English Journeys: National and Cultural Identity in 1930s and 19 ...

cosy English travel books which poured from the presses in the 1930s,” but when readers get inside and embark on a journey of their own, they find more challenging content: a survey of prewar England and a manifesto for the changes the country needed so badly.⁴ “It is a useful feature of travel narrative,” Baxendale added, “that the writer can turn it to a whole range of different purposes, all the while protesting that they are doing no more than simply describing what they saw and where they went. So it is with English Journey.”⁵ That the book was a joint publishing venture put out by Heinemann (Priestley’s usual publisher) and Victor Gollancz, who was later to found the Left Book Club and send George Orwell on The Road to Wigan Pier, accords English Journey a significant place in 1930s literature. It takes travel writing away from the innate conservatism of works like H. V. Morton’s In Search of England—a book that, as the next chapter shows, tends to address the challenges of modernity via a retreat into an idealised rural past—and marks out a space within which the traveller becomes a trenchant social critic.

It was a common approach amongst writers of this period to juxtapose “old England,” the land of historic castles, cathedrals and hamlets, with the “new England” of twentieth-century technology, motor cars, and the radio. Priestley, although he adopted elements of this discourse, suggested that it is too simplistic, and that there was, in reality, another England to be considered: the blighted, depressed, often overlooked England of an Industrial Revolution that had moved on elsewhere, leaving behind only a ruined landscape and the ruined lives of those now unemployed with little or no hope for the future. He found this England in “Rusty Lane, West Bromwich,” close to Birmingham. “I have never seen such a picture of grimy desolation as that street offered me,” he told the same reader who barely fifty pages earlier had followed him breathlessly around a Cotswold Manor house: “It would not matter very much—though it would matter—if only metal were kept there; but it happens that people live there, children are born there and grow up there.”⁶ That such a place should exist in England was, for him, a terrible comment on how the nation had failed so many of the people upon whose labours it had risen to its current position.