| Chapter 1: | Setting out on an English Journey |
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It would be tempting, reading Priestley’s account, to think that of these three options one of them represents a real or true England and that the others are somehow imposters. The rarely acknowledged truth is, as he stressed, much more complex than that: at any given time all of these Englands are component parts of the whole. If England could be brought to see all of itself and to consider how best to draw together those bonds that had become so tenuous by 1933, then all might be well. The dust jacket to the original print run of English Journey visualises this process, presenting a panorama through which cars and buses travel past farms and rural hamlets surrounded by clumps of trees that themselves line the roads to large-scale factory complexes and coastal ports. In this design, with its art deco colour scheme of green, orange, yellow, and black on a cream background, a sense of harmony—however incongruous—prevails. Even the modern England receives space, for the rural and industrial motifs are set alongside roadside advertising hoardings and petrol stations, and a group of bungalows sits perched by the sea.
Sadly, though, England is not so readily packaged, and the prevailing tone of Priestley’s work is that of a man finding both delight and exasperation in his experiences in a country lacking a cohesive heart. The industrial powerhouse of Manchester, like its satellite towns—“towns meant to work in and not to live in and now even robbed of their work”—is sunk in despondency, its people little more than pale, hopeless versions of their nineteenth-century selves. It is hard to survey such places, he wrote, “without feeling that there is a terrible lack of direction and leadership in our affairs.”
It does not matter now whether Manchester does the thinking to-day and the rest of England thinks it to-morrow, or whether we turn the tables on them and think to-day for Manchester to-morrow. But somebody somewhere will have to do some hard thinking soon.7
The achievements of the Victorian period, like the sacrifices of the First World War, lay heavily on the England of 1933, reproaching its people with the state in which they existed. The excesses of the industrial past