Arnold Bennett in Avon, Seine-et-Marne (77), France

I'd been completely unaware of this plaque in Avon near Fontainebleau and only came upon it by chance. This was unveiled by the Arnold Bennett Society in 2008.

 

'L'auteur anglais
Arnold
Bennett

(1867-1931)
vécut dans la villa "les Néfliers"
(1908-1911) où il écrivit
son chef d'oeuvre
"The Old Wives' Tale"'.

 

Néflier means 'medlar'.

Riceyman Steps and Arnold Bennett, Clerkenwell: London #25

'Near this site

stood

Henry Earlforward's

bookshop in

Arnold Bennett's

1923 novel

Riceyman Steps

set in

Clerkenwell'

 

Gwynne Place is near the plaque on Kings Cross Road, and these are the steps that Bennett had in mind as 'Riceyman Steps', divided, as in the book, in two tiers, although there are more than Bennett's twenty.

 

 

Within a few yards of Granville Square ('Riceyman Square' in the novel), which is at the top of the steps, is this building in Lloyd Baker Street named 'Riceyman House' after the novel.

The Work of Lionel Britton: Chapter I: Hunger and Love and the Critics

The Open University has now put my entire thesis online, which makes it much easier to read - without the lost attributes - here

Please note, though, that the final paragraph of the second Introduction has now been found to be completely incorrect: Lionel Britton, the writer of Hunger and Love, never wrote a will: The University of Texas got the wrong Lionel Britton!

This chapter concerns the critics’ reactions to Hunger and Love, and in it I examine a number of critics who wrote about Lionel Britton’s work at the time of its publication in 1931. Before looking at some of the contemporary criticisms of Hunger and Love, though, an understanding of the observations made would be facilitated by a synopsis of the novel.

Hunger and Love is a semi-autobiographical account of the intellectual development of the working-class orphan Arthur Phelps, who is about sixteen years old at the beginning of the book, and the reader learns almost nothing of his past life. Set entirely in London from 1904 or 1905 to some time during World War I, it records in some detail the extreme poverty of the uneducated Arthur, who starts his working life at a greengrocer’s and then continues by working for several booksellers. Throughout most of the book he has very few friends, and almost all of his contact with others is through his work or by chance encounters in the street. Some of his limited spare time is spent trying to make his meagre earnings last until the end of the week — by, for example, mending his shabby clothes — but most of his time is spent in the manic pursuit of the education he never received as a child. Arthur devours any scraps of knowledge that he can, reading works of science or arts indiscriminately. He buys books from the penny ‘dumps’ on the book barrows that line Farringdon Road, and works his way through the Penny Cyclopaedia and Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. The novel details how Arthur takes advantage of any opportunity to increase his learning by reading at work, when sent out on errands, and during his lunch breaks. Periods of unemployment are described, a few political activities, and Arthur’s developing intellectual education arguing with the crowd gathered around Speakers’ Corner. There are also many descriptions of the book trade from a shop assistant’s point of view.

The ‘Hunger’ in the title clearly refers to Arthur’s lack of food, but it also alludes to both sexual and intellectual frustration; the ‘Love’ too refers to sex, as well as to the love of knowledge, and to a much broader love of humanity. The narrator has complete access to Arthur’s thoughts and no one else’s, and frequently addresses him directly in the second person, often to mock him. The world is thus largely seen through Arthur’s (or the narrator’s) consciousness, and the novel contains many unspoken insults directed at the bourgeoisie, the church, the government, or the police. Any figures of authority are the targets, and they are seen not only as impediments to his freedom, but throwbacks to an earlier period of evolution.

The novel is a long inter-war howl of contempt for the rule-makers and the people whom the narrator considers to be the war-mongers, the perpetrators of a vast conspiracy. For these reasons alone, it was inevitable that there would be some hostile reactions to the novel. Britton foresaw this, and joked about it before the novel was published: ‘I don’t think six months in gaol would stop me. Most of my friends say I shall get twenty years. The unkind ones say I shall deserve it’.

¹

Hunger and Love is far from being a straightforward narrative, and a laudatory review by Geoffrey West in the TLS recognizes that Britton is ‘frankly contemptuous of the novel as story’.² The novel is didactic, and filled with philosophical and scientific thoughts, becoming more complex as the book develops. Thoughts hold up the story, or rather, thoughts are a large part of the story: sickened by a world where business rules and the rich perpetuate their life-styles through repressing the poor both physically and psychologically, the narrator gradually develops a blueprint for a future ruled by the human mind. His future will be one in which people co-operate with each other instead of competing, and all energies will be devoted to the benefit of the world as a whole. There is no romantic nostalgia for a lost world, and Britton embraces technological progress as a means to a vaguely communistic society — or perhaps anarchistic to be more precise, as there is no support for any political party: Arthur Phelps’s voice is a lonely one.

