunderstorms occur every day'; 'Helium gas costs £1 per 1000 cubic
feet'; 'There are over 500 varieties of spiders in Great Britain';
'London firemen use 14,000,000 gallons of water annually', etc., etc.)
There is a marked advance in intellectual curiosity and, on the whole, in
the demand made on the reader's attention. In practice the GEM and MAGNET
and the post-war papers are read by much the same public, but the mental
age aimed at seems to have risen by a year or two years--an improvement
probably corresponding to the improvement in elementary education since
1909.

The other thing that has emerged in the post-war boys' papers, though not
to anything like the extent one would expect, is bully-worship and the
cult of violence.

If one compares the GEM and MAGNET with a genuinely modern paper, the
thing that immediately strikes one is the absence of the leader-principle.
There is no central dominating character; instead there are fifteen
or twenty characters, all more or less on an equality, with whom
readers of different types can identify. In the more MODERN papers
this is not usually the case. Instead of identifying with a schoolboy of
more or less his own age, the reader of the SKIPPER, HOTSPUR, etc., is
led to identify with a G-man, with a Foreign Legionary, with some variant
of Tarzan, with an air ace, a master spy, an explorer, a pugilist--at
any rate with some single all-powerful character who dominates everyone
about him and whose usual method of solving any problem is a sock on the
jaw. This character is intended as a superman, and as physical strength
is the form of power that boys can best understand, he is usually a sort
of human gorilla; in the Tarzan type of story he is sometimes actually a
giant, eight or ten feet high. At the same time the scenes of violence in
nearly all these stories are remarkably harmless and unconvincing. There
is a great difference in tone between even the most bloodthirsty English
paper and the threepenny Yank Mags, FIGHT STORIES, ACTION STORIES,
etc. (not strictly boys' papers, but largely read by boys). In the Yank Mags
you get real blood-lust, really gory descriptions of the all-in,
jump-on-his-testicles style fighting, written in a jargon that has been
perfected by people who brood endlessly on violence. A paper like FIGHT
STORIES, for instance, would have very little appeal except to sadists
and masochists. You can see the comparative gentleness of the English
civilization by the amateurish way in which prize-fighting is always
described in the boys' weeklies. There is no specialized vocabulary. Look
at these four extracts, two English, two American;


When the gong sounded, both men were breathing heavily and each had great
red marks on his chest. Bill's chin was bleeding, and Ben had a cut over
his right eye.

Into their corners they sank, but when the gong clanged again they were
up swiftly, and they went like tigers at each other. (ROVER)

* * *

He walked in stolidly and smashed a clublike right to my face. Blood
spattered and I went back on my heels, but surged in and ripped my right
under the heart. Another right smashed full on Ben's already battered
mouth, and, spitting out the fragments of a tooth, he crashed a flailing
left to my body. (FIGHT STORIES)

* * *

It was amazing to watch the Black Panther at work. His muscles rippled
and slid under his dark skin. There was all the power and grace of a
giant cat in his swift and terrible onslaught.

He volleyed blows with a bewildering speed for so huge a fellow. In a
moment Ben was simply blocking with his gloves as well as he could. Ben
was really a past-master of defence. He had many fine victories behind
him. But the Negro's rights and lefts crashed through openings that
hardly any other fighter could have found. (WIZARD)

* * *

Haymakers which packed the bludgeoning weight of forest monarchs crashing
down under the ax hurled into the bodies of the two heavies as they
swapped punches. (FIGHT STORIES)


Notice how much more knowledgeable the American extracts sound. They
are written for devotees of the prize-ring, the others are not. Also, it
ought to be emphasized that on its level the moral code of the English
boys' papers is a decent one. Crime and dishonesty are never held up to
admiration, there is none of the cynicism and corruption of the American
gangster story. The huge sale of the Yank Mags in England shows that
there is a demand for that kind of thing, but very few English writers
seem able to produce it. When hatred of Hitler became a major emotion
in America, it was interesting to see how promptly'anti-Fascism' was
adapted to pornographic purposes by the editors of the Yank Mags. One
magazine which I have in front of me is given up to a long, complete
story, 'When Hell Game to America', in which the agents of a 'blood-
maddened European dictator' are trying to conquer the U.S.A. with
death-rays and invisible aeroplanes. There is the frankest appeal to
sadism, scenes in which the Nazis tie bombs to women's backs and fling
them off heights to watch them blown to pieces in mid-air, others in
which they tie naked girls together by their hair and prod them with
knives to make them dance, etc., etc. The editor comments solemnly
on all this, and uses it as a plea for tightening up restrictions against
immigrants. On another page of the same paper: 'LIVES OF THE HOTCHA
CHORUS GIRLS. Reveals all the intimate secrets and fascinating pastimes
of the famous Broadway Hotcha girls. NOTHING IS OMITTED. Price 10c.' 'HOW
TO LOVE. 10c.' 'FRENCH PHOTO RING. 25c.' 'NAUGHTY NUDIES TRANSFERS.
From the outside of the glass you see a beautiful girl, innocently dressed.
Turn it around and look through the glass and oh! what a difference! Set
of 3 transfers 25c.,' etc., etc., etc. There is nothing at all like this
in any English paper likely to be read by boys. But the process of
Americanization is going on all the same. The American ideal, the
'he-man', the 'tough guy', the gorilla who puts everything right by
socking everybody on the jaw, now figures in probably a majority of boys'
papers. In one serial now running in the SKIPPER he is always portrayed
ominously enough, swinging a rubber truncheon.

The development of the WIZARD, HOTSPUR, etc., as against the earlier
boys' papers, boils down to this: better technique, more scientific
interest, more bloodshed, more leader-worship. But, after all, it is the
LACK of development that is the really striking thing.

To begin with, there is no political development whatever. The world of
the SKIPPER and the CHAMPION is still the pre-1914 world of the MAGNET
and the GEM. The Wild West story, for instance, with its cattle-rustlers,
lynch-law and other paraphernalia belonging to the eighties, is a
curiously archaic thing. It is worth noticing that in papers of this type
it is always taken for granted that adventures only happen at the ends of
the earth, in tropical forests, in Arctic wastes, in African deserts, on
Western prairies, in Chinese opium dens--everywhere in fact, except the
places where things really DO happen. That is a belief dating from thirty
or forty years ago, when the new continents were in process of being
opened up. Nowadays, of course, if you really want adventure, the place
to look for it is in Europe. But apart from the picturesque side of the
Great War, contemporary history is carefully excluded. And except that
Americans are now admired instead of being laughed at, foreigners are
exactly the same figures of fun that they always were. If a Chinese
character appears, he is still the sinister pigtailed opium-smuggler of
Sax Rohmer; no indication that things have been happening in China since
1912--no indication that a war is going on there, for instance. If a
Spaniard appears, he is still a 'dago' or 'greaser' who rolls cigarettes
and stabs people in the back; no indication that things have been
happening in Spain. Hitler and the Nazis have not yet appeared, or are
barely making their appearance. There will be plenty about them in a
little while, but it will be from a strictly patriotic angle (Britain versus
Germany), with the real meaning of the struggle kept out of sight
as much as possible. As for the Russian Revolution, it is extremely
difficult to find any reference to it in any of these papers. When Russia
is mentioned at all it is usually in an information snippet (example:
'There are 29,000 centenarians in the USSR.'), and any reference to
the Revolution is indirect and twenty years out of date. In one story in
the ROVER, for instance, somebody has a tame bear, and as it is a Russian
bear, it is nicknamed Trotsky--obviously an echo of the 1917-23 period
and not of recent controversies. The clock has stopped at 1910. Britannia
rules the waves, and no one has heard of slumps, booms, unemployment,
dictatorships, purges or concentration camps.

And in social outlook there is hardly any advance. The snobbishness is
somewhat less open than in the GEM and MAGNET--that is the most one can
possibly say. To begin with, the school story, always partly dependent on
snob-appeal, is by no means eliminated. Every number of a boys' paper
includes at least one school story, these stories slightly outnumbering
the Wild Westerns. The very elaborate fantasy-life of the GEM and MAGNET
is not imitated and there is more emphasis on extraneous adventure, but
the social atmosphere (old grey stones) is much the same. When a new
school is introduced at the beginning of a story we are often told in
just those words that 'it was a very posh school'. From time to time a
story appears which is ostensibly directed AGAINST snobbery. The
scholarship-boy (cf. Tom Redwing in the MAGNET) makes fairly frequent
appearances, and what is essentially the same theme is sometimes
presented in this form: there is great rivalry between two schools, one
of which considers itself more 'posh' than the other, and there are
fights, practical jokes, football matches, etc., always ending in the
discomfiture of the snobs. If one glances very superficially at some of
these stories it is possible to imagine that a democratic spirit has
crept into the boys' weeklies, but when one looks more closely one sees
that they merely reflect the bitter jealousies that exist within the
white-collar class. Their real function is to allow the boy who goes to a
cheap private school (NOT a Council school) to feel that his school is
just as 'posh' in the sight of God as Winchester or Eton. The sentiment
of school loyalty ('We're better than the fellows down the road'), a
thing almost unknown to the real working class, is still kept up. As
these stories are written by many different hands, they do, of course,
vary a good deal in tone. Some are reasonably free from snobbishness, in
others money and pedigree are exploited even more shamelessly than in the
GEM and MAGNET. In one that I came across an actual MAJORITY of the boys
mentioned were titled.

