Landscape and the Geographical Imagination of J.B
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A University of Sussex DPhil thesis Available online via Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/ This thesis is protected by copyright which belongs to the author. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Please visit Sussex Research Online for more information and further details LANDSCAPE AND THE GEOGRAPHICAL IMAGINATION OF J.B. PRIESTLEY: 1913-1930 Master of Philosophy University of Sussex Roger Jenness July 2013 Statement I hereby declare that this thesis has not been, and will not be, submitted in whole or in part to another University for the award of any other degree. Signature i Acknowledgements I wish to thank everyone who, in different ways, has helped me to prepare this thesis. The bibliography by Alan Day has been an invaluable guide through Priestley’s vast number of writings especially those that have been the main source of information for my thesis. The staff at the Reading Room of the British Library at Colindale supplied copies of the Bradford Pioneer and The Yorkshire Observer. Alison Cullingford, the Special Collections Librarian at the J.B. Priestley Library at the University of Bradford has provided information and commented on Priestley’s work. Several members of the J.B. Priestley Society, including Tom Priestley, J.B. Priestley’s son, have also been helpful by providing information. Staff at the Local Studies Library in Bradford and the West Yorkshire Archives helped me to access information about Priestley, Bradford before the First World War and the redevelopments during the 1950s and 1960s. The staff at the BBC Written Archives Centre in Reading provided information on the making of Lost City. There were no formal consultations or interviews in my research and access to information was not restricted by any special conditions. My daughter Madeleine helped with what I considered to be some tricky IT technicalities. Last but not least I want to thank my tutor Dr Simon Rycroft for advice and information and for always encouraging me to move on to the next stage. I wish to thank everybody who has given permission to include literary, archival and illustrative material in my thesis. I am particularly grateful for the permission from United Agents and Dent Everyman's Library to include material from Angel Pavement and other examples of Priestley's work. The covers of Angel Pavement have been included with the permission of the Random House Group and Harper Collins Publishers. ii Summary There are a number of studies on J.B. Priestley’s life and work including assessments of his novels, social and political writings and contribution to English culture. Some of these studies have commented on Priestley and landscape, especially his attachment to Bradford and rural Yorkshire. There are no detailed studies, however, relating to his geographical imagination. The purpose of this research is a survey and interpretation of Priestley’s work to form a source of information and ideas relating to landscape, dwelling and topophilia as the basis of his geographical imagination. The thesis will consider, firstly, what he wrote relating to the origin and form of his attachment to Bradford and rural Yorkshire as indicated by his articles in the Bradford Pioneer in 1913, a Labour newspaper published in Bradford. The thesis explains the extent to which he continued this attachment in his later work after the First World War before writing about London. In the next stage I approach the novel Angel Pavement in terms of his responses to London in relation to the provinces. Finally, the research is concerned with how Angel Pavement represented the landscape and identity of London in about 1930. The main contribution of the research is its detailed response to Priestley’s thoughts on urban and rural landscapes in his early journalism and popular fiction. The research is organized around two main themes. The first of these is concerned with the origin of Priestley’s attachment to Bradford and rural Yorkshire. The second considers how this attachment has influenced later work, in particular how he approached writing about