It is clear, then, that the book is set in a battle context, as Arthur is constantly pointing out. He bemoans, for instance, the fact that work is taking his life away: ‘what is there in this future that will compensate you now for this […] almost total surrender of your life’ (p. 206). As the book draws to a close, a far more sinister threat than Phelps’s struggle for economic survival develops as preparations are made for war; the propaganda increases, and the pressure on Arthur to enlist for World War I becomes increasingly strong.

Although the narrator assumes that Arthur Phelps dies at the end of the book, it is by no means certain if he enlists in the army, is hit by shrapnel during an air raid, or dies in another way. All the reader is told is ‘Whether you stay at home or go and fight — life is coming to a close’, and ‘I don’t know where you are, but I think it is the end’ (pp. 691, 703). Herbert Marshall, who in his review of the novel seamlessly drifts between his own writing style and Brittonese, had evidently read a proof copy of the book, although he rather oddly speaks of ‘Private Phelps, lost among the war-murdered millions’, and reviewer C. H. Norman also mentions Phelps being ‘blown to bits by a shell on the battlefield’.³ Thoughts of joining the war certainly occur to Phelps, although only fleetingly, and only as murderous thoughts might easily briefly occur to a confirmed pacifist: if Phelps had been killed as an active member of the armed forces it would have been a psychological victory for the governing class, and it seems doubtful that this is the impression that the narrator wants to convey. It would be far more in keeping with Arthur’s ideas if he died in England, and if he continued to refuse to fight for a cause that he was incapable of identifying as his own. George Rees’s interpretation of the ending is much less assured than either Marshall’s or Norman’s; he does not even believe the assumptions of the narrator:

'In the end we simply lose sight of him. He disappears in wartime, and we are left to guess whether he is driven through the power of Parliament, press and pulpit, to join and thus forsake his principles; or whether, stoically enduring the opprobrium of the lickspittle bourgeois mob, he resolutely refuses to be a hired butcher, and lives until the world madness has passed'.⁴

Rees’s lack of conviction is an appealing interpretation, and the ending of the novel is perhaps better for its ambiguity.

Below, I mention several people who commended Britton’s Brain of the previous year because the reception of this work obviously affected the way Hunger and Love was anticipated and received: the interest generated by Brain prepared the ground for the interest in the novel, and even the negative reviews of Hunger and Love were lengthy. The fact that Shaw was instrumental in having the play performed is significant, as are his comments on Britton: he said that the play had ‘good vocal writing and natural theatre sense’, and ‘it is clear he can deliver the goods’, which was reproduced in many newspapers and magazines. But Shaw’s qualification of this remark, ‘as soon as he settles down into an established line of business, unless, ass [sic] seems probable, he starves in the meantime’, was omitted, as were his other reservations.⁵

Drama critic Hannen Swaffer was one of Britton’s greatest champions, and defended him against other critics who attacked his work. At the back of Hunger and Love, Putnam reproduced impressive snippets from Swaffer’s Daily Express review of Brain: ‘The most highbrow play ever produced in England…Had more thought in it than any other play for years…May be acted in every capital in the world…I prophesy for Lionel Britton a brilliant future’ [p. 707]. Britton was grateful for his support and wrote a letter to him from which Swaffer quoted in the Express: ‘Thanks for the courage with which you stood up against the whole pack of them’.⁶ Other reviews were also highly complimentary. In The Manchester Guardian ‘R. H. T.’ says ‘Many great men have amused themselves by forecasting the future of mankind. It seems to the present reviewer that Lionel Britton leaves them all a very long way behind’.⁷ He concludes by proclaiming Brain ‘a work of genius’. C. E. M. Joad also calls Britton a genius in a long review of Brain in The Sunday Referee, but it was perhaps the Introduction to Hunger and Love by another philosopher — Bertrand Russell — which more than anything else generated such interest in the novel.

There were many reviews of Hunger and Love, some positive, some negative, and some mixed. Nevertheless, and perhaps surprisingly for such an anti-Establishment work, hardly any review seems to have been unreservedly negative. Today Britton’s name is almost forgotten, with the occasional exceptions of entries in encyclopaedias or bibliographies of science fiction, utopias or computer science, and a very encouraging recent review by Adam Daly; but he was once very briefly a relatively well-known writer: in her biography of Virginia Woolf, for example, Winifred Holtby lists him alongside other working-class authors, all of whom are far better known today than Britton: James Hanley, Sean O’Casey and W. H. Davies.⁸

Frank Swinnerton’s reaction to Hunger and Love, full of anger at Arthur Phelps for having the gall to ‘steal’ from his employers’ time, is very negative. He says of the young worker: ‘His notion of his own greatness is such that he exploits his employers and then savages them […] because they dismiss him ’.⁹ Swinnerton was obviously proud of having worked his way up from office boy to editor of Chatto & Windus to emerge as a staunch member of the Establishment that Britton is attacking. And although self-deprecating about his own intellectual credentials, Swinnerton strongly resents the idea of the working classes becoming intellectuals:

'Mr. Russell calls Mr. Britton "a highly intellectual proletarian." What a description! And what a terrifying portent! The highbrow sustained by the parental dole is familiar to us but if the slums are also to send us highbrows the end of the world is overdue.'