Where working-class characters appear, it is usually either as comics
(jokes about tramps, convicts, etc.), or as prize-fighters, acrobats,
cowboys, professional footballers and Foreign Legionaries--in other
words, as adventurers. There is no facing of the facts about
working-class life, or, indeed, about WORKING life of any description.
Very occasionally one may come across a realistic description of, say,
work in a coal-mine, but in all probability it will only be there as the
background of some lurid adventure. In any case the central character is
not likely to be a coal-miner. Nearly all the time the boy who reads
these papers--in nine cases out often a boy who is going to spend his
life working in a shop, in a factory or in some subordinate job in an
office--is led to identify with people in positions of command, above
all with people who are never troubled by shortage of money. The Lord
Peter Wimsey figure, the seeming idiot who drawls and wears a monocle but
is always to the fore in moments of danger, turns up over and over again.
(This character is a great favourite in Secret Service stories.) And, as
usual, the heroic characters all have to talk B.B.C.; they may talk
Scottish or Irish or American, but no one in a star part is ever
permitted to drop an aitch. Here it is worth comparing the social
atmosphere of the boys' weeklies with that of the women's weeklies,
the ORACLE, the FAMILY STAR, PEG'S PAPER, etc.

The women's papers are aimed at an older public and are read for the most
part by girls who are working for a living. Consequently they are on the
surface much more realistic. It is taken for granted, for example, that
nearly everyone has to live in a big town and work at a more or less dull
job. Sex, so far from being taboo, is THE subject. The short, complete
stories, the special feature of these papers, are generally of the 'came
the dawn' type: the heroine narrowly escapes losing her 'boy' to a
designing rival, or the 'boy' loses his job and has to postpone marriage,
but presently gets a better job. The changeling-fantasy (a girl brought
up in a poor home is 'really' the child of rich parents) is another
favourite. Where sensationalism comes in, usually in the serials, it
arises out of the more domestic type of crime, such as bigamy, forgery or
sometimes murder; no Martians, death-rays or international anarchist
gangs. These papers are at any rate aiming at credibility, and they have
a link with real life in their correspondence columns, where genuine
problems are being discussed. Ruby M. Ayres's column of advice in the
ORACLE, for instance, is extremely sensible and well written. And yet the
world of the ORACLE and PEG'S PAPER is a pure fantasy-world. It is the
same fantasy all the time; pretending to be richer than you are. The
chief impression that one carries away from almost every story in these
papers is of a frightful, overwhelming 'refinement'. Ostensibly the
characters are working-class people, but their habits, the interiors of
their houses, their clothes, their outlook and, above all, their speech
are entirely middle class. They are all living at several pounds a week
above their income. And needless to say, that is just the impression that
is intended. The idea is to give the bored factory-girl or worn-out
mother of five a dream-life in which she pictures herself--not actually
as a duchess (that convention has gone out) but as, say, the wife of a
bank-manager. Not only is a five-to-six-pound-a-week standard of life set
up as the ideal, but it is tacitly assumed that that is how working-class
people really DO live. The major facts aree simply not faced. It is
admitted, for instance, that people sometimes lose their jobs; but then
the dark clouds roll away and they get better jobs instead. No mention of
un-employment as something permanent and inevitable, no mention of the
dole, no mention of trade unionism. No suggestion anywhere that there can
be anything wrong with the system AS A SYSTEM; there are only individual
misfortunes, which are generally due to somebody's wickedness and can in
any case be put right in the last chapter. Always the dark clouds roll
away, the kind employer raises Alfred's wages, and there are jobs for
everybody except the drunks. It is still the world of the WIZARD and the
GEM, except that there are orange-blossoms instead of machine-guns.

The outlook inculcated by all these papers is that of a rather except-
ionally stupid member of the Navy League in the year 1910. Yes, it
may be said, but what does it matter? And in any case, what else do you
expect?

Of course no one in his senses would want to turn the so-called penny
dreadful into a realistic novel or a Socialist tract. An adventure story
must of its nature be more or less remote from real life. But, as I have
tried to make clear, the unreality of the WIZARD and the GEM is not so
artless as it looks. These papers exist because of a specialized demand,
because boys at certain ages find it necessary to read about Martians,
death-rays, grizzly bears and gangsters. They get what they are looking
for, but they get it wrapped up in the illusions which their future
employers think suitable for them. To what extent people draw their ideas
from fiction is disputable. Personally I believe that most people are
influenced far more than they would care to admit by novels, serial
stories, films and so forth, and that from this point of view the worst
books are often the most important, because they are usually the ones
that are read earliest in life. It is probable that many people who would
consider themselves extremely sophisticated and 'advanced' are actually
carrying through life an imaginative background which they acquired in
childhood from (for instance) Sapper and lan Hay. If that is so, the
boys' twopenny weeklies are of the deepest importance. Here is the stuff
that is read somewhere between the ages of twelve and eighteen by a very
large proportion, perhaps an actual majority, of English boys, including
many who will never read anything else except newspapers; and along with
it they are absorbing a set of beliefs which would be regarded as
hopelessly out of date in the Central Office of the Conservative Party.
All the better because it is done indirectly, there is being pumped into
them the conviction that the major problems of our time do not exist,
that there is nothing wrong with LAISSEZ-FAIRE capitalism, that
foreigners are un-important comics and that the British Empire is a sort
of charity-concern which will last for ever. Considering who owns these
papers, it is difficult to believe that this is un-intentional. Of the
twelve papers I have been discussing (i.e. twelve including the THRILLER
and DETECTIVE WEEKLY) seven are the property of the Amalgamated Press,
which is one of the biggest press-combines in the world and controls more
than a hundred different papers. The GEM and MAGNET, therefore, are
closely linked up with the DAILY TELEGRAPH and the FINANCIAL TIMES.
This in itself would be enough to rouse certain suspicions, even if it
were not obvious that the stories in the boys' weeklies are politically
vetted. So it appears that if you feel the need of a fantasy-life in
which you travel to Mars and fight lions bare-handed (and what boy
doesn't?), you can only have it by delivering yourself over, mentally, to
people like Lord Camrose. For there is no competition. Throughout the
whole of this run of papers the differences are negligible, and on this
level no others exist. This raises the question, why is there no such
thing as a left-wing boys' paper?

At first glance such an idea merely makes one slightly sick. It is so
horribly easy to imagine what a left-wing boys' paper would be like, if
it existed. I remember in 1920 or 1921 some optimistic person handing
round Communist tracts among a crowd of public-school boys. The tract I
received was of the question-and-answer kind:

Q,. 'Can a Boy Communist be a Boy Scout, Comrade?'
A. 'No, Comrade.'
Q,. 'Why, Comrade?'
A. 'Because, Comrade, a Boy Scout must salute the Union Jack, which is
the symbol of tyranny and oppression,' etc., etc.

Now suppose that at this moment somebody started a left-wing paper
deliberately aimed at boys of twelve or fourteen. I do not suggest that
the whole of its contents would be exactly like the tract I have quoted
above, but does anyone doubt that they would be SOMETHING like it?
Inevitably such a paper would either consist of dreary up-lift or it
would be under Communist influence and given over to adulation of Soviet
Russia; in either case no normal boy would ever look at it. Highbrow
literature apart, the whole of the existing left-wing Press, in so far as
it is at all vigorously 'left', is one long tract. The one Socialist
paper in England which could live a week on its merits AS A PAPER is the
DAILY HERALD: and how much Socialism is there in the DAILY HERALD? At
this moment, therefore, a paper with a 'left' slant and at the same time
likely to have an appeal to ordinary boys in their teens is something
almost beyond hoping for.

