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

Habermann’s words, Priestley was concerned that “the new England is not English enough” and that if this modernity were put to the test, whether by the continuing ravages of the global Depression or by the actions of a real iron autocracy, it may not prove strong enough to withstand the challenges it faced.²⁰

Only through a renewed sense of unity would the country advance, Priestley argued. Only by realising that the success or failure of one region affects the whole could England hope to recapture its prestige and sense of purpose. “In seeking a way forward,” as Baxendale noted, Priestley developed the theme of “the nation as a single community with shared responsibility for all its members.”²¹ “Was Jarrow still in England or not?” Priestley asked rhetorically, looking back on his travels. “Had we exiled Lancashire and the North-East coast? Were we no longer on speaking terms with cotton weavers and miners and platers and riveters? Why had nothing been done about these decaying towns and their workless people?”²² “If the Germans had been threatening these towns, instead of Want, Disease, Hopelessness, Misery, something would have been done quickly enough,” he argued, framing what was happening in the North of England as though it were an invasion, but one that had gone unnoticed because there was no readily identifiable army against which to take up arms.²³ By suggesting that what was required of the country here was the same kind of response that would be seen in wartime, Priestley issued a rallying cry to defend England not from invasion but from the worst excesses of the malaise into which it had sunk. Within six years this rhetoric would be used again, and by then Priestley’s hypothetical German invasion was a very real threat indeed.

Much has been made of Priestley’s voice in English Journey, and indeed of the implied reader that he has in mind when making his points. Ina Habermann asserted that “Priestley’s implied reader is clearly middle class—perhaps the sort of person with influence and a social conscience who could be galvanized into action by a graphic account of the plight of the unemployed.”²⁴ “Ostensibly searching for England,” as John Baxendale