Swinnerton nevertheless sees a number of positive points in the book, although none in Arthur, whom he finds selfish: the main argument in Hunger and Love is that it is the bourgeoisie who are selfish.

Rebecca West also has some positive things to say about Hunger and Love, and even admits that ‘One would have to be cold and a cad not to have a warm corner in one’s heart for Arthur Phelps’.¹⁰ However, she continues by saying that ‘Since Mr. Britton is cut off from his fellow creatures by this wall of hatred he has learned nothing about [others in a similar situation to himself]. He has written a book about the destiny of man without knowing anything about man.’

Harold Nicolson is more offended by Hunger and Love. He concedes that the book is interesting, but only as a ‘specimen’: ‘it is bottled life, preserved in vinegar’.¹¹ He continues by denouncing Britton as ‘glum and humourless, and he likes to snarl’, adding that if the novel were intended as a satire on the self-educated it was a work of genius, but that he does not think that this is the case. Nicolson’s main complaint is that the book is dangerous because it is about class hatred.

Bernard Shaw’s assessment of Hunger and Love appears to be lost, although a comment on the front cover of the dust jacket of the New Zealander John E. Lee’s Children of the Poor states ‘A whopper. In its intensity I can only compare it with Lionel Britton’s Hunger and Love’.¹²

In an edition of the Johannesburg Sunday Times (Britton subscribed to press cutting agencies and collected many reviews of his books from around the world) ‘J. L. L.’ is slightly equivocal about the novel. He calls Britton’s book ‘amazing’, and adds that ‘All the destructive criticism in the world cannot rob “Hunger and Love” of a certain brilliance, or the author of intellectual endowments and a general knowledge of no mean quality.’¹³ But not many people would have understood the concluding remark: ‘If it were not for the fact that the author is obviously sincere and has given us much that reaches high levels of excellence, one would be inclined to use the title of his 31st chapter [‘All Balls’] as a tabloid description of his book.’

Arnold Bennett’s reaction to the novel was not as ambivalent as this, and he was even moved to write a pastiche of Britton’s style:

'Now Lionel Britton’s book. Very Long. Introduction by Bertrand Russell. Yes, by Bertrand Russell. […] I read and read. […] I was continually moving my arms, together with all the nerves, tendons, ganglions, veins, arteries, bones, concealed beneath my seven skins.

'The day wore on. Curtains. Bourgeois electricity. The surface of the planet on which I sat had moved several thousand miles, not counting its movement round the sun, nor its vaster movement as part of the ever-shifting solar system. Indeed I didn’t know where I was in spacetime. …

'Bourgeois dinner. Next day I resumed. Page after big page. I reached page 705. The last. But why the last? "Well", said I, to the invisible Lionel Britton, who was rushing through the ether as inconceivably fast as I was, "I’ve read your novel, Lionel Britton"'.¹⁴

Hunger and Love was the last book that Bennett reviewed for the Evening Standard, and in the article he also describes both his impression of Britton on the two occasions he met him, as well as his review of the novel, written in his own usual style. Bennett sat next to Britton during the premiere of Brain, and although he did not like the play, he was too polite to say so. However, had the invisible Lionel Britton mentioned in the quotation above actually been present at the time that Bennett finished reading Hunger and Love, there would have been no such embarrassment: Bennett enjoyed ‘a great deal of the book’, says that it has ‘genuine force’, that it is ‘not a book to be ignored’ and recommends it ‘to the stout-hearted’. It is evident that the review was written with a considerable degree of affection for the novel; he calls it ‘propaganda, strident as a brass band’, but although he does not mind propaganda, feels that Britton ‘frequently forgets that he is telling a story’. It must be said, though, that Britton would not have disagreed with Bennett’s criticism — in a ‘Caution to the Reader’ which was perhaps originally designed as an Introduction to the novel, Britton freely admits that the book has ‘not, strictly speaking, a story’, with ‘nothing of what is usually understood as characters’.¹⁵

This is one of the negative aspects that Orwell saw in the novel, and his comments on it are interesting. He calls the book ‘entirely sound’ as a ‘social document’, but (rather like Britton himself) fails to recognize it as a novel as such: it is more of ‘a kind of monologue on poverty’.¹⁶ But like a number of other reviewers, he finds the repetitions annoying. Nevertheless, as mentioned below in Chapter 3, the book (which Orwell stressed was ‘unusual’), certainly made a lasting impression on him, and almost certainly had an influence on Orwell’s work.