But it does not follow that it is impossible. There is no clear reason
why every adventure story should necessarily be mixed up with
snobbishness and gutter patriotism. For, after all, the stories in the
HOTSPUR and the MODERN BOY are not Conservative tracts; they are merely
adventure stories with a Conservative bias. It is fairly easy to imagine
the process being reversed. It is possible, for instance, to imagine a
paper as thrilling and lively as the HOTSPUR, but with subject-matter and
'ideology' a little more up to date. It is even possible (though this
raises other difficulties) to imagine a women's paper at the same
literary level as the ORACLE, dealing in approximately the same kind of
story, but taking rather more account of the realities of working-class
life. Such things have been done before, though not in England. In the
last years of the Spanish monarchy there was a large output in Spain of
left-wing novelettes, some of them evidently of anarchist origin.
Unfortunately at the time when they were appearing I did not see their
social significance, and I lost the collection of them that I had, but no
doubt copies would still be procurable. In get-up and style of story they
were very similar to the English fourpenny novelette, except that their
inspiration was 'left'. If, for instance, a story described police
pursuing anarchists through the mountains, it would be from the point of
view of the anarchist and not of the police. An example nearer to hand is
the Soviet film CHAPAIEV, which has been shown a number of times in
London. Technically, by the standards of the time when it was made,
CHAPAIEV is a first-rate film, but mentally, in spite of the unfamiliar
Russian background, it is not so very remote from Hollywood. The one
thing that lifts it out of the ordinary is the remarkable performance by
the actor who takes the part of the White officer (the fat one)--a
performance which looks very like an inspired piece of gagging. Otherwise
the atmosphere is familiar. All the usual paraphernalia is there--heroic
fight against odds, escape at the last moment, shots of galloping horses,
love interest, comic relief. The film is in fact a fairly ordinary one,
except that its tendency is 'left'. In a Hollywood film of the Russian
Civil War the Whites would probably be angels and the Reds demons. In the
Russian version the Reds are angels and the Whites demons. That is also a
lie, but, taking the long view, it is a less pernicious lie than the
other.

Here several difficult problems present themselves. Their general nature
is obvious enough, and I do not want to discuss them. I am merely
pointing to the fact that, in England, popular imaginative literature is
a field that left-wing thought has never begun to enter. ALL fiction from
the novels in the mushroom libraries downwards is censored in the
interests of the ruling class. And boys' fiction above all, the blood-
and-thunder stuff which nearly every boy devours at some time or
other, is sodden in the worst illusions of 1910. The fact is only
unimportant if one believes that what is read in childhood leaves no
impression behind. Lord Camrose and his colleagues evidently believe
nothing of the kind, and, after all, Lord Camrose ought to know.



Charles Dickens


I


Dickens is one of those writers who are well worth stealing. Even the
burial of his body in Westminster Abbey was a species of theft, if you
come to think of it.

When Chesterton wrote his introductions to the Everyman Edition of
Dickens's works, it seemed quite natural to him to credit Dickens with
his own highly individual brand of medievalism, and more recently a
Marxist writer, Mr. T. A. Jackson, has made spirited efforts to turn
Dickens into a blood-thirsty revolutionary. The Marxist claims him as
'almost' a Marxist, the Catholic claims him as 'almost' a Catholic, and
both claim him as a champion of the proletariat (or 'the poor', as
Chesterton would have put it). On the other hand, Nadezhda Krupskaya, in
her little book on Lenin, relates that towards the end of his life Lenin
went to see a dramatized version of THE CRICKET ON THE HEARTH, and found
Dickens's 'middle-class sentimentality' so intolerable that he walked out
in the middle of a scene.

Taking 'middle-class' to mean what Krupskaya might be expected to mean
by it, this was probably a truer judgement than those of Chesterton and
Jackson. But it is worth noticing that the dislike of Dickens implied in
this remark is something unusual. Plenty of people have found him
unreadable, but very few seem to have felt any hostility towards the
general spirit of his work. Some years later Mr. Bechhofer Roberts
published a full-length attack on Dickens in the form of a novel (THIS
SIDE IDOLATRY), but it was a merely personal attack, concerned for the
most part with Dickens's treatment of his wife. It dealt with incidents
which not one in a thousand of Dickens's readers would ever hear about,
and which no more invalidates his work than the second-best bed
invalidates HAMLET. All that the book really demonstrated was that a
writer's literary personality has little or nothing to do with his
private character. It is quite possible that in private life Dickens was
just the kind of insensitive egoist that Mr. Bechhofer Roberts makes him
appear. But in his published work there is implied a personality quite
different from this, a personality which has won him far more friends
than enemies. It might well have been otherwise, for even if Dickens was
a bourgeois, he was certainly a subversive writer, a radical, one might
truthfully say a rebel. Everyone who has read widely in his work has felt
this. Gissing, for instance, the best of the writers on Dickens, was
anything but a radical himself, and he disapproved of this strain in
Dickens and wished it were not there, but it never occurred to him to
deny it. In OLIVER TWIST, HARD TIMES, BLEAK HOUSE, LITTLE DORRIT,
Dickens attacked English institutions with a ferocity that has never since
been approached. Yet he managed to do it without making himself hated,
and, more than this, the very people he attacked have swallowed him so
completely that he has become a national institution himself. In its
attitude towards Dickens the English public has always been a little like
the elephant which feels a blow with a walking-stick as a delightful
tickling. Before I was ten years old I was having Dickens ladled down my
throat by schoolmasters in whom even at that age I could see a strong
resemblance to Mr. Creakle, and one knows without needing to be told that
lawyers delight in Sergeant Buzfuz and that LITTLE DORRIT is a favourite
in the Home Office. Dickens seems to have succeeded in attacking
everybody and antagonizing nobody. Naturally this makes one wonder
whether after all there was something unreal in his attack upon society.
Where exactly does he stand, socially, morally, and politically? As
usual, one can define his position more easily if one starts by deciding
what he was NOT.

In the first place he was NOT, as Messrs. Chesterton and Jackson seem
to imply, a 'proletarian' writer. To begin with, he does not write about the
proletariat, in which he merely resembles the overwhelming majority of
novelists, past and present. If you look for the working classes in
fiction, and especially English fiction, all you find is a hole. This state-
ment needs qualifying, perhaps. For reasons that are easy enough to
see, the agricultural labourer (in England a proletarian) gets a fairly
good showing in fiction, and a great deal has been written about
criminals, derelicts and, more recently, the working-class intelli-
gentsia. But the ordinary town proletariat, the people who make the
wheels go round, have always been ignored by novelists. When they do
find their way between the covers of a book, it is nearly always as
objects of pity or as comic relief. The central action of Dickens's
stories almost invariably takes place in middle-class surroundings. If
one examines his novels in detail one finds that his real subject-matter
is the London commercial bourgeoisie and their hangers-on--lawyers,
clerks, tradesmen, innkeepers, small craftsmen, and servants. He has no
portrait of an agricultural worker, and only one (Stephen Blackpool in
HARD TIMES) of an industrial worker. The Plornishes in LITTLE DORRIT are
probably his best picture of a working-class family--the Peggottys, for
instance, hardly belong to the working class--but on the whole he is not
successful with this type of character. If you ask any ordinary reader
which of Dickens's proletarian characters he can remember, the three he
is almost certain to mention are Bill Sykes, Sam Weller, and Mrs. Gamp. A
burglar, a valet, and a drunken midwife--not exactly a representative
cross-section of the English working class.

Secondly, in the ordinarily accepted sense of the word, Dickens is not a
'revolutionary' writer. But his position here needs some defining.

Whatever else Dickens may have been, he was not a hole-and-corner
soul-saver, the kind of well-meaning idiot who thinks that the world will
be perfect if you amend a few bylaws and abolish a few anomalies. It is
worth comparing him with Charles Reade, for instance. Reade was a much
better-informed man than Dickens, and in some ways more public-spirited.
He really hated the abuses he could understand, he showed them up in a
series of novels which for all their absurdity are extremely readable,
and he probably helped to alter public opinion on a few minor but
important points. But it was quite beyond him to grasp that, given the
existing form of society, certain evils CANNOT be remedied. Fasten upon
this or that minor abuse, expose it, drag it into the open, bring it
before a British jury, and all will be well that is how he sees it.
Dickens at any rate never imagined that you can cure pimples by cutting
them off. In every page of his work one can see a consciousness that
society is wrong somewhere at the root. It is when one asks 'Which root?'
that one begins to grasp his position.

The truth is that Dickens's criticism of society is almost exclusively
moral. Hence the utter lack of any constructive suggestion anywhere in
his work. He attacks the law, parliamentary government, the educational
system and so forth, without ever clearly suggesting what he would put in
their places. Of course it is not necessarily the business of a novelist,
or a satirist, to make constructive suggestions, but the point is that
Dickens's attitude is at bottom not even DEStructive. There is no clear
sign that he wants the existing order to be overthrown, or that he
believes it would make very much difference if it WERE overthrown. For in
reality his target is not so much society as 'human nature'. It would be
difficult to point anywhere in his books to a passage suggesting that the
economic system is wrong AS A SYSTEM. Nowhere, for instance, does he make
any attack on private enterprise or private property. Even in a book like
OUR MUTUAL FRIEND, which turns on the power of corpses to interfere with
living people by means of idiotic wills, it does not occur to him to
suggest that individuals ought not to have this irresponsible power. Of
course one can draw this inference for oneself, and one can draw it again
from the remarks about Bounderby's will at the end of HARD TIMES, and
indeed from the whole of Dickens's work one can infer the evil of
LAISSEZ-FAIRE capitalism; but Dickens makes no such inference himself. It
is said that Macaulay refused to review HARD TIMES because he disapproved
of its 'sullen Socialism'. Obviously Macaulay is here using the word
'Socialism' in the same sense in which, twenty years ago, a vegetarian
meal or a Cubist picture used to be referred to as 'Bolshevism'. There is
not a line in the book that can properly be called Socialistic; indeed,
its tendency if anything is pro-capitalist, because its whole moral is
that capitalists ought to be kind, not that workers ought to be
rebellious. Bounderby is a bullying windbag and Gradgrind has been
morally blinded, but if they were better men, the system would work well
enough that, all through, is the implication. And so far as social
criticism goes, one can never extract much more from Dickens than this,
unless one deliberately reads meanings into him. His whole 'message' is
one that at first glance looks like an enormous platitude: If men would
behave decently the world would be decent.

