| Chapter 1: | Setting out on an English Journey |
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are never unequivocally praised, but they suggest that England once had much more purpose about it than it did in Priestley’s day, with its tendency towards lethargy. Travelling through the outlying districts of Newcastle, Priestley surveyed a landscape “strewn with broken-down pitmen’s cottages and the ruins of higgledy-piggledy allotments.” It would be hard to imagine a better illustration of a place that needs “tidying-up,” in Priestley’s phrase, in both the literal and metaphorical senses of the word—but who, the reader ponders, is to take up the task?
Having toured and been appalled in equal measure by Newcastle, Gateshead, the East Durham coalfields, and the decaying industrial towns on the River Tees, on the return leg of his journey Priestley travelled from the bustling port of Hull to the medieval cathedral life of Lincoln, and finally to the Fenland town of Boston, where he attended a screening of Our Betters (based on W. Somerset Maugham’s story) at the local cinema and found the audience listless and unengaged. “They hardly ever laughed,” he recalled, “never applauded, and gave no signs of taking any interest in the picture.”8 It is hard, though, to blame the people for this lethargy, for “what have the antics of a tiny remote smart set to do with them?”9 “We talk about the cinema giving the people what they want,” Priestley went on,
but really I am not sure that it does not do less of that than the older forms of popular entertainment. If a little fit-up theatrical company came to this place, they would give their audiences melodrama, broad farce, pantomime; and they would certainly never dream of offering them anything that resembled Our Betters. But the cinema is always offering them such things. What pleases Hollywood has to please South Lincolnshire.10
In many ways, that apathetic cinema audience is Priestley’s most striking example of what was wrong with England in 1933. There was no sense of connection between the audience and the events on the screen, only a technologically sophisticated form of entertainment lacking a human heart. There was little or no connection, either, between the