Angel Pavement by J. B. Priestley

First published: 1930

Type of work: Panoramic social chronicle

Time of work: The late 1920’s, in the midst of the Great Depression

Locale: All of London, from Dockland to the West End, from the heart of the City to its outlying suburbs

Principal Characters:

• James Golspie, a mysterious stranger who enters into the life of Twigg & Dersingham, a London firm dealing in wood veneers and inlays used in the manufacture of furniture
• Lena Golspie, his attractive daughter
• Howard Dersingham, an inept, ineffectual product of the English public school system, the head of the firm
• Mrs. Dersingham (Pongo), Howard’s wife
• Herbert Smeeth, the firm’s bookkeeper
• Edie Smeeth, his wife
• George Smeeth, their son
• Edna Smeeth, their daughter
• Lilian Matfield, the firm’s secretary
• Harold Turgis, the firm’s junior clerk
• Mrs. Pelumpton, his landlady
• Mr. Pelumpton, her husband, a sometime dealer in used furniture
• Poppy Sellers, the firm’s typist
• Stanley Poole, the firm’s office boy, who practices detection
• Norman Birtley, Lilian Matfield’s sometime suitor
• The Mittys, Mrs. Smeeth’s relations, who visit once too often

The Novel

J. B. Priestley employs the arrival and departure of the mysterious Mr. Golspie as the frame in which to paint a panoramic portrait of London life in the midst of the Great Depression. When James Golspie, sole agent for a Balkan firm that cheaply produces veneers and inlays, arrives in London to find an outlet for his business, he is intrigued by the name Angel Pavement, a cul-de-sac in the heart of the business district of London called the City, and moves in on Twigg & Dersingham, a firm located there that is experiencing a sales decline which is only partly the result of the unfavorable economic climate. That Howard Dersingham, who fancies himself a gentleman, is not cut out for the business world enables Golspie to manipulate him with ease.

Whatever Golspie’s original intentions toward the firm, a disastrous dinner party at the Dersingham home, at which Golspie and his uninvited, late-arriving daughter Lena are rudely made to feel intruders among guests with pretensions to a higher social class, seals the fate of Twigg & Dersingham. Golspie convinces Dersingham to pay him his unusually high commissions in advance as orders pour in without informing the unwitting head of the firm that the suppliers of the veneers have raised their prices by as much as seventy percent. With contracts signed to supply customers at lower prices than it can in fact afford to offer, Twigg & Dersingham is ruined as Golspie and his daughter quietly sail for South America and new worlds to conquer, more fools to dazzle and destroy.

Within the frame of an intricate business swindle, Priestley explores the mood and values of a Britain that has gone awry after World War I. Traditional English values of hearth and home have been lost as a younger generation adopts the surface values of Hollywood films, falls prey to foreign, sometimes criminal, business practices, and desperately seeks a good time and easy money among the faceless multitudes wandering aimlessly along the overcrowded thoroughfares and dismal back streets of a bleak and unwelcoming city. It is the lives of the firm’s employees that become the focus of the novel. As the fortunes of Twigg & Dersingham rise and fall, so too do the hopes and dreams of its bookkeeper, secretary, and junior clerk.

The Characters

Herbert Smeeth, the bookkeeper, Lilian Matfield, the secretary, and Harold Turgis, the junior clerk, are the three Twigg & Dersingham employees whom Priestley pictures in sharpest detail within a novel as rich in characterization as any by Charles Dickens. The author follows them as they travel to and from the City from various outlying residential districts. He observes their working day, their breaks for lunch and tea, their evening amusements, their weekend boredom.

Smeeth’s lower-middle-class family, completely dependent upon him, considers his job, the very center of his being, to be more secure than he knows it to be. His gentle warnings go unheeded; his short-lived pay raise is quickly squandered on food and drink to entertain the Mittys, Mrs. Smeeth’s relations, at an ill-timed party that parallels the Dersingham debacle.