Naturally this calls for a few characters who are in positions of
authority and who DO behave decently. Hence that recurrent Dickens
figure, the good rich man. This character belongs especially to Dickens's
early optimistic period. He is usually a 'merchant' (we are not
necessarily told what merchandise he deals in), and he is always a
superhumanly kind-hearted old gentleman who 'trots' to and fro, raising
his employees' wages, patting children on the head, getting debtors out
of jail and in general, acting the fairy godmother. Of course he is a
pure dream figure, much further from real life than, say, Squeers or
Micawber. Even Dickens must have reflected occasionally that anyone who
was so anxious to give his money away would never have acquired it in the
first place. Mr. Pickwick, for instance, had 'been in the city', but it
is difficult to imagine him making a fortune there. Nevertheless this
character runs like a connecting thread through most of the earlier
books. Pickwick, the Cheerybles, old Chuzzlewit, Scrooge--it is the same
figure over and over again, the good rich man, handing out guineas.
Dickens does however show signs of development here. In the books of the
middle period the good rich man fades out to some extent. There is no one
who plays this part in A TALE OF TWO CITIES, nor in GREAT EXPECTATIONS--
GREAT EXPECTATIONS is, in fact, definitely an attack on patronage--and
in HARD TIMES it is only very doubtfully played by Gradgrind after his
reformation. The character reappears in a rather different form as
Meagles in LITTLE DORRIT and John Jarndyce in BLEAK HOUSE--one might
perhaps add Betsy Trotwood in DAVID COPPERFIELD. But in these books the
good rich man has dwindled from a 'merchant' to a RENTIER. This is
significant. A RENTIER is part of the possessing class, he can and,
almost without knowing it, does make other people work for him, but he
has very little direct power. Unlike Scrooge or the Cheerybles, he cannot
put everything right by raising everybody's wages. The seeming inference
from the rather despondent books that Dickens wrote in the fifties is
that by that time he had grasped the helplessness of well-meaning
individuals in a corrupt society. Nevertheless in the last completed
novel, OUR MUTUAL FRIEND (published 1864-5), the good rich man comes
back in full glory in the person of Boffin. Boffin is a proletarian by origin
and only rich by inheritance, but he is the usual DEUS EX MACHINA,
solving everybody's problems by showering money in all directions. He
even 'trots', like the Cheerybles. In several ways OUR MUTUAL FRIEND is
a return to the earlier manner, and not an unsuccessful return either.
Dickens's thoughts seem to have come full circle. Once again, individual
kindliness is the remedy for everything.

One crying evil of his time that Dickens says very little about is child
labour. There are plenty of pictures of suffering children in his books,
but usually they are suffering in schools rather than in factories. The
one detailed account of child labour that he gives is the description in
DAVID COPPERFIELD of little David washing bottles in Murdstone & Grinby's
warehouse. This, of course, is autobiography. Dickens himself, at the age
of ten, had worked in Warren's blacking factory in the Strand, very much
as he describes it here. It was a terribly bitter memory to him, partly
because he felt the whole incident to be discreditable to his parents,
and he even concealed it from his wife till long after they were married.
Looking back on this period, he says in DAVID COPPERFIELD:


It is a matter of some surprise to me, even now, that I can have been so
easily thrown away at such an age. A child of excellent abilities and
with strong powers of observation, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt
bodily or mentally, it seems wonderful to me that nobody should have made
any sign in my behalf. But none was made; and I became, at ten years old,
a little labouring hind in the service of Murdstone & Grinby.


And again, having described the rough boys among whom he worked:


No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this
companionship. . . and felt my hopes of growing up to be a learned and
distinguished man crushed in my bosom.


Obviously it is not David Copperfield who is speaking, it is Dickens
himself. He uses almost the same words in the autobiography that he began
and abandoned a few months earlier. Of course Dickens is right in saying
that a gifted child ought not to work ten hours a day pasting labels on
bottles, but what he does not say is that NO child ought to be condemned
to such a fate, and there is no reason for inferring that he thinks it.
David escapes from the warehouse, but Mick Walker and Mealy Potatoes
and the others are still there, and there is no sign that this troubles
Dickens particularly. As usual, he displays no consciousness that the
STRUCTURE of society can be changed. He despises politics, does not
believe that any good can come out of Parliament--he had been a
Parliamentary shorthand writer, which was no doubt a disillusioning
experience--and he is slightly hostile to the most hopeful movement of
his day, trade unionism. In HARD TIMES trade unionism is represented as
something not much better than a racket, something that happens because
employers are not sufficiently paternal. Stephen Blackpool's refusal to
join the union is rather a virtue in Dickens's eyes. Also, as Mr. Jackson
has pointed out, the apprentices' association in BARNABY RUDGE, to which
Sim Tappertit belongs, is probably a hit at the illegal or barely legal
unions of Dickens's own day, with their secret assemblies, passwords and
so forth. Obviously he wants the workers to be decently treated, but
there is no sign that he wants them to take their destiny into their own
hands, least of all by open violence.

As it happens, Dickens deals with revolution in the narrower sense in two
novels, BARNABY RUDGE and A TALE OF TWO CITIES. In BARNABY RUDGE
it is a case of rioting rather than revolution. The Gordon Riots of 1780,
though they had religious bigotry as a pretext, seem to have been little
more than a pointless outburst of looting. Dickens's attitude to this kind
of thing is sufficiently indicated by the fact that his first idea was to
make the ringleaders of the riots three lunatics escaped from an asylum.
He was dissuaded from this, but the principal figure of the book is in
fact a village idiot. In the chapters dealing with the riots Dickens
shows a most profound horror of mob violence. He delights in describing
scenes in which the 'dregs' of the population behave with atrocious
bestiality. These chapters are of great psychological interest, because
they show how deeply he had brooded on this subject. The things he
describes can only have come out of his imagination, for no riots on
anything like the same scale had happened in his lifetime. Here is one of
his descriptions, for instance:


If Bedlam gates had been flung open wide, there would not have issued
forth such maniacs as the frenzy of that night had made. There were men
there who danced and trampled on the beds of flowers as though they trod
down human enemies, and wrenched them from their stalks, like savages who
twisted human necks. There were men who cast their lighted torches in the
air, and suffered them to fall upon their heads and faces, blistering the
skin with deep unseemly burns. There were men who rushed up to the fire,
and paddled in it with their hands as if in water; and others who were
restrained by force from plunging in, to gratify their deadly longing. On
the skull of one drunken lad--not twenty, by his looks--who lay upon
the ground with a bottle to his mouth, the lead from the roof came
streaming down in a shower of liquid fire, white hot, melting his head
like wax. . . But of all the howling throng not one learnt mercy from, or
sickened at, these sights; nor was the fierce, besotted, senseless rage
of one man glutted.


You might almost think you were reading a description of 'Red' Spain by a
partisan of General Franco. One ought, of course, to remember that when
Dickens was writing, the London 'mob' still existed. (Nowadays there is
no mob, only a flock.) Low wages and the growth and shift of population
had brought into existence a huge, dangerous slum-proletariat, and until
the early middle of the nineteenth century there was hardly such a thing
as a police force. When the brickbats began to fly there was nothing
between shuttering your windows and ordering the troops to open fire. In
A TALE OF TWO CITIES he is dealing with a revolution which was really
about something, and Dickens's attitude is different, but not entirely
different. As a matter of fact, A TALE OF TWO CITIES is a book which
tends to leave a false impression behind, especially after a lapse of
time.

The one thing that everyone who has read A TALE OF TWO CITIES remem-
bers is the Reign of Terror. The whole book is dominated by the guillotine--
tumbrils thundering to and fro, bloody knives, heads bouncing into the
basket, and sinister old women knitting as they watch. Actually these
scenes only occupy a few chapters, but they are written with terrible
intensity, and the rest of the book is rather slow going. But A TALE OF
TWO CITIES is not a companion volume to THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL. Dickens
sees clearly enough that the French Revolution was bound to happen and
that many of the people who were executed deserved what they got. If, he
says, you behave as the French aristocracy had behaved, vengeance will
follow. He repeats this over and over again. We are constantly being
reminded that while 'my lord' is lolling in bed, with four liveried
footmen serving his chocolate and the peasants starving outside,
somewhere in the forest a tree is growing which will presently be sawn
into planks for the platform of the guillotine, etc., etc., etc. The
inevitability of the Terror, given its causes, is insisted upon in the
clearest terms:


It was too much the way. . . to talk of this terrible Revolution as if it
were the only harvest ever known under the skies that had not been sown--
as if nothing had ever been done, or omitted to be done, that had led to
it--as if observers of the wretched millions in France, and of the
misused and perverted resources that should have made them prosperous,
had not seen it inevitably coming, years before, and had not in plain
terms recorded what they saw.