Hunger and Love attracted rather more negative criticism from Stephen Garry’s article in the Daily Worker; at the time, ‘socialist realism’ (though not used as an expression until about 1932) was all important to the Communist Party of Great Britain’s approach to fiction, although the degree of its inclusiveness of ‘acceptable’ authors varied considerably through the years.¹⁷ Garry’s article seems to represent the fierce strain of criticism of the time; he has obviously realized that the novel is largely autobiographical, and taking the cue from Britton he addresses him as the dead Arthur Phelps, playing on the word ‘dead’ to mean unthinking, and using the second person throughout. In a manner rather similar to the first section of Bennett’s review, although without any admiration — this is parody rather than pastiche — Garry begins with: ‘And so, Arthur Phelps, my boy, you are dead! And no wonder!’¹⁸ Garry has understood the book well, and his main argument is that if Phelps/Britton had spent more time in ideological struggle instead of forming lofty ideas about utopia, he would have arrived at the ‘correct’ way of thinking.

But interestingly, if the Communist Party of Great Britain (via the Daily Worker) did not approve of Hunger and Love, other reviewers on the left certainly did, and it is significant that one of the most enthusiastic reviews of it was in in the anarchist weekly Freedom. After giving his appreciation of the late Arnold Bennett, ‘B. M.’ says that ‘Lionel Britton’s work is fated to arouse violent and acrimonious discussion and resentment. People who are positive and have something to say infuriate authority’.¹⁹ The reviewer continues: ‘In my view it is a work of genius and of high literary quality.’ And his final words on Britton’s book are similar to Russell’s: ‘I cannot too strongly urge the claims of this book upon you.’

Another person on the left, J. F. Horrabin, calls Britton’s book ‘A Real Proletarian Novel’, and is almost as enthusiastic as ‘B. M’. He thinks that Britton should have done some editing of the book because he appears to have unloaded all the fruits of his self-education into it in a haphazard fashion, but says that it is ‘dead right in observation, magnificent in passion. Let no one be frightened off reading it by anything I have said above’.²⁰

The Marxist Philip Henderson was also impressed: ‘Britton has written a work of undisciplined, elemental power. Its protest against the moral degradation that makes human life dependent upon possession of money, stands out like a huge volcanic rock in the polite literary world of our time’.²¹ Henderson claims that Britton’s depiction of Phelps ‘gives his work the quality of an epic’, and also mentions Bennett for having ‘the courage to hail the book as a work of genius’, but disagrees with him saying that Hunger and Love is better than Ulysses. Unfortunately, he does not give his source, although Bennett certainly said neither of these things in his Evening Standard review.

Geoffrey West’s review of Hunger and Love in the Times Literary Supplement is also highly complimentary, speaking of Britton’s ‘ambitious attempt to synthesize all relevant knowledge in a single coherent attitude to society and the universe at large’.²² He concludes: ‘Mr. Lionel Britton has written a remarkable work; if the term “work of genius” is due to originality in purpose and plan, to industry and vitality in execution on a large scale, then it is difficult to withhold it from “Hunger and Love.”’

Another very positive review of Hunger and Love, and certainly one of the last in a newspaper, was by the above mentioned George Rees in the Egyptian Gazette. In this, he understands Britton’s aim as being to destroy the status quo and begin an egalitarian society, and is obviously in full agreement with him. He is annoyed that the Book Society omitted it from their monthly bulletin, and like Britton, he rails against ‘the bourgeoisie and their system of plunder’ with apparently equal — and personally felt, the reader is bound to conclude — venom:

'One can understand now, perhaps, why the Society refused to recommend this novel; why, also, the fatly comfortable Gerald Goulds and James Agates have utterly ignored, in their recapitulation of the year’s best books, a work of striking beauty and originality'.²³

Finally, a word must be said about Bertrand Russell’s Introduction to the novel. Russell calls Hunger and Love ‘a very remarkable piece of work’, ‘filled with a splendid rage against the humbug, the cruelty, and the moral degradation of the possessing classes’.²⁴ He has doubts about Britton’s vision working in practice, but ends by saying that ‘Mr. Britton has portrayed his world with passion, with vividness, with a wealth of illustrative detail, and with a considerable power of generalising thought. […] I am convinced that his book deserves to be widely read’ (p. xi). Russell was one of the very few people who had any idea of how much effort had been put into the book, and one of the few to know that a considerable effort had also been put into finding a publisher for it.

¹Lionel Britton, letter, ‘Should Authors Be Paid?’, Everyman, 4 December 1930, [n. p.], [n. pg.], LBC, Box 12, Folder 10.

²[Geoffrey West], ‘Hunger and Love by Lionel Britton’, 19 February 1931, TLS, 131.

³H. P. J. Marshall, ‘Towards the Human: Lionel Britton — A New Force in the World of Thought’, New World, May 1930, p. 10, LBC, Box 12, Folder 11, (also Box 6, unnumbered folder); C. H. Norman, ‘The Revolutionary Spirit in Modern Literature and Drama — XII’, Saturday Review, 26 November 1936, p. 3, LBC, Box 12, Folder 10.

