J. B. Priestley (1894–1984)

This carefully crafted book is a master class in how to write a convincing argument that will retain a middle class reader's interest by never descending to polemic. Priestly lays before everyone, especially those of his readers who really would prefer not to know, that a terrible social injustice had been done to those people who made and extracted the wealth that made Britain an economic titan.
The further Priestly ventures on his journey, the greater the deprivation uncovered - so that by show more the time he reaches Tyneside and the Durham collieries we are truly aware of the calamitous state of workers shut out of works that have become defunct as a result of the Great Depression. (The journey took place in 1933).
Perhaps it ought to be read alongside George Orwell's "The Road to Wigan Pier" and "Down and Out in Paris and London", both of which books tackle the subject as a political failure. Priestly demands of his readers that they be woken up to a human tragedy in their own land, amongst their own people, and take action that would relieve it. Unfortunately, this didn't happen, the situation only being altered by the country rearming and preparing for war.
My copy of this book is a Jubilee Edition (1984), and contains 80 black and white photographs which speak to the failure of will and decency, where working families lived in mean hovels in towns unfit to be called such.
I thought I wouldn't like this book, but I remembered the human warmth that is the foundation of Priestley's "Angel Pavement", and found this endearing aspect of his writing present here. show less

I read this play knowing nothing about it other than it involved a police inspector calling in on a well-to-do family dinner party and asking about a crime. What preconceptions I had led me to consider the story to be like Agatha Christie’s stories.

I was wrong. This play was much more serious and deals with the abuse of vulnerable people in society by the better off.

This play was, and is, a wake up call for any of us who look down on people less well-off than ourselves, or who are rude and show more arrogant to others.

While today’s society and its greater awareness of human rights and labour protection laws date the play and prevent some of the blatant abuse described, there are still valuable lessons for society in the three acts of this work. show less

I've just been reading South Riding and Odette Keun's description of London in the thirties, so this seemed a good moment to have a look at Priestley's take on the English provinces in the depression years.

What's immediately striking to anyone used to more recent travel writing is how constructed it all is. For one thing, his inimitable voice (as with Dickens, it feels as though it's being read aloud even when it's on the printed page); for another, the careful arrangement of his route and show more the subjects he covers, all cunningly arranged to build up to his key chapters on Gateshead and the Durham pit villages. He uses a whole battery of stage and pulpit tricks to keep our attention and sympathy: By arguing like a convinced but reasonable local preacher rather than with the hectoring voice of a politician or journalist, he makes sure that his middle-class readers never get the feeling that they're being sucked into red revolution. We scarcely even notice the point where he gets fed up with taking local buses and whistles up a chauffeur to drive him the rest of the way, or the ever-so-slightly symbolic return to a fog-bound London from which the rest of the country is invisible...

So, what is he saying? Essentially, he seems to be warning his readers that England is losing the respect for individual human values that he sees as its chief strength as a country. People should not be ranting in the newspapers against "benefit scroungers" or refugees; they should be out there working with the unemployed to rebuild self-respect and give lives some meaning. Towns should not be grim and functional, there should be theatres and music and places for young people to ogle each other, even on Sundays. And hotels should provide decent food and adequate quantities of hot water, and there should be devolution of power to the English regions...

His idea of the "three Englands" in the final chapter is interesting: he sees modern England as a superposition of "Merrie England"; Victorian Muck and Brass; and bright thirties modernity. His fear is that the elements that are coming to dominate are the pointless luxury of the first, the heartless utilitarianism of the second, and the brash, mass-produced, transatlantic(*) political apathy and lack of culture of the third.

Strange to reflect that he was writing eighty years ago, really! Not that much has changed: industrial Britain is still scraping itself up after the 19th century; London still doesn't quite realise that there's anything beyond the M25. Food has perhaps got a little bit better; poverty and unemployment are still around, but perhaps hit people in different ways; and Priestley might have felt inclined to revise his comments about the beneficial effects of the tobacco industry. Seeing post-WWI Bradford deprived of the colour and variety it got from its German-Jewish community provoked him into a pro-immigration rant; I hope that he wouldn't have been pushed the other way by seeing the city as it is now...

(*) Like most British intellectuals, Priestley seems to have been very fond of America when he went there, but affected to hate "American" intrusions into British cultural life. show less

Review upon second reading, 2021:
As a modern gothic novel, Priestley does a pretty good job with "Benighted" in evoking the requisite elements of age, decay, unnatural mental states and palpitating fear. These were the elements I particularly noticed on my first reading in 2013, inspired by my prior exposure to James Whale's classic film adaptation. The quieter moments of relationship between the characters, interesting though they were, felt something of a distraction from the show more genre-trappings. I realise now that, in the way Priestley used the detective genre in "An Inspector Calls" to examine the English class structure, he was doing a similar thing in "Benighted" through a gothic lens.

Written fewer than ten years after the horrors of the Great War, the old dark house in the wasteland becomes a metaphor of the crumbling decay at the heart of the Empire, storm-battered, assaulted, threatened with annihilation, and occupied by a degenerate aristocracy, represented in the frayed insanity of the Femm household, in equal measure served upon and terrified by the lumpenproletariat that is Morgan, their dumb and brutish manservant.

Priestley brings into this feverish household the Wavertons, a bourgeois married couple, too concerned with appearances to be able to live freely and love each other openly, and their cynical, irreverent acquaintance, Penderel, a traumatised survivor of the trenches subject to sudden bouts of depression. These three are later joined on set by a petty bourgeois provincial who has crawled up the capitalist greasy pole to become as rich as he is greedy, and, representing the working class, his East End chorus-girl escort.

So far, so awful, but in a few short scenes, Priestley exposes his characters flaws, motivations and their tender humanity. They become people as well as allegorical types, and I found myself caring for them all. They're tested together in the crucible of existential horror, all required to put aside pretence and meet each other genuinely.

I didn't warm to what seems to be a patriarchal thread Priestley had woven through the story in using the name 'Femm' for the ruling class presiding over a nation emasculated by war, together with a swipe at male writers of women's books being presented as a sign of an effeminate degeneracy of 'healthy masculinity', nor to instances of ableism and antisemitism.

Those infrequent blemishes aside, the febrile build-up to crisis and aftermath draws to a wearied end which is brilliant in being simultaneously dark, hopeful and ambivalent. There is a poignancy in being able to look back from the vantage of almost a century at the darker horrors about to be unleashed on Priestley's generation, which he had glimpsed and unavailingly warned of.

Review upon first reading, 2013:
I bought this book because I enjoyed the James Whale film adaptation, The Old Dark House. Atmospheric and amusing as the film is, the book (naturally) is better.

There are no gruesome shocks in the way of modern horror but, if you let your imagination put you in the shoes of the lonely travellers who find themselves stranded in the strange old Femm house, it is really creepy and horripilating.

Priestley is able to go inside his characters thoughts and history in much more depth than Whale was able to do, and this is where it steps ahead of the film. Also, the ending is much darker than the Hollywood version (though the introduction to my edition says that Whale shot Priestley's ending, but the studio made him change it).

I read Benighted during a week of Autumnal rains and storms: a perfect read, providing you're safely indoors with a hot cup of tea and a biscuit. show less