And again:


All the devouring and insatiate monsters imagined since imagination could
record itself, are fused in the one realization, Guillotine. And yet there
is not in France, with its rich variety of soil and climate, a blade, a leaf,
a root, a spring, a peppercorn, which will grow to maturity under con-
ditions more certain than those that have produced this horror. Crush
humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will
twist itself into the same tortured forms.


In other words, the French aristocracy had dug their own graves. But
there is no perception here of what is now called historic necessity.
Dickens sees that the results are inevitable, given the causes, but he
thinks that the causes might have been avoided. The Revolution is
something that happens because centuries of oppression have made the
French peasantry sub-human. If the wicked nobleman could somehow have
turned over a new leaf, like Scrooge, there would have been no
Revolution, no JACQUERIE, no guillotine--and so much the better. This is
the opposite of the 'revolutionary' attitude. From the 'revolutionary'
point of view the class-struggle is the main source of progress, and
therefore the nobleman who robs the peasant and goads him to revolt is
playing a necessary part, just as much as the Jacobin who guillotines the
nobleman. Dickens never writes anywhere a line that can be interpreted as
meaning this. Revolution as he sees it is merely a monster that is
begotten by tyranny and always ends by devouring its own instruments. In
Sydney Carton's vision at the foot of the guillotine, he foresees Defarge
and the other leading spirits of the Terror all perishing under the same
knife--which, in fact, was approximately what happened.

And Dickens is very sure that revolution is a monster. That is why
everyone remembers the revolutionary scenes in A TALE OF TWO CITIES;
they have the quality of nightmare, and it is Dickens's own nightmare. Again
and again he insists upon the meaningless horrors of revolution--the
mass-butcheries, the injustice, the ever-present terror of spies, the
frightful blood-lust of the mob. The descriptions of the Paris mob--the
description, for instance, of the crowd of murderers struggling round the
grindstone to sharpen their weapons before butchering the prisoners in
the September massacres--outdo anything in BARNABY RUDGE. The
revolutionaries appear to him simply as degraded savages--in fact, as
lunatics. He broods over their frenzies with a curious imaginative
intensity. He describes them dancing the 'Carmagnole', for instance:


There could not be fewer than five hundred people, and they were dancing
like five thousand demons. . . They danced to the popular Revolution song,
keeping a ferocious time that was like a gnashing of teeth in unison. . .
They advanced, retreated, struck at one another's hands, clutched at one
another's heads, spun round alone, caught one another, and spun around in
pairs, until many of them dropped. . . Suddenly they stopped again, paused,
struck out the time afresh, forming into lines the width of the public
way, and, with their heads low down and their hands high up, swooped
screaming off. No fight could have been half so terrible as this dance.
It was so emphatically a fallen sport--a something, once innocent,
delivered over to all devilry.


He even credits some of these wretches with a taste for guillotining
children. The passage I have abridged above ought to be read in full. It
and others like it show how deep was Dickens's horror of revolutionary
hysteria. Notice, for instance that touch, 'with their heads low down and
their hands high up', etc., and the evil vision it conveys. Madame
Defarge is a truly dreadful figure, certainly Dickens's most successful
attempt at a MALIGNANT character. Defarge and others are simply 'the
new oppressors who have risen in the destruction of the old', the
revolutionary courts are presided over by 'the lowest, cruellest and
worst populace', and so on and so forth. All the way through Dickens
insists upon the nightmare insecurity of a revolutionary period, and in
this he shows a great deal of prescience. 'A law of the suspected, which
struck away all security for liberty or life, and delivered over any good
and innocent person to any bad and guilty one; prisons gorged with people
who had committed no offence, and could obtain no hearing'--it would
apply pretty accurately to several countries today.

The apologists of any revolution generally try to minimize its horrors;
Dickens's impulse is to exaggerate them--and from a historical point of
view he has certainly exaggerated. Even the Reign of Terror was a much
smaller thing than he makes it appear. Though he quotes no figures, he
gives the impression of a frenzied massacre lasting for years, whereas in
reality the whole of the Terror, so far as the number of deaths goes, was
a joke compared with one of Napoleon's battles. But the bloody knives and
the tumbrils rolling to and fro create in his mind a special sinister
vision which he has succeeded in passing on to generations of readers.
Thanks to Dickens, the very word 'tumbril' has a murderous sound; one
forgets that a tumbril is only a sort of farm-cart. To this day, to the
average Englishman, the French Revolution means no more than a pyramid of
severed heads. It is a strange thing that Dickens, much more in sympathy
with the ideas of the Revolution than most Englishmen of his time, should
have played a part in creating this impression.

If you hate violence and don't believe in politics, the only remedy
remaining is education. Perhaps society is past praying for, but there is
always hope for the individual human being, if you can catch him young
enough. This belief partly accounts for Dickens's preoccupation with
childhood.

No one, at any rate no English writer, has written better about childhood
than Dickens. In spite of all the knowledge that has accumulated since,
in spite of the fact that children are now comparatively sanely treated,
no novelist has shown the same power of entering into the child's point
of view. I must have been about nine years old when I first read DAVID
COPPERFIELD. The mental atmosphere of the opening chapters was so
immediately intelligible to me that I vaguely imagined they had been
written BY A CHILD. And yet when one re-reads the book as an adult and
sees the Murdstones, for instance, dwindle from gigantic figures of doom
into semi-comic monsters, these passages lose nothing. Dickens has been
able to stand both inside and outside the child's mind, in such a way
that the same scene can be wild burlesque or sinister reality, according
to the age at which one reads it. Look, for instance, at the scene in
which David Copperfield is unjustly suspected of eating the mutton chops;
or the scene in which Pip, in GREAT EXPECTATIONS, coming back from Miss
Havisham's house and finding himself completely unable to describe what
he has seen, takes refuge in a series of outrageous lies--which, of
course, are eagerly believed. All the isolation of childhood is there.
And how accurately he has recorded the mechanisms of the child's mind,
its visualizing tendency, its sensitiveness to certain kinds of
impression. Pip relates how in his childhood his ideas about his dead
parents were derived from their tombstones:


The shape of the letters on my father's, gave me an odd idea that he was
a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and
turn of the inscription, 'ALSO GEORGIANA, WIFE OF THE ABOVE', I drew a
childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly. To five
little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long, which were
arranged in a neat row beside their grave, and were sacred to the memory
of five little brothers of mine. . . I am indebted for a belief I
religiously entertained that they had all been born on their backs with
their hands in their trouser-pockets, and had never taken them out in
this state of existence.


There is a similar passage in DAVID COPPERFIELD. After biting Mr.
Murdstone's hand, David is sent away to school and obliged to wear on his
back a placard saying, 'Take care of him. He bites.' He looks at the door
in the playground where the boys have carved their names, and from the
appearance of each name he seems to know in just what tone of voice the
boy will read out the placard:


There was one boy--a certain J. Steerforth--who cut his name very deep
and very often, who, I conceived, would read it in a rather strong voice,
and afterwards pull my hair. There was another boy, one Tommy Traddles,
who I dreaded would make game of it, and pretend to be dreadfully
frightened of me. There was a third, George Demple, who I fancied would
sing it.


When I read this passage as a child, it seemed to me that those were
exactly the pictures that those particular names would call up. The
reason, of course, is the sound-associations of the words (Demple--
'temple'; Traddles--probably 'skedaddle'). But how many people, before
Dickens, had ever noticed such things? A sympathetic attitude towards
children was a much rarer thing in Dickens's day than it is now. The
early nineteenth century was not a good time to be a child. In Dickens's
youth children were still being 'solemnly tried at a criminal bar, where
they were held up to be seen', and it was not so long since boys of
thirteen had been hanged for petty theft. The doctrine of 'breaking the
child's spirit' was in full vigour, and THE FAIRCHILD FAMILY was a
standard book for children till late into the century. This evil book is
now issued in pretty-pretty expurgated editions, but it is well worth
reading in the original version. It gives one some idea of the lengths to
which child-discipline was sometimes carried. Mr. Fairchild, for
instance, when he catches his children quarrelling, first thrashes them,
reciting Dr. Watts's 'Let dogs delight to bark and bite' between blows of
the cane, and then takes them to spend the afternoon beneath a gibbet
where the rotting corpse of a murderer is hanging. In the earlier part of
the century scores of thousands of children, aged sometimes as young as
six, were literally worked to death in the mines or cotton mills, and
even at the fashionable public schools boys were flogged till they ran
with blood for a mistake in their Latin verses. One thing which Dickens
seems to have recognized, and which most of his contemporaries did not,
is the sadistic sexual element in flogging. I think this can be inferred
from DAVID COPPERFIELD and NICHOLAS NICKLEBY. But mental cruelty to a
child infuriates him as much as physical, and though there is a fair
number of exceptions, his schoolmasters are generally scoundrels.