⁴George Rees, ‘An Epic of Hatred’, Egyptian Gazette, 28 January 1932, [n. pg.], LBC, Box 12, Folder 10.

⁵Bernard Shaw, letter to Sir Barry Jackson, 16 September 1929, LBC, Box 2, Folder.

⁶Hannen Swaffer, ‘Brain a Book Now’, [Daily Express], [1930], [n. pg.], in the possession of the present author.

⁷‘R. H. T.’, ‘Brain’, Manchester Guardian, 26 June 1930, [n. pg.], LBC, Box 13, Folder 15.

⁸Lyman Tower Sargent, British and American Utopian Literature, 1516–1985: An Annotated, Chronological Bibliography (Boston, MA: Hall, 1979; repr. New York: Garland, 1988), p. 188; Everett F. Bleiler, Science Fiction: The Early Years: A Full Description of More Than 3,000 Science-Fiction Stories from the Earliest Times to the Appearance of the Genre Magazines in 1930 (Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 1990), p. 85; John Clute and Peter Nicholls, eds, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 1993; rev. 1995), p. 161; Anthony Ralston, Edwin D. Reilly and David Hemmendinger, eds, Encyclopedia of Computer Science, 4th ed (New York: Grove’s Dictionaries, 2000), p. 706; Adam Daly, ‘The Lost Genius of Lionel Britton’, Wormwood, 6 (2006), pp. 47–57; Winifred Holtby, Virginia Woolf (London: Wishart, 1932), p. 58.

⁹Frank Swinnerton, ‘A Hero of Colossal Cheek!’, [n. pub.], [n. pg.], LBC, Box 12, Folder 11.

¹⁰Rebecca West, ‘The Exasperating Egotism of Lionel Britton’, Daily Telegraph, 20 February 1931, [n. pg.], LBC, Box 12, Folder 11.

¹¹Harold Nicolson, ‘Nightmare Novel of an Author Who “Likes to Snarl”’, Daily Express, 19 February 1931, [n. pg.], LBC, Box 12, Folder 11.

¹²John A. Lee, Children of the Poor (London: Laurie, 1934; repr. Henry, 1949), front cover of dust jacket.

¹³‘J. L. L.’, ‘Hunger and Love: By Lionel Britton’, Johannesburg Sunday Times, 19 April 1931, [n. pg.], LBC, Box 12, Folder 10.

¹⁴Arnold Bennett, ‘Young Man’s Novel Slaps Your Cheek: Ferocious Hatred’, Evening Standard, 26 February 1931, [n. pg.], LBC, Box 18, Folder 3.

¹⁵Lionel Britton, ‘Caution to the Reader’, [n. d.], LBC, Series II: Drafts, Box 2, Folder 1.

¹⁶The Complete Works of George Orwell, ed. by Peter Davison, 20 vols (London: Secker & Warburg, 1986–1998; rev. and updated 2000), A Patriot After All: 1940–1941, pp. 203–05. (Originally published as ‘Poverty — Plain and Coloured’ by ‘Eric Blair’, Adelphi, April 1931, pp. 80–82.)

¹⁷Andy Croft, Red Letter Days: British Fiction in the 1930s (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), pp. 59–95.

¹⁸Stephen Garry, ‘“Hunger and Love”: The Story of a DEAD Worker’, Daily Worker, 28 March 1931, [n. pg.], LBC, Box 12, Folder 10.

¹⁹‘B. M.’, ‘Books to Buy’, Freedom: A Journal of Libertarian Thought, Work and Literature, May 1931, pp. 6–7.

²⁰J. F. Horrabin, ‘“Hunger and Love”: A Real Proletarian Novel’, Plebs, September 1931, pp. 210–11 (p. 211).

²¹Philip Henderson, Literature: And a Changing Civilisation (London: John Lane the Bodley Head, 1935), pp. 143­–44.

²²‘Hunger and Love by Lionel Britton’.

²³‘An Epic of Hatred’.

²⁴Bertrand Russell, Introduction, Hunger and Love, pp. vii–xi (p. vii).

(Hereafter all page references to Hunger and Love are given in parentheses following the quotation.)

Lionel Britton — A Brief Biography

(The information below was a small part of my thesis, but new details of Lionel Britton's life continue to be revealed to me, correcting, enhancing, and in other ways transforming my knowledge of the man.)

Scarcely any biographical information about Lionel Britton is readily available, and since the mid-1930s his name has been almost forgotten. Information about Britton’s family background, though, is helpful to gain an impression of the formation of his ideas, particularly the importance of literature and foreign languages to him, and the reasons for his hatred of capitalism, religion, the law and institutions in general. The details of Britton’s life after the publication of his last imaginative work in 1935 are also an indication of why he disappeared from the public eye.

