The Black-coated Worker and the Great Depression in 1930s Literature
Chapter
Abstract
Written accounts of the Great Depression in Britain are customarily accompanied by familiar visual imagery. The picture library required to illustrate such surveys will typically select from the following stock images: the Jarrow march, a queue at a soup kitchen, men standing idle at a street corner, or, more emotively, ragged and barefoot children. These images visually reinforce stereotypical reactions to accounts of ‘the hungry Thirties’, economically confirming the harsh quality of life during this decade for members of the working classes. While few would deny the validity of using these pictures to convey such information, this orthodox iconography of the Depression overlooks the effects of the failing economy on other ‘working’ classes. The Slump was no respecter of social rank, profoundly affecting those areas of the employment market that were formerly considered ‘safe’. One contemporary report suggests that security of employment was, by 1935, ‘for the great majority of clerks a thing of the past, and they have therefore acquired the last decisive characteristic of the wage worker, that of uncertainty with regard to the future’.1 Although white-collar unemployment during the 1930s is little recognised today, this phenomenon was much debated in the fiction and non-fiction of the period. In these texts, the putative complacency of secure and comfortable suburban life was challenged by a wide variety of writers seeking to investigate the Depression’s hidden victims.2
Keywords
Great Depression Literary Culture Lower Middle Classis Soup Kitchen Reading Public
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Notes
- 1.F.D. Klingender, The Condition of Clerical Labour in Britain, Martin Lawrence, 1935, p. 98.Google Scholar
- 2.Walter Greenwood’s seminal novel of industrial unemployment, Love on the Dole (1933), illustrates this persistence in the following scene, in which Sally Hardcastle rues her brother’s decision to refuse an effeminising but secure job option: ‘She frowned petulantly; pouted, asking herself, plaintively, whether she could help it if her father and Harry were unemployed. Anyway, Harry should have taken the job in an office when he left school: he wouldn’t be advised.’ Walter Greenwood, Love on the Dole, Penguin, 1969 (1933), p. 169.Google Scholar
- 3.George Orwell, Coming up for Air, Penguin, 1963 (1939), p. 14.Google Scholar
- 4.George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, Penguin, 1966 (1937), p. 78.Google Scholar
- 7.John Burnett argues that ‘In the development of English housing types, middle-class housing of the inter-war period, most typically represented by the semi-detached villa situated in a newly-developed suburban area, seems to mark a disjunction with the past, and an entry into a new era of mass housing still today the most characteristic expression of English domestic architecture’. Burnett backs up this argument by noting that of the 3,998,000 new houses built in England and Wales between 1919 and 1939, 2,886,000 were constructed by private builders who were typically building for those with an income level of £200-£600 per year. John Burnett, A Social History of Housing 1815–1985, Methuen, 1986 (1978), pp. 250, 252.Google Scholar
- 10.Frank Tilsley’s novel The Plebeian’s Progress, Gollancz, 1933 includes the following scene in which an out-of-work clerk decides to try his luck at selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door:Google Scholar
- 14.H.L. Beales and R.S. Lambert (eds), Memoirs of the Unemployed, Victor Gollancz, 1934, pp. 131–2.Google Scholar
- 15.Figures quoted in John Stevenson, British Society 1914–45, Penguin, 1990 (1984), p. 266.Google Scholar
- 16.G. Routh, Occupations of the People of Great Britain, 1801–1981, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1987, p. 28.Google Scholar
- 17.Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars, Routledge, 1991, p. 8.Google Scholar
- 19.The following extract from C.S. Forester’s Plain Murder, Penguin, 1954 (1930) offers an impression of the use of current economic events to provide a motive for murder: ‘And we’ll be looking for a job’, said Oldroyd. ‘I’ve been out before and I know what it’s like’. ‘Know what it’s like? D’you think I don’t know too?’ said Morris. ‘“Dear Sir, in reply to your advertisement in to-day’s Daily Express” — bah, I’ve done hundreds of ‘em. God, you’re lucky compared to me. I got a wife an’ two nippers, don’t you forget. An’ a fat chance we’ve got of finding another job …. We’ll be starving in the streets in a fortnight’s time. Jesus, it’ll be cold. I’ve had some’. Reddy [never having been unemployed] did not appreciate fully the gnawing fears which were assaulting the other two — hunger and cold were only words to him. (pp. 5–6). Later Morris, the married clerk, meditates privately on these gnawing fears: He realised in all its horror the imminence of dismissal, of tramping streets looking for work, of standing elbow to elbow with seedy out-of-works scanning the’situations Vacant’ columns of the newspapers in the Free Library …. All men have their secret fear. (p. 13)Google Scholar
- 20.Quoted from Priestley’s introduction to Everyman’s Library edition of Angel Pavement. J.B. Priestley, Angel Pavement, Everyman’s Library, 1968 (1930), p. xii.Google Scholar
- Vincent Brome, J.B. Priestley, Hamish Hamilton, 1988, p. 94.Google Scholar
- 21.John Osborne, A Better Class of Person, Faber & Faber, 1981, p. 65.Google Scholar
- 23.Joseph McAleer, Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain 1914–1950, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1992, p. 46.Google Scholar
- 25.J.B. Priestley, Angel Pavement, Penguin, 1948 (1930), p. 25. All subsequent page references are to this edition.Google Scholar
- Frank Swinnerton, The Georgian Literary Scene, Everyman’s Library, J.M. Dent & Sons, 1938.Google Scholar
- 27.For discussions of who might constitute a ‘middlebrow’ reader during the 1930s, see the following: Alison Light’s Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (1991).Google Scholar
- Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (1992).Google Scholar
- Rosa Maria Bracco, Merchants of Hope: British Middlebrow Writers and the First World War, 1919–1939 (1993).Google Scholar
- Nicola Humble’s The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s (2001).Google Scholar
- 29.See chapter entitled ‘What was Leonard Bast Really Like?’ in Jonathan Rose’s The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2001, pp. 393–438.Google Scholar
- 30.Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, Cambridge University Press, 1963 (1868), p. 47.Google Scholar
- 31.See also Swinnerton’s depiction of clerk characters at ease with ‘high’ culture in the Queen’s Hall in his novel On the Staircase. Frank Swinnerton, On the Staircase, Methuen, 1914, pp. 160–9.Google Scholar
- 34.Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, The Long Weekend: A Social History of Great Britain 1918–1939, Cardinal, 1991 (1940), p. 298.Google Scholar
- 35.‘Drama Review’, Cornelius, Time and Tide, 7 September 1940. Peter Davison (ed.), A Patriot After All: The Complete Works of George Orwell, Volume Twelve, 1940–1941, Secker and Warburg, 1998, p. 251.Google Scholar
- 36.Frank Tilsley, I’d Do It Again, Morley-Baker, 1969 (1936), pp. 131–2. All subsequent page references are to this edition.Google Scholar
- 37.Frank Tilsley, We Live and Learn, Labour Book Service, 1939, p. 9.Google Scholar
- 40.Frank Tilsley, First Things First, Michael Joseph, 1938, p. 99.Google Scholar
- 47.Walter Allen, Tradition and Dream: The English and American Novel from the Twenties to Our Time, Readers Union, 1965 (1964), p. 228.Google Scholar
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© Jonathan Wild 2006