Except for the universities and the big public schools, every kind of
education then existing in England gets a mauling at Dickens's hands.
There is Doctor Blimber's Academy, where little boys are blown up with
Greek until they burst, and the revolting charity schools of the period,
which produced specimens like Noah Claypole and Uriah Heep, and Salem
House, and Dotheboys Hall, and the disgraceful little dame-school kept by
Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt. Some of what Dickens says remains true even
today. Salem House is the ancestor of the modern 'prep school', which
still has a good deal of resemblance to it; and as for Mr. Wopsle's
great-aunt, some old fraud of much the same stamp is carrying on at this
moment in nearly every small town in England. But, as usual, Dickens's
criticism is neither creative nor destructive. He sees the idiocy of an
educational system founded on the Greek lexicon and the wax-ended cane;
on the other hand, he has no use for the new kind of school that is
coming up in the fifties and sixties, the 'modern' school, with its
gritty insistence on 'facts'. What, then, DOES he want? As always, what
he appears to want is a moralized version of the existing thing--the old
type of school, but with no caning, no bullying or underfeeding, and not
quite so much Greek. Doctor Strong's school, to which David Copperfield
goes after he escapes from Murdstone & Grinby's, is simply Salem House
with the vices left out and a good deal of 'old grey stones' atmosphere
thrown in:


Doctor Strong's was an excellent school, as different from Mr. Creakle's
as good is from evil. It was very gravely and decorously ordered, and on
a sound system; with an appeal, in everything, to the honour and good
faith of the boys. . . which worked wonders. We all felt that we had a part
in the management of the place, and in sustaining its character and
dignity. Hence, we soon became warmly attached to it--I am sure I did
for one, and I never knew, in all my time, of any boy being otherwise--
and learnt with a good will, desiring to do it credit. We had noble games
out of hours, and plenty of liberty; but even then, as I remember, we
were well spoken of in the town, and rarely did any disgrace, by our
appearance or manner, to the reputation of Doctor Strong and Doctor
Strong's boys.


In the woolly vagueness of this passage one can see Dickens's utter lack
of any educational theory. He can imagine the MORAL atmosphere of a good
school, but nothing further. The boys 'learnt with a good will', but what
did they learn? No doubt it was Doctor Blimber's curriculum, a little
watered down. Considering the attitude to society that is everywhere
implied in Dickens's novels, it comes as rather a shock to learn that he
sent his eldest son to Eton and sent all his children through the
ordinary educational mill. Gissing seems to think that he may have done
this because he was painfully conscious of being under-educated himself.
Here perhaps Gissing is influenced by his own love of classical learning.
Dickens had had little or no formal education, but he lost nothing by
missing it, and on the whole he seems to have been aware of this. If he
was unable to imagine a better school than Doctor Strong's, or, in real
life, than Eton, it was probably due to an intellectual deficiency rather
different from the one Gissing suggests.

It seems that in every attack Dickens makes upon society he is always
pointing to a change of spirit rather than a change of structure. It is
hopeless to try and pin him down to any definite remedy, still more to
any political doctrine. His approach is always along the moral plane, and
his attitude is sufficiently summed up in that remark about Strong's
school being as different from Creakle's 'as good is from evil'. Two
things can be very much alike and yet abysmally different. Heaven and
Hell are in the same place. Useless to change institutions without a
'change of heart'--that, essentially, is what he is always saying.

If that were all, he might be no more than a cheer-up writer, a
reactionary humbug. A 'change of heart' is in fact THE alibi of people
who do not wish to endanger the STATUS QUO. But Dickens is not a humbug,
except in minor matters, and the strongest single impression one carries
away from his books is that of a hatred of tyranny. I said earlier that
Dickens is not IN THE ACCEPTED SENSE a revolutionary writer. But it is
not at all certain that a merely moral criticism of society may not be
just as 'revolutionary'--and revolution, after all, means turning things
upside down--as the politico-economic criticism which is fashionable at
this moment. Blake was not a politician, but there is more understanding
of the nature of capitalist society in a poem like 'I wander through each
charted street' than in three-quarters of Socialist literature. Progress
is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably
disappointing. There is always a new tyrant waiting to take over from the
old--generally not quite so bad, but still a tyrant. Consequently two
viewpoints are always tenable. The one, how can you improve human nature
until you have changed the system? The other, what is the use of changing
the system before you have improved human nature? They appeal to
different individuals, and they probably show a tendency to alternate in
point of time. The moralist and the revolutionary are constantly
undermining one another. Marx exploded a hundred tons of dynamite beneath
the moralist position, and we are still living in the echo of that
tremendous crash. But already, somewhere or other, the sappers are at
work and fresh dynamite is being tamped in place to blow Marx at the
moon. Then Marx, or somebody like him, will come back with yet more
dynamite, and so the process continues, to an end we cannot yet foresee.
The central problem--how to prevent power from being abused--remains
unsolved. Dickens, who had not the vision to see that private property is
an obstructive nuisance, had the vision to see that. 'If men would behave
decently the world would be decent' is not such a platitude as it sounds.


II


More completely than most writers, perhaps, Dickens can be explained in
terms of his social origin, though actually his family history was not
quite what one would infer from his novels. His father was a clerk in
government service, and through his mother's family he had connexions
with both the Army and the Navy. But from the age of nine onwards he was
brought up in London in commercial surroundings, and generally in an
atmosphere of struggling poverty. Mentally he belongs to the small urban
bourgeoisie, and he happens to be an exceptionally fine specimen of this
class, with all the 'points', as it were, very highly developed. That is
partly what makes him so interesting. If one wants a modern equivalent,
the nearest would be H. G. Wells, who has had a rather similar history
and who obviously owes something to Dickens as novelist. Arnold Bennett
was essentially of the same type, but, unlike the other two, he was a
midlander, with an industrial and noncomformist rather than commercial
and Anglican background.

The great disadvantage, and advantage, of the small urban bourgeois is
his limited outlook. He sees the world as a middle-class world, and
everything outside these limits is either laughable or slightly wicked.
On the one hand, he has no contact with industry or the soil; on the
other, no contact with the governing classes. Anyone who has studied
Wells's novels in detail will have noticed that though he hates the
aristocrat like poison, he has no particular objection to the plutocrat,
and no enthusiasm for the proletarian. His most hated types, the people
he believes to be responsible for all human ills, are kings, landowners,
priests, nationalists, soldiers, scholars and peasants. At first sight a
list beginning with kings and ending with peasants looks like a mere
omnium gatherum, but in reality all these people have a common factor.
All of them are archaic types, people who are governed by tradition and
whose eyes are turned towards the past--the opposite, therefore, of the
rising bourgeois who has put his money on the future and sees the past
simply as a dead hand.

Actually, although Dickens lived in a period when the bourgeoisie was
really a rising class, he displays this characteristic less strongly than
Wells. He is almost unconscious of the future and has a rather sloppy
love of the picturesque (the 'quaint old church', etc.). Nevertheless his
list of most hated types is like enough to Wells's for the similarity to
be striking. He is vaguely on the side of the working class--has a sort
of generalized sympathy with them because they are oppressed--but he
does not in reality know much about them; they come into his books
chiefly as servants, and comic servants at that. At the other end of the
scale he loathes the aristocrat and--going one better than Wells in this
loathes the big bourgeois as well. His real sympathies are bounded by Mr.
Pickwick on the upper side and Mr. Barkis on the lower. But the term
'aristocrat', for the type Dickens hates, is vague and needs defining.

Actually Dickens's target is not so much the great aristocracy, who
hardly enter into his books, as their petty offshoots, the cadging
dowagers who live up mews in Mayfair, and the bureaucrats and
professional soldiers. All through his books there are countess hostile
sketches of these people, and hardly any that are friendly. There are
practically no friendly pictures of the landowning class, for instance.
One might make a doubtful exception of Sir Leicester Dedlock; otherwise
there is only Mr. Wardle (who is a stock figure the 'good old squire')
and Haredale in BARNABY RUDGE, who has Dickens's sympathy because he is a
persecuted Catholic. There are no friendly pictures of soldiers (i.e.
officers), and none at all of naval men. As for his bureaucrats, judges
and magistrates, most of them would feel quite at home in the
Circumlocution Office. The only officials whom Dickens handles with any
kind of friendliness are, significantly enough, policemen.

