The early Celtic poets, the Welsh and the Irish, were easier about the joys of nature; Drabble quotes them, and that is one of the great pleasures of her book — its quotations, generous in length, pertinently chosen. In fact, it could be called a most useful kind of anthology, writers given elbow-room but put in their context, compared or contrasted with their contemporaries, from the Middle Ages on to the genteel 18th century, struggling out of that gentility, then torn from it by the industrialisation of the 19th. Dickens on the gouging of Camden for the new railway — horrified but also fascinated; Arnold Bennett on the Potteries, Orwell on the condition of northern England between the wars. Orwell glimpses the face of a girl seen from the train: ‘It is difficult not to quote Orwell at length’, says Drabble in her admiration of him. She does so, and it is unforgettable. Here are a few lines:
What I saw in her face was not the ignorant suffering of an animal. She knew well enough what was happening to her — understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain.
Then the train took him again into the open country.
This book first came out in 1979 and Drabble says she has taken the chance to update it and revise some of the opinions in it. Towards the end she quotes Larkin: ‘... before I snuff it, the whole/ Boiling will be bricked in/ Except for the tourist parts —/ First slum of Europe . . .’ In her afterword, Drabble remarks that even Tarka the Otter now has a tourist trail.
The artist Edward Burne-Jones declared towards the end of the 19th century that ‘the more telegraph poles I see, the more angels I shall paint’. The 21st century is still young, and its imagery is still in the making.
A tentative conclusion, but it was an excellent idea to bring this instructive and entertaining book from the last century freshly into this new one.
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