The problem of unemployment as shown in the novel “Angel Pavement” by John Priestley
John Boyton Priestley became one of the major figures in the cultural life of Britain after the WWI, he was a novelist, playwright, essayist, broadcaster and all-round man of ideas. "Angel Pavement" is one of his best-known and best-regarded novels, it belongs to critical realism. Angel pavement is the name of a little side street in London's commercial district. In this novel it is the setting for a social drama, a slice of London life before the war. The author portrays the time, when the decline in business became alarming, thousands of people, thrown upon the streets, were desperately trying to find any kind of job just to survive. While reading it, you find yourself in the 1930th London, following the lives of a group of employees of a veneer and furniture inlay business. The cast of characters is ordinary, there are no angels in spite of the beautiful enigmatic name of the street. All characters are common working people, with the help of which the author reveals the social drama of that time. They are Mr. Smeeth, an accountant, Ms Matfield, a secretary, Turgies, an office clerk, Mr Dersingham, the owner of the firm. These people desire happiness, stability and security, they don't demand anything extraordinary or superfluous of their life, but unfortunately the period of time and the place where they live have doomed them to miserable existence. The company after a temporary fabulous improvement goes hopelessly bankrupt; the slump is caused by a crook and swindler Mr. Golspie. Because of his artful actions all the employees lose their jobs and find themselves in the street.
All the characters of Priestley's novel are united by a central problem of unemployment. The author very skillfully depicted the problem through the life of each character. Stanley was an office boy, who lived in the world of his own invented adventures. Whenever he was sent to do some errands for the office, he "dodged about the crowded streets" shadowing people, as if he were a detective or spy. The imaginary world in which he lived protected him to some extant from the influence of the deep-seated crisis of that time. Nevertheless, its drastic effect on Stanley doesn't escape from the reader's eyes. We can see it in the way the boy was planning to spend a shilling given by his mother for day expenses. p.28 "he always ate his breakfast so quickly that his stomach forgot about it almost at once and left him hollow inside by ten o'clock and absolutely aching by twelve. He often wondered what would happen to him if, instead of being the first to go to lunch, at half past twelve, he was the last, and to wait until the half past one. There are innumerable ways to spend a shilling on lunch, from the downright solid way of blowing the lot on a sausage or fried liver and mashed potatoes...to the immediatefully delightful but rather unsatisfying method of spreading it out, buying a jam tart here, a banana there, and some milk chocolate somewhere else; and Stanley knew them all".
Another character through whose eyes the reader gets the idea of the employment situation of that time is Mr. Smeeth. Smeeth works as a head clerk at Twigg and Dersingham and is proud to having risen to his position through the office hierarchy, but realizes with dismayed incomprehension that neither his younger colleagues nor his children share his attitude to employment and loyalty to the firm. Throughout the whole novel Smeeth is experiencing great fear of losing his job. p33 "sometimes at night, when he could not sleep, it came to him with all its force and dreadfully illuminated the darkness with little pictures of shabby and broken men, trudging round from office to office, haunting the Labour Exchanges and the newspaper rooms of free Libraries, and gradually sinking into the workhouse and the gutter". The author truly and profoundly revealed the misery of the low and middle-class Londoners in the 30th; he resorts to numerous examples making the novel bitterly realistic. e.g. Mr. Smeeth's cardboard boots, that got completely in rainy weather -- one of his so to say "bargains", the passengers of the tram are compared to "cargo of wet clothes", or to "irritable ghosts". Unemployed people took up any opportunity seeking for a job, Priestley very expressively portrayed the day when the company put an advertisement that they were hiring: p.90 "postal heavens opened and a hurricane of letters fell upon Twigg and Dersingham. Into Angel Pavement all that day there poured a bewildering stream of replies. It seemed as if street after street, whole suburbs, had been waiting for this particular opening".
Ms Matfield is also a very important character in the novel, through who Priestley emphasized the difficulty of surviving in London as a female white-collar worker. Daughter of a country doctor, Matfield relies on her father to supplement her low pay and she is fully conscious of her limited employment options: "What chance has a girl? The rot they talk about the women working! The men jolly well see where all the decent jobs go to."Furthermore, private rented accommodation is not readily available to Matfield, as it is to the male clerk in her office, Harold Turgis, and she lives in a residential hostel along with a large number of single female office workers, who, as the narrator notes, are "compelled, by economic conditions still artfully adjusted to suit the male, to live in London as cheaply as possible".
Priesley marvelously managed to depict the life of ordinary people in Britain during the economic slump of the 30th. This novel is a nice example that the natural selection does exist among human beings especially in the world of business, everyone is striking out for oneself, but those who are tough, artful are more likely to succeed.