Dickens's attitude is easily intelligible to an Englishman, because it is
part of the English puritan tradition, which is not dead even at this
day. The class Dickens belonged to, at least by adoption, was growing
suddenly rich after a couple of centuries of obscurity. It had grown up
mainly in the big towns, out of contact with agriculture, and politically
impotent; government, in its experience, was something which either
interfered or persecuted. Consequently it was a class with no tradition
of public service and not much tradition of usefulness. What now strikes
us as remarkable about the new moneyed class of the nineteenth century is
their complete irresponsibility; they see everything in terms of
individual success, with hardly any consciousness that the community
exists. On the other hand, a Tite Barnacle, even when he was neglecting
his duties, would have some vague notion of what duties he was
neglecting. Dickens's attitude is never irresponsible, still less does he
take the money-grubbing Smilesian line; but at the back of his mind there
is usually a half-belief that the whole apparatus of government is
unnecessary. Parliament is simply Lord Coodle and Sir Thomas Doodle, the
Empire is simply Major Bagstock and his Indian servant, the Army is
simply Colonel Chowser and Doctor Slammer, the public services are simply
Bumble and the Circumlocution Office--and so on and so forth. What he
does not see, or only intermittently sees, is that Coodle and Doodle and
all the other corpses left over from the eighteenth century ARE
performing a function which neither Pickwick nor Boffin would ever bother
about.

And of course this narrowness of vision is in one way a great advantage
to him, because it is fatal for a caricaturist to see too much. From
Dickens's point of view 'good' society is simply a collection of village
idiots. What a crew! Lady Tippins! Mrs. Gowan! Lord Verisopht! The
Honourable Bob Stables! Mrs. Sparsit (whose husband was a Powler)! The
Tite Barnacles! Nupkins! It is practically a case-book in lunacy. But at
the same time his remoteness from the landowning-military-bureaucratic
class incapacitates him for full-length satire. He only succeeds with
this class when he depicts them as mental defectives. The accusation
which used to be made against Dickens in his lifetime, that he 'could not
paint a gentleman', was an absurdity, but it is true in this sense, that
what he says against the 'gentleman' class is seldom very damaging. Sir
Mulberry Hawk, for instance, is a wretched attempt at the wicked-baronet
type. Harthouse in HARD TIMES is better, but he would be only an ordinary
achievement for Trollope or Thackeray. Trollope's thoughts hardly move
outside the 'gentleman' class, but Thackeray has the great advantage of
having a foot in two moral camps. In some ways his outlook is very
similar to Dickens's. Like Dickens, he identifies with the puritanical
moneyed class against the card-playing, debt-bilking aristocracy. The
eighteenth century, as he sees it, is sticking out into the nineteenth in
the person of the wicked Lord Steyne. VANITY FAIR is a full-length
version of what Dickens did for a few chapters in LITTLE DORRIT. But by
origins and upbringing Thackeray happens to be somewhat nearer to the
class he is satirizing. Consequently he can produce such comparatively
subtle types as, for instance, Major Pendennis and Rawdon Crawley. Major
Pendennis is a shallow old snob, and Rawdon Crawley is a thick-headed
ruffian who sees nothing wrong in living for years by swindling
tradesmen; but what Thackery realizes is that according to their tortuous
code they are neither of them bad men. Major Pendennis would not sign a
dud cheque, for instance; Rawdon certainly would, but on the other hand
he would not desert a friend in a tight corner. Both of them would behave
well on the field of battle--a thing that would not particularly appeal
to Dickens. The result is that at the end one is left with a kind of
amused tolerance for Major Pendennis and with something approaching
respect for Rawdon; and yet one sees, better than any diatribe could make
one, the utter rottenness of that kind of cadging, toadying life on the
fringes of smart society. Dickens would be quite incapable of this. In
his hands both Rawdon and the Major would dwindle to traditional
caricatures. And, on the whole, his attacks on 'good' society are rather
perfunctory. The aristocracy and the big bourgeoisie exist in his books
chiefly as a kind of 'noises off', a haw-hawing chorus somewhere in the
wings, like Podsnap's dinner-parties. When he produces a really subtle
and damaging portrait, like John Dorrit or Harold Skimpole, it is
generally of some rather middling, unimportant person.

One very striking thing about Dickens, especially considering the time he
lived in, is his lack of vulgar nationalism. All peoples who have reached
the point of becoming nations tend to despise foreigners, but there is
not much doubt that the English-speaking races are the worst offenders.
One can see this from the fact that as soon as they become fully aware of
any foreign race they invent an insulting nickname for it. Wop, Dago,
Froggy, Squarehead, Kike, Sheeny, Nigger, Wog, Chink, Greaser,
Yellowbelly--these are merely a selection. Any time before 1870 the list
would have been shorter, because the map of the world was different from
what it is now, and there were only three or four foreign races that had
fully entered into the English consciousness. But towards these, and
especially towards France, the nearest and best-hated nation, the English
attitude of patronage was so intolerable that English 'arrogance' and
'xenophobia' are still a legend. And of course they are not a completely
untrue legend even now. Till very recently nearly all English children
were brought up to despise the southern European races, and history as
taught in schools was mainly a list of battles won by England. But one
has got to read, say, the QUARTERLY REVIEW of the thirties to know what
boasting really is. Those were the days when the English built up their
legend of themselves as 'sturdy islanders' and 'stubborn hearts of oak'
and when it was accepted as a kind of scientific fact that one Englishman
was the equal of three foreigners. All through nineteenth-century novels
and comic papers there runs the traditional figure of the 'Froggy'--a
small ridiculous man with a tiny beard and a pointed top-hat, always
jabbering and gesticulating, vain, frivolous and fond of boasting of his
martial exploits, but generally taking to flight when real danger
appears. Over against him was John Bull, the 'sturdy English yeoman', or
(a more public-school version) the 'strong, silent Englishman' of Charles
Kingsley, Tom Hughes and others.

Thackeray, for instance, has this outlook very strongly, though there are
moments when he sees through it and laughs at it. The one historical fact
that is firmly fixed in his mind is that the English won the battle of
Waterloo. One never reads far in his books without coming upon some
reference to it. The English, as he sees it, are invincible because of
their tremendous physical strength, due mainly to living on beef. Like
most Englishmen of his time, he has the curious illusion that the English
are larger than other people (Thackeray, as it happened, was larger than
most people), and therefore he is capable of writing passages like this:


I say to you that you are better than a Frenchman. I would lay even money
that you who are reading this are more than five feet seven in height,
and weigh eleven stone; while a Frenchman is five feet four and does not
weigh nine. The Frenchman has after his soup a dish of vegetables, where
you have one of meat. You are a different and superior animal--a
French-beating animal (the history of hundreds of years has shown you to
be so), etc. etc.


There are similar passages scattered all through Thackeray's works.
Dickens would never be guilty of anything of that kind. It would be an
exaggeration to say that he nowhere pokes fun at foreigners, and of
course like nearly all nineteenth-century Englishmen, he is untouched by
European culture. But never anywhere does he indulge in the typical
English boasting, the 'island race', 'bulldog breed', 'right little,
tight little island' style of talk. In the whole of A TALE OF TWO CITIES
there is not a line that could be taken as meaning, 'Look how these
wicked Frenchmen behave!' The only place where he seems to display a
normal hatred of foreigners is in the American chapters of MARTIN
CHUZZLEWIT. This, however, is simply the reaction of a generous mind
against cant. If Dickens were alive today he would make a trip to Soviet
Russia and come back to the book rather like Gide's RETOUR DE L'URSS. But
he is remarkably free from the idiocy of regarding nations as
individuals. He seldom even makes jokes turning on nationality. He does
not exploit the comic Irishman and the comic Welshman, for instance, and
not because he objects to stock characters and ready-made jokes, which
obviously he does not. It is perhaps more significant that he shows no
prejudice against Jews. It is true that he takes it for granted (OLIVER
TWIST and GREAT EXPECTATIONS) that a receiver of stolen goods will be a
Jew, which at the time was probably justified. But the 'Jew joke',
endemic in English literature until the rise of Hitler, does not appear
in his books, and in OUR MUTUAL FRIEND he makes a pious though not very
convincing attempt to stand up for the Jews.

Dickens's lack of vulgar nationalism is in part the mark of a real
largeness of mind, and in part results from his negative, rather
unhelpful political attitude. He is very much an Englishman but he is
hardly aware of it--certainly the thought of being an Englishman does
not thrill him. He has no imperialist feelings, no discernible views on
foreign politics, and is untouched by the military tradition.
Temperamentally he is much nearer to the small noncomformist tradesman
who looks down on the 'redcoats', and thinks that war is wicked--a
one-eyed view, but after all, war is wicked. It is noticeable that
Dickens hardly writes of war, even to denounce it. With all his
marvellous powers of description, and of describing things he had never
seen, he never describes a battle, unless one counts the attack on the
Bastille in A TALE OF TWO CITIES. Probably the subject would not strike
him as interesting, and in any case he would not regard a battlefield as
a place where anything worth settling could be settled. It is one up to
the lower-middle-class, puritan mentality.