Lionel Erskine Nimmo Britton had far from humble beginnings. At his birth on 4 November 1887 his paternal grandfather, John James Britton, was a solicitor practising in the small Warwickshire market town of Alcester and his father, Richard Waddams Nimmo Britton, had very recently passed his intermediate examinations to be a solicitor and was now practising in the family business — Britton & Son — in the nearby village of Astwood Bank, where he lived with his family. Lionel’s maternal grandfather, Samuel Thomas, was for some time the representative in France of Samuel Thomas & Sons, manufacturers of needles and fish-hooks in Redditch; this business was founded by Samuel’s father — also named Samuel — who lived in a large house in front of his extensive British Needle Mills until his death in 1878. It was one of the largest businesses in the town, with one hundred and twenty-two employees at the time of the 1871 census. By the 1881 census, Henry Thomas, a younger son of Samuel Thomas senior, appears to have taken over the greater part, if not all, of the family business. By this time Samuel Thomas junior had returned to England on a permanent basis, and he too was a needle manufacturer, employing just twelve people.

Lionel’s mother, Irza Vivian Geraldine, was born in 1866 and had met Richard at Kings Coughton, in a former farmhouse near Alcester where Richard lived with his father and the rest of the family; Irza was a fifteen-year-old poetry enthusiast who had initially gone to the house to visit John James Britton, a ‘real live poet’ who had earned a minor reputation locally, and who later published a novel. Irza and Richard married in 1885 and moved to Astwood Bank, where Ivy was born the following year and Lionel the year after. There are very few listings of Britton & Son at Astwood Bank in Kelly’s Directories for that period: early in 1888, the company went into bankruptcy.

Never fully qualified as a solicitor, Richard — who had previously worked as a teaching assistant and was given to writing philosophical musings by no means entirely different from those of his mature son Lionel — probably did not enjoy the legal profession. On his bankruptcy, he initially tried to find work again as a teaching assistant in England, although the family very soon moved to Paris, where Richard had found work as a managing clerk in a legal firm, and where Lionel’s brother Percy was born. France and the French language run throughout the Britton and the Thomas families: Samuel Thomas junior had spent a number of years in France, where at least six of his children, including Lionel’s mother, were born; Samuel’s wife Marie Antoinette was French, and both of Lionel’s parents spoke the language fluently. This strong French connection must to some extent explain Lionel’s fluency in the language, and is no doubt also indicative of the facility with which he later learned so many others: his friend Herbert Marshall claimed that Britton was fluent in over twenty different languages.

However, Richard’s employment in France lasted only a short time, and the Brittons then moved to the Bournemouth area, where Richard again worked unsuccessfully as a solicitor, and where the family income was supplemented by Irza working as a boarding house keeper. A fourth child, Cyril, was born in 1891, and by the end of the following year the couple had significant debts. In 1894, when Lionel was seven, Richard died of tuberculosis. Irza, who already had at least one suitor, remained in the area and married a gunner in the Royal Navy in 1897, although no other details of this marriage appear to have survived, and she was later to change her name back to Britton.

Lionel, Ivy, Percy and Cyril all moved to Redditch to live with their maternal grandparents, where their grandfather was then a traveller in a fishing tackle business. According to Lionel’s own account, he excelled at school and soon learned all that they could teach him. It seems evident that he showed some of the rebelliousness that would later be a notable feature of his character: he already hated religious instruction, and was excused music lessons because he thought them ‘silly’. By 1901 Ivy was still at school at the age of nearly fifteen, but her younger brother Lionel was almost certainly in London by this time. His grandparents had presumably not wanted, or perhaps had not had the means for, him to continue his education. For a brief period he lodged elsewhere in Redditch, later informing the Daily News and Westminster Gazette that his first job was ‘sandpapering fishing rods’. After running away and spending a few days as an office boy in Birmingham, Britton moved to London, and from this point his work life and intellectual life become very similar to that of Arthur Phelps in Hunger and Love.

In London, Britton found work as an errand boy at a grocer’s in Theobald’s Road, although he was dismissed from there for reasons unknown. He next found more errand work with an educational bookseller, the University Book Co. on Southampton Row, which according to Britton was the main catalyst to his intellectual curiosity, where he secretly read all he could in the firm’s time, which was also when he discovered ‘the penny-dump on the book-barrows on Farringdon Road’, ‘a mine of mind for empty pockets’. Britton worked at the shop for about six years, when he voluntarily left to work as a shop assistant for bookseller A. H. Mayhew (on whom Sarner in Hunger and Love is probably based) in Charing Cross Road for nearly two years; Mayhew found him ‘honest and industrious’ and ‘parted with him with regret’.

Britton appears not to have mentioned World War I in newspaper or magazine articles or surviving letters, although the vicious propaganda machine in the novel, where the narrator tells of Phelps being urged by almost everyone around him into joining the war, seems to be comment enough on Britton’s experience of it: in an obituary, Raymond Douglas reveals that Britton was attacked by a patriotic mob for not enlisting, and was imprisoned as a conscientious objector for about eighteen months.