Miss Matfield, who is approaching spinsterhood, lives in the respectable Burpenfield Club, a residential club for women from good middle-class homes in the country who are compelled by economic circumstances to live in London as cheaply as possible. Along with all the others there, she hates the club and awaits a Prince Charming to carry her away, not only from the Burpenfield but also from Angel Pavement. She would probably marry anyone who might ask her, even dull Norman Birtley, a friend from the country, who, ill at ease in the bewildering city, cannot muster either the will or the courage to ask for her hand.

At first appalled by the coarseness of Mr. Golspie, Lilian Matfield finds herself more and more attracted to him and fancies that he is responding to her in kind. Her life of quiet desperation, akin to those of the characters her Burpenfield neighbor has seen in a Chekhov play, continues its stultifying course once Mr. Golspie leaves her waiting at Victoria Station. He has forgotten the promised weekend on which she has pinned her hopes for romance.

Young Turgis has no family, in fact no life at all outside Twigg & Dersingham, but the firm holds even less meaning for him than it does for Miss Matfield. Turgis lives in a drab little room at Mrs. Pelumpton’s and waits for the Hollywood dream to become his reality. When it seems in fact to be happening, when he meets Lena Golspie, who, at loose ends for a night or two, encourages his advances and then just as suddenly drops him, Turgis completely misunderstands the relationship, meaningless to Lena but to him the means of entry into a world of love and adventure. Realizing the truth, Turgis nearly chokes Lena to death and tries to kill himself. Angel Pavement, however, is no sordid melodrama, but a slice of life itself with all its boring, pointless routine. Neither Lena nor Turgis dies. She is discovered in time to be saved, and he is unsuccessful in his own ineptly romantic attempt at suicide when the gas meter clicks off for want of a shilling. Only dreams end; life, Priestley insists, goes on.

The enigmatic Golspie, a man without a past, weaves in and out of all of the characters’ lives, vigorously reordering for himself a chaotic world, offering but eventually withholding from the others a promise of riches and enchantment. A God figure or charlatan, Golspie represents a recurring character-type in Priestley’s fiction: the charismatic master of ceremonies with a touch of the sinister who controls the destinies of lesser mortals.

Critical Context

Angel Pavement, Priestley’s first serious novel of epic proportions and his first major critical success as opposed to the popular success of The Good Companions (1929), is a masterpiece of relentless tone that is curiously leavened at its conclusion by an optimism that at times mars Priestley’s other works. Even as he depicts them at their worst, Priestley suggests at the end, as he would continue to do throughout his long career, that his countrymen will survive, that they will pull themselves together and muddle through. Turgis may find the helpmate he needs in Poppy Sellers. Smeeth sees life more clearly then before as, ironically, he reaches for his old set of glasses to replace the ones he has broken in a brawl with the Mittys. Even Mrs. Dersingham shows herself ready to accept the challenge of an uncertain future.

The promise of romance and adventure which Golspie held for them all may be, even for him, an empty dream. As the freighter carrying Golspie and Lena sails for South America, the sun disappears. Life may be brightening for the rest, but there are gray skies ahead for Mr. Golspie. The conclusion of this bleakest of Priestley’s thirty novels ironically belies its author’s pose as realist. The ultimate denial of romance for Golspie himself reveals Priestley’s own romantic view of a just world which rewards the good and holds forth the promise of punishment for the evildoer. The golden days of his youth had been obliterated by a terrible war and the economic depression that followed it, but even in Great Britain’s darkest hours Priestley believed that mankind would build a better world and live in the sunlight once again.

Bibliography

Atkins, John. J. B. Priestley: The Last of the Sages, 1981.

Cooper, Susan. J. B. Priestley: Portrait of an Author, 1970.

DeVitis, A. A., and Albert E. Kalson. J. B. Priestley, 1980.

Dodd, L. W. Review in Saturday Review of Literature. VII (September 20, 1930), p. 300.

Gregory, Alyse. Review in The Nation. CXXXI (September 17, 1930), p. 137.

Hughes, David. J. B. Priestley: An Informal Study of His Work, 1958.

The Times Literary Supplement. Review. August 21, 1930, p. 666.