III


Dickens had grown up near enough to poverty to be terrified of it, and in
spite of his generosity of mind, he is not free from the special
prejudices of the shabby-genteel. It is usual to claim him as a 'popular'
writer, a champion of the 'oppressed masses'. So he is, so long as he
thinks of them as oppressed; but there are two things that condition his
attitude. In the first place, he is a south-of-England man, and a Cockney
at that, and therefore out of touch with the bulk of the real oppressed
masses, the industrial and agricultural labourers. It is interesting to
see how Chesterton, another Cockney, always presents Dickens as the
spokesman of 'the poor', without showing much awareness of who 'the poor'
really are. To Chesterton 'the poor' means small shopkeepers and
servants. Sam Weller, he says, 'is the great symbol in English literature
of the populace peculiar to England'; and Sam Weller is a valet! The
other point is that Dickens's early experiences have given him a horror
of proletarian roughness. He shows this unmistakably whenever he writes
of the very poorest of the poor, the slum-dwellers. His descriptions of
the London slums are always full of undisguised repulsion:


The ways were foul and narrow; the shops and houses wretched; and people
half naked, drunken, slipshod and ugly. Alleys and archways, like so many
cesspools, disgorged their offences of smell, and dirt, and life, upon
the straggling streets; and the whole quarter reeked with crime, and
filth, and misery, etc. etc.


There are many similar passages in Dickens. From them one gets the
impression of whole submerged populations whom he regards as being beyond
the pale. In rather the same way the modern doctrinaire Socialist
contemptuously writes off a large block of the population as
'lumpenproletariat'.

Dickens also shows less understanding of criminals than one would expect
of him. Although he is well aware of the social and economic causes of
crime, he often seems to feel that when a man has once broken the law he
has put himself outside human society. There is a chapter at the end of
DAVID COPPERFIELD in which David visits the prison where Latimer and
Uriah Heep are serving their sentences. Dickens actually seems to regard
the horrible 'model' prisons, against which Charles Reade delivered his
memorable attack in IT IS NEVER TOO LATE TO MEND, as too humane. He
complains that the food is too good! As soon as he comes up against crime
or the worst depths of poverty, he shows traces of the 'I've always kept
myself respectable' habit of mind. The attitude of Pip (obviously the
attitude of Dickens himself) towards Magwitch in GREAT EXPECTATIONS is
extremely interesting. Pip is conscious all along of his ingratitude
towards Joe, but far less so of his ingratitude towards Magwitch. When he
discovers that the person who has loaded him with benefits for years is
actually a transported convict, he falls into frenzies of disgust. 'The
abhorrence in which I held the man, the dread I had of him, the
repugnance with which I shrank from him, could not have been exceeded if
he had been some terrible beast', etc. etc. So far as one can discover
from the text, this is not because when Pip was a child he had been
terrorized by Magwitch in the churchyard; it is because Magwitch is a
criminal and a convict. There is an even more 'kept-myself-respectable'
touch in the fact that Pip feels as a matter of course that he cannot
take Magwitch's money. The money is not the product of a crime, it has
been honestly acquired; but it is an ex-convict's money and therefore
'tainted'. There is nothing psychologically false in this, either.
Psychologically the latter part of GREAT EXPECTATIONS is about the best
thing Dickens ever did; throughout this part of the book one feels 'Yes,
that is just how Pip would have behaved.' But the point is that in the
matter of Magwitch, Dickens identifies with Pip, and his attitude is at
bottom snobbish. The result is that Magwitch belongs to the same queer
class of characters as Falstaff and, probably, Don Quixote--characters
who are more pathetic than the author intended.

When it is a question of the non-criminal poor, the ordinary, decent,
labouring poor, there is of course nothing contemptuous in Dickens's
attitude. He has the sincerest admiration for people like the Peggottys
and the Plornishes. But it is questionable whether he really regards them
as equals. It is of the greatest interest to read Chapter XI of DAVID
COPPERFIELD and side by side with it the autobiographical fragments
(parts of this are given in Forster's LIFE), in which Dickens expresses
his feelings about the blacking-factory episode a great deal more
strongly than in the novel. For more than twenty years afterwards the
memory was so painful to him that he would go out of his way to avoid
that part of the Strand. He says that to pass that way 'made me cry,
after my eldest child could speak.' The text makes it quite clear that
what hurt him most of all, then and in retrospect, was the enforced
contact with 'low' associates:


No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this
companionship; compared these everyday associates with those of my
happier childhood. But I held some station at the blacking warehouse
too. . . I soon became at least as expeditious and as skilful with my hands
as either of the other boys. Though perfectly familiar with them, my
conduct and manners were different enough from theirs to place a space
between us. They, and the men, always spoke of me as 'the young
gentleman'. A certain man. . . used to call me 'Charles' sometimes in
speaking to me; but I think it was mostly when we were very
confidential. . . Poll Green uprose once, and rebelled against the
'young-gentleman' usage; but Bob Fagin settled him speedily.


It was as well that there should be 'a space between us', you see.
However much Dickens may admire the working classes, he does not wish to
resemble them. Given his origins, and the time he lived in, it could
hardly be otherwise. In the early nineteenth century class animosities
may have been no sharper than they are now, but the surface differences
between class and class were enormously greater. The 'gentleman' and the
'common man' must have seemed like different species of animal. Dickens
is quite genuinely on the side of the poor against the rich, but it would
be next door to impossible for him not to think of a working-class
exterior as a stigma. In one of Tolstoy's fables the peasants of a
certain village judge every stranger who arrives from the state of his
hands. If his palms are hard from work, they let him in; if his palms are
soft, out he goes. This would be hardly intelligible to Dickens; all his
heroes have soft hands. His younger heroes--Nicholas Nickleby, Martin
Chuzzlewit, Edward Chester, David Copperfield, John Harmon--are usually
of the type known as 'walking gentlemen'. He likes a bourgeois exterior
and a bourgeois (not aristocratic) accent. One curious symptom of this is
that he will not allow anyone who is to play a heroic part to speak like
a working man. A comic hero like Sam Weller, or a merely pathetic figure
like Stephen Blackpool, can speak with a broad accent, but the JEUNE
PREMIER always speaks the equivalent of B.B.C. This is so, even when it
involves absurdities. Little Pip, for instance, is brought up by people
speaking broad Essex, but talks upper-class English from his earliest
childhood; actually he would have talked the same dialect as Joe, or at
least as Mrs. Gargery. So also with Biddy Wopsle, Lizzie Hexam, Sissie
Jupe, Oliver Twist--one ought perhaps to add Little Dorrit. Even Rachel
in HARD TIMES has barely a trace of Lancashire accent, an impossibility
in her case.

One thing that often gives the clue to a novelist's real feelings on the
class question is the attitude he takes up when class collides with sex.
This is a thing too painful to be lied about, and consequently it is one
of the points at which the 'I'm-not-a-snob' pose tends to break down.

One sees that at its most obvious where a class-distinction is also a
colour-distinction. And something resembling the colonial attitude
('native' women are fair game, white women are sacrosanct) exists in a
veiled form in all-white communities, causing bitter resentment on both
sides. When this issue arises, novelists often revert to crude
class-feelings which they might disclaim at other times. A good example
of 'class-conscious' reaction is a rather forgotten novel, THE PEOPLE OF
CLOPTON, by Andrew Barton. The author's moral code is quite clearly mixed
up with class-hatred. He feels the seduction of a poor girl by a rich man
to be something atrocious, a kind of defilement, something quite
different from her seduction by a man in her own walk of life. Trollope
deals with this theme twice (THE THREE CLERKS and THE SMALL HOUSE AT
ALLINGTON) and, as one might expect, entirely from the upper-class angle.
As he sees it, an affair with a barmaid or a landlady's daughter is
simply an 'entanglement' to be escaped from. Trollope's moral standards
are strict, and he does not allow the seduction actually to happen, but
the implication is always that a working-class girl's feelings do not
greatly matter. In THE THREE CLERKS he even gives the typical
class-reaction by noting that the girl 'smells'. Meredith (RHODA FLEMING)
takes more the 'class-conscious' viewpoint. Thackeray, as often, seems to
hesitate. In PENDENNIS (Fanny Bolton) his attitude is much the same as
Trollope's; in A SHABBY GENTEEL STORY it is nearer to Meredith's.

One could divine a great deal about Trollope's social origin, or
Meredith's, or Barton's, merely from their handling of the class-sex
theme. So one can with Dickens, but what emerges, as usual, is that he is
more inclined to identify himself with the middle class than with the
proletariat. The one incident that seems to contradict this is the tale
of the young peasant-girl in Doctor Manette's manuscript in A TALE OF TWO
CITIES. This, however, is merely a costume-piece put in to explain the
implacable hatred of Madame Defarge, which Dickens does not pretend to
approve of. In DAVID COPPERFIELD, where he is dealing with a typical
nineteenth-century seduction, the class-issue does not seem to strike him
as paramount. It is a law of Victorian novels that sexual misdeeds must
not go unpunished, and so Steerforth is drowned on Yarmouth sands, but
neither Dickens

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