As early as 1917, Britton started to learn Russian and applied for Russian citizenship, although his application was disallowed by the Soviet ambassador. Then in the early 1920s he found a more remunerative post with the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers, where he worked for about six years, latterly as Assistant General Secretary. In his letter of reference in 1929, the General Secretary describes Britton as ‘an independent thinker, cautious and meditative, yet courageous in the expression of his opinions’, and who was also ‘a gifted linguist [whose] translation of the lesser European languages has frequently been of value to us’.

For several years before this Britton had been working on his huge novel Hunger and Love, although he had disagreed with publishers because he refused to allow any cuts to be made to the content. It is a measure of his self-confidence and his powers of persuasion that he secured Bertrand Russell’s five-page Introduction to the novel, and that Constant Huntington of Putnam not only did not insist that he make cuts, but also allowed him to write the final amendments to it more or less as he wished.


The influence of the cinema on Britton’s writing is briefly mentioned in a chapter below, as film was of great interest to him: he was chairman of the experimental London Film Guild in the late 1920s, which had its studio in the same building as Foyle’s bookshop on Charing Cross Road. This voluntary organization was largely unsuccessful, only producing a small number of mainly critically unsuccessful shorts; Britton never directed a film, although he was responsible for some montage work. The secretary of the Guild was Herbert Marshall, who later moved to Russia for a number of years as a student of Eisenstein’s.


By the time Britton left his advertising job in favour of writing, his mother Irza was living with him in a flat in Marylebone, in Saville Street, which was later incorporated into Hanson Street. And by the late 1920s Britton had also met Sinead Acheson, a woman in the legal profession who was to be his devoted friend for the rest of his life, and with whom he appears to have lived intermittently during the 1930s and 1940s.


Britton also had a strong interest in the theatre over many years and frequently attended performances; when he was a teenager, he had been a supernumerary at Her Majesty’s Theatre under Sir Herbert Tree, and wrote his first play — ‘Fang; or, the Reluctant Employee’ — during this period. Before Hunger and Love was finally published, Britton had also written at least a first draft of his three published plays, and it is an indication of his strong powers of persuasion that the play would possibly not have been published without the assistance of Bernard Shaw, into whose hands he contrived to thrust a copy; Shaw passed it on to Sir Barry Jackson, which the press reported with great enthusiasm. Brain was published in May 1930, very shortly after its first and only performance, which was by the Masses Stage and Film Guild at the Savoy Theatre. Brain ensured that Britton was already relatively well known when Hunger and Love was published the following February, and after this his short-lived fame began in earnest and he was in great demand for a few brief years. He was asked to give a number of talks, to open theatres, he became the drama critic for The New Clarion, and established Left Theatre with André van Gyseghem (the first director of Nottingham Playhouse) and several others. There were many articles about him in newspapers and magazines, and a great deal of attention was also given to his second play, Spacetime Inn, for example: the blurb on the dust jacket speaks of ‘the play which was read at the House of Commons — the only occasion in the history of any Parliament that such a thing has ever happened’. Britton’s M. P. friend John Smith Clarke had made the occasion possible, but both the blurb and the headlines are slightly misleading: although Britton himself certainly read his play before a group of M. P.s, the session was only held in a House of Commons committee room. Critically, the play was better received than Brain, although it was performed for four nights only at the Arts Theatre in London, and once by the Hostel Players in Hoddesdon the following year. (For this second performance, the play also attracted a great deal of publicity — much of it pictorial — because Bernard Shaw gave one of his old Norfolk jackets to his namesake in the play.)


There were many caricatures of Britton in the newspapers and magazines of the day because he was quite an unusual figure for the time. Shaw had called him a ‘wild young man’ and Arnold Bennett had thought that he looked as though he had just come from the French Riviera: he had a shock of wiry hair which stood up almost perpendicular to his head and which he rather amateurishly cut himself, and he always wore an open-neck shirt, usually with light trousers or shorts and plimsolls; he was teetotal and did not smoke.


Britton had been anticipating a visit to Russia for some years, and as the initial excitement of his success eased off considerably, he went there in July 1935 at the expense of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers. Five years previously, the working-class writer Harold Heslop had stayed there for the same amount of time as Britton: three months. The two writers’ impressions of the country have many similarities — Heslop was shocked by the poverty he saw, by his guide’s ignorance of Russian culture, and bewildered by the consternation which his desire to see Zamyatin caused; after attending a show trial, he called himself ‘a stranger in a world beyond my own belief’. Britton’s frequent letters to Acheson express his disgust with the country. He was also alarmed by the poverty, exasperated by the queues and what he saw as the ignorance of the Russian people, as well as the fact that they would not answer his probing questions or allow him to explore his surroundings unescorted; above all, perhaps, he thought that his belief in co-operation as opposed to competition was not being practised in Russia: he believed that food and other shortages were caused by the government channelling money into the defence budget. What he saw forced him to see the United Kingdom as more socialist than Russia; he still thought that Russian communism would eventually succeed in its goals, but thought that the gradualism of the British Labour Party was better suited to the country’s progress than the Communist Party of Great Britain. He returned by boat in October; Irza had become used to having more space, and most of Britton’s belongings had been moved to Acheson’s house.


