Work Is a Curse: John Wain/Kingsley Amis/Iris Murdoch

Abstract

The 1930s were an era of economic deprivation coupled with a burgeoning awareness of class conflict in Britain. Narratives such as the fictional Love on the Dole by Walter Greenwood or the non-fictional The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell underlined the plight of many ordinary British people who were neither members of the capital-owning or industrial class nor the professional, better educated, comfortable middle class. Unemployment is pathologised in Greenwood’s novel: “it got you slowly, with the slippered stealth of an unsuspected, malignant disease” (169). And key to Orwell’s narrative are the pathetically poor living conditions of ordinary working people (for instance, the coal-miners, “blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of coal dust” [31]) and the unemployed alike. During this period, social organisations also arose — a National Union Of Unemployed Workers, serving the interests of a then vast interest group, sought to increase solidarity and collective action in the face of “the deadening, debilitating effect of unemployment” (Orwell 73). Extreme hardship and institutional carelessness were par for the course — the dole was low, and rules preventing working illegally to earn extra money were rigorously enforced — thereby inflating the disparity between “The Establishment” as such and ordinary people.