English Journey

Written by J. B. Priestley

Narrated by Sean Baker

‘The finest book ever written about England and the English’ Stuart Maconie

‘J. B. Priestley is one of our literary icons of the 20th Century and it is time that we all became re-acquainted with his genius.’ Dame Judi Dench

Three years before George Orwell made his expedition to the far and frozen North in The Road to Wigan Pier, celebrated writer and broadcaster JB Priestley cast his net wider, in a book subtitled ‘a Rambling but Truthful Account of What One Man Saw and Heard and Felt and Thought During a Journey Through England During the Autumn of the Year 1933.’ Appearing first in 1934, it was a huge and immediate success. Today, it still stands as a timeless classic: warm-hearted, intensely patriotic and profound.

An account of his journey through England – from Southampton to the Black Country, to the North East and Newcastle, to Norwich and home – English Journey is funny and tender. But it is also a forensic reading of a changing England and a call to arms as passionate as anything in Orwell’s bleak masterpiece. Moreover, it both captured and catalysed the public mood of its time. In capturing and describing an English landscape and people hitherto unseen, writing scathingly about vested interests and underlining the dignity of working people, Priestley influenced the thinking and attitudes of an entire generation and helped formulate a public consensus for change that led to the birth of the welfare state.

Prophetic and as relevant today as it was nearly ninety years ago, English Journey is an elegant and readable love letter to a country Priestley finds unfathomable.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Release date: Apr 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9780008585693

J. B. Priestley

J. B. Priestley was born in Bradford in 1894. He fought in the First World War and was badly wounded in 1916. He went on to study at Trinity Hall, Cambridge and, from the late 1920s, established himself as a successful novelist, playwright, essayist, social commentator and radio broadcaster. He is best known for his 1945 play, An Inspector Calls. J. B. Priestley died in 1984.

Reviews for English Journey

[nigeyb · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It was Victor Gollancz who commissioned two pieces of English travel writing from two gifted but very different writers. One was "The Road to Wigan Pier" by George Orwell, the other was "English Journey". "English Journey" is subtitled..."English journey being a rambling but truthful account of what one man saw and heard and felt and thought during a journey through England during the autumn of the year 1933 by J.B. Priestley."...which sums it up very succinctly.In 1934, J.B. Priestley published this account of a journey through England from Southampton to the Black Country, to the North East and Newcastle, to Norwich and then back to his home in Highgate, London. His account is very personal and idiosyncratic, and in it he muses on how towns and regions have changed, their history, amusing pen pictures of those he encounters, and all of this is enhanced by a large side order of realism and hard-nosed opinion. The book was a best seller when it was published and apparently had an influence on public attitudes to poverty and welfare, and the eventual formation of the welfare state.The book also makes a fascinating companion piece to "In Search Of England" by H.V. Morton, which was published a few years earlier, and was another enormously successful English travelogue, however one that provides a far more romantic version of England, an England untroubled by poverty and the depression. Like H.V. Morton's book, "English Journey" has never been out of print. "English Journey" is a fascinating account, and the edition I read, published by Great Northern Books, is also illustrated with over 80 modern and archive photos. It's a really beautiful book and one I heartily recommend.The introduction by the always readable and interesting Stuart Maconie made me chuckle too..."If, as a writer, J.B. Priestley had just been brilliant, humane, elegant, virile, intelligent, witty and technically dazzling, he'd be arguably considered the pre-eminent British literary talent of his age. Sadly from him though, he also laboured beneath the crushing burden of being accessible, engaging, crystal clear and enormously popular. The mandarins of the metropolitan elite like their 'provincial' voices to stay just that if possible, or at least to have the decency to be faintly troubled and attractively doomed, like say D.H. Lawrence or John Lennon, rather than rich, successful, boundlessly gifted and ordered like J.B. Priestley or Paul McCartney. The riches and success must have been some consolation."I shall be reading more of J.B. Priestley's work.

[thorold_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I've just been reading South Riding and Odette Keun's description of London in the thirties, so this seemed a good moment to have a look at Priestley's take on the English provinces in the depression years. What's immediately striking to anyone used to more recent travel writing is how constructed it all is. For one thing, his inimitable voice (as with Dickens, it feels as though it's being read aloud even when it's on the printed page); for another, the careful arrangement of his route and the subjects he covers, all cunningly arranged to build up to his key chapters on Gateshead and the Durham pit villages. He uses a whole battery of stage and pulpit tricks to keep our attention and sympathy: By arguing like a convinced but reasonable local preacher rather than with the hectoring voice of a politician or journalist, he makes sure that his middle-class readers never get the feeling that they're being sucked into red revolution. We scarcely even notice the point where he gets fed up with taking local buses and whistles up a chauffeur to drive him the rest of the way, or the ever-so-slightly symbolic return to a fog-bound London from which the rest of the country is invisible...So, what is he saying? Essentially, he seems to be warning his readers that England is losing the respect for individual human values that he sees as its chief strength as a country. People should not be ranting in the newspapers against "benefit scroungers" or refugees; they should be out there working with the unemployed to rebuild self-respect and give lives some meaning. Towns should not be grim and functional, there should be theatres and music and places for young people to ogle each other, even on Sundays. And hotels should provide decent food and adequate quantities of hot water, and there should be devolution of power to the English regions...His idea of the "three Englands" in the final chapter is interesting: he sees modern England as a superposition of "Merrie England"; Victorian Muck and Brass; and bright thirties modernity. His fear is that the elements that are coming to dominate are the pointless luxury of the first, the heartless utilitarianism of the second, and the brash, mass-produced, transatlantic(*) political apathy and lack of culture of the third. Strange to reflect that he was writing eighty years ago, really! Not that much has changed: industrial Britain is still scraping itself up after the 19th century; London still doesn't quite realise that there's anything beyond the M25. Food has perhaps got a little bit better; poverty and unemployment are still around, but perhaps hit people in different ways; and Priestley might have felt inclined to revise his comments about the beneficial effects of the tobacco industry. Seeing post-WWI Bradford deprived of the colour and variety it got from its German-Jewish community provoked him into a pro-immigration rant; I hope that he wouldn't have been pushed the other way by seeing the city as it is now...(*) Like most British intellectuals, Priestley seems to have been very fond of America when he went there, but affected to hate "American" intrusions into British cultural life.