Britton had awoken from his utopian dream to find a nightmare both in Russia and, more personally, at home. Putnam, having made only a modest profit from Hunger and Love, (less than £100 after 10,000 sales and an expensive promotion campaign) and losses with Brain and Spacetime Inn, had already refused to give more than a perfunctory promotion to Animal Ideas. Britton had delayed his visit to Russia because the play was due to be published in the United Kingdom, but it proved to be a disaster: it was never performed (except by Britton himself at various readings), sales were very low, and it was largely ignored critically. In a revealing fourteen-page letter to Herbert Marshall, he called his experience ‘the snuff-out’: he was facing ruin as a writer and had little money left.

Britton escaped from London to take part in a socialist project at ‘Netherwood’ in Hastings, which was perhaps chosen because of its connection with the working-class writer Robert Tressell. In the second half of the 1930s, Netherwood was a large run-down property which had been bought by the actor and playwright E. C. Vernon Symonds to convert into a left-wing guest house that was intended as a haven for socialist meetings and trade union conferences among other things. Britton received free board and lodging there in return for manual work — mainly gardening and reconstructing the swimming pool — and was eking out the remainder of his advance for the Russian edition of Hunger and Love, although he hated almost everything about Netherwood.

During his stay in Hastings Britton was writing the play ‘Du Barry’, although it was never published and never performed. He later wrote several more plays and a novel, philosophical works, and dramatized several novels, such as The Pickwick Papers, Barchester Towers, Gwyn Jones’s Times Like These and three works by J. Jefferson Farjeon. But apart from a performance of ‘Mr Pickwick’ at Rugby and two translations of rather obscure Russian writers in the 1940s, Britton’s career in the theatre and in print was at an end.


Consequently, although he remained a committed writer, Britton was by economic necessity forced to find other means of survival, which led to an itinerant lifestyle. He taught from time to time, gave play readings throughout the country, and synchronized English dialogue to Russian films. And there was also another source of income: Acheson had bought a second-hand boat — known as ‘Spacetime Inn’, or simply ‘Spacetime’ — which she kept on the Thames and followed Irza’s suggestion to rent it out, with Britton collecting the proceeds from customers. He lived on the boat, in boathouses, or simply by the riverside, from about 1937 to 1944, although not continuously. And towards the end of the 1940s he was living with his mother again, now at Park House, a leasehold property at 66 Tufnell Park Road. In a draft application for a grant from the Civil List fund in 1951, he gave his income as ‘Between £70 and £80 per annum’.


In 1954 Britton suffered multiple injuries in a car accident from which he was very fortunate to survive; however, he received an undisclosed sum in compensation, with which he hoped to publish his work and ‘be independent of publishers’ readers’. Britton was developing an obsession: he had amplified Bernard Shaw’s (possibly unfinished) play Why She Would Not, and for the rest of his life was concerned with the Society of Authors’s refusal to allow the simultaneous publication of both Shaw’s fragment and Britton’s ending. He kept scrapbooks of newspaper cuttings about the society along with its financial details, and biographical details of the committee members. And he was directly or indirectly supported by several prominent writers in opposition to the society’s exclusivity, including Bertrand Russell, who remarked of the society’s attitude to Britton’s writing: ‘If the principle became established that nothing should be published unless it aroused admiration in a number of elderly big-wigs, the result would be a disastrous censorship.’ These were encouraging words, although they can only have fed the obsession: in 1964, Britton sent a two-hundred-and-eighty-five-paragraph dossier to the Director of Public Prosecutions alleging fraudulent activities on the part of the Society of Authors. Nothing was ever proved.


Also in 1964, Britton formed a company — The Park Group Limited — with two Canadians using a bank in the Bahamas with the intention of publishing and producing his plays for stage and screen, of which the first was to be ‘the Shaw play’. However, nothing appears to have come to fruition from the Park Group, probably because Britton was insisting that ‘the Shaw play’ be published first, whereas the other directors (who were responsible for all of the company’s not inconsiderable expenses pending a refund from the ‘profits’) were worried about a possible court injunction. Three years later Britton established his own company — Promethean Publishers Ltd — which appears never to have published anything either.

Britton spent his last years as a virtual recluse in Margate. In 1969 he wrote a letter to Bertrand Russell from his new home, in which he states that he has had a nervous breakdown, and has lost his house in Tufnell Park along with all of his money; the reasons for this are not mentioned. But Britton was still trying to sue the Society of Authors as late as June 1970, six months before his death at the local hospital following a heart attack. There were few obituaries, and even those commented on his obscurity.


Herbert Marshall, who was by that time Professor and Director of Soviet and East European Studies (Performing Arts) at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, had all of Britton’s literary effects transported to the university, where they remain today.