[meteeratymn]

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 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. It 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.’

When it was published in 1931, the novel gained great publicity because Bertrand Russell wrote the five-page introduction to it, in which he lavished great praise on it. But Britton had already published a play called Brain the year before, which is about a computer which is built clandestinely in the Sahara Desert, and which will eventually contain all the information in the world: a kind of prediction of the internet. Bernard Shaw had some praise for the play. Lionel Britton’s second play, Spacetime Inn, is set in spacetime and its characters — Eve (of Adam and Eve), the Queen of Sheba, Samuel Johnson, Napoleon, Karl Marx, Queen Victoria, and Bernard Shaw — are stranded in a pub with two members of the working-class. As with Brain, everyone is blown up in the end: Britton was fond of apocalyptic endings, and Hunger and Love finishes with the blood bath of World War I.

For various reasons, Britton never published a follow-up novel and died in poverty.

The link below begins with a whistlestop tour of working-class fiction from the Chartist era through to the 20th century before alighting at the 1930s for a more detailed analysis of Britton’s place in working-class fiction. The main themes covered in it are work, unemployment and the lack of money, gender, and birth control:

Dr Tony Shaw: British Working-Class Fiction and Lionel Britton’s Place in It