London. iii Contents Acknowledgements i Summary ii Chapter 1 Introduction 1 1.1 J.B. Priestley 4 1.2 Priestley and geography 6 Chapter 2 Landscapes, dwelling and literary geographies 9 2.1 Landscapes 9 2.2 Dwelling 12 2.3 Literary geographies 15 Chapter 3 Priestley and the Bradford Pioneer 19 3.1 Bradford and Priestley’s early life 19 3.2 The Bradford Pioneer 27 3.3 Landscapes and the Bradford Pioneer 29 3.3.1 Urbanism 30 3.3.2 Greening the city 31 3.3.3 Development 32 3.3.4 Criticisms of Bradford 32 3.3.5 Rural Yorkshire 34 3.4 Bradford and the Provinces 38 Chapter 4 After the ‘great gold Maytime’ 39 4.1 Landscapes and The Yorkshire Observer 39 4.1.1 The modern city 41 4.1.2 The experience of nature 43 4.1.3 Suburbanization 45 4.1.4 Provinces 46 4.2 Novels about rural Yorkshire and Bradford in the 1920s 47 4.2.1 Adam’s experience of Arcadia and wilderness 47 4.2.2 Leaving the North 49 4.3 Relationships with Bradford and rural Yorkshire in later work 50 4.3.1 Bright Day 51 4.3.2 Lost City 51 4.3.3 The Swan Arcadian 56 Chapter 5 The contexts of Angel Pavement 58 5.1 Priestley’s attitudes to London 58 5.2 The Provinces and Angel Pavement 63 5.3 Responses to Angel Pavement 66 5.4 Angel Pavement and other representations of London 69 Chapter 6 Angel Pavement and London 72 6.1 London 72 6.2 The City 73 iv 6.3 Other London districts 78 6.3.1 Central London outside the City 78 6.3.2 North London 79 6.3.3 South London 81 6.3.4 East London 81 6.3.5 West London 82 6.4 Regeneration of London 82 Chapter 7 Landscapes and the experiences of the characters in Angel Pavement 84 7.1 Meanings 84 7.1.1 Monstrous London 85 7.1.2 Security and escape 86 7.1.3 Jungles 88 7.1.4 Juxtapositions 89 7.1.5 Weather 90 7.1.6 Travel 91 7.1.7 Despair and disappointments 91 Chapter 8 Priestley's geographical imagination: 1913-1930 95 8.1 Landscape, place, belonging and dwelling 95 8.1.1 The usefulness of these concepts to the study 95 8.1.2 The purpose of Priestley's geographical imagination 96 8.1.3 The scope of Priestley's geographical imagination 97 8.2 A lexicon of Priestley's geographical imagination 98 8.2.1 Anti-modernity 99 8.2.2 Life narrative 99 8.2.3 Empathy 99 8.2.4 Romanticism 100 8.2.5 Pictorial imagery 100 8.2.6 Bradford and London 101 8.2.7 London identities 102 8.3 Priestley's imagination and critiques in cultural geography 102 8.3.1 Post-phenomenology 103 8.3.2 Interconnectedness of places 103 8.3.3 More-than-representational theory 104 8.4 Potential Research Directions 104 8.4.1 Other contemporary geographical imaginations 105 8.4.2 Mapping Priestley's geographical imagination 105 8.4.3 Popular geographies and landscape awareness 105 8.4.4 Empathy in visual art 105 8.5 Priestley scholarship 106 Bibliography 107 v Illustrations Figure 1: Statue of J.B. Priestley in Bradford City Centre 1 Figure 2: Detail from Ordnance Survey Yorkshire West Riding sheets CCXVI.3 & CCI.15 published in 1908 (original scale 1:2500) showing where Priestley lived in Saltburn Place and Mannheim Road, Bradford 5 Figure 3: Heading of Priestley’s Bradford Pioneer articles 19 Figure 4: View of Bradford in the eighteen-eighties 22 Figure 5: Market Street, Bradford in the eighteen-nineties 23 Figure 6: View across Forster Square towards Kirkgate, Bradford in 1912 24 Figure 7: Detail from Ordnance Survey Yorkshire West Riding sheets CCXVI. 4 & CCXVI.8 published in 1908 (original scale 1:2500) showing Bradford City Centre 25 Figure 8: Photograph of path across Ilkley Moor by Herbert Whone 37 Figure 9: Theatre poster by Charles Buchel 50 Figure 10: View along Darley Street, Bradford, circa 1900 53 Figure 11: Swan Arcade looking towards Market Street 55 Figure 12: Bradford in the 1970s 56 Figure 13: Cartoon of Priestley from The Belle Vue Magazine, March 1930 58 Figure 14: View along Fleet Street in the 1920s 59 Figure 15: Cover of Angel Pavement 61 Figure 16: Cover of Angel Pavement 68 Figure 17: Detail from Ordnance Survey Middlesex sheet XVII.II published 1897 (original scale 1:2500) showing a central part of the City of London 77 1 Figure 1: Statue of J.B. Priestley in Bradford City Centre Chapter 1 Introduction Since 1986, Priestley’s enduring presence in Bradford has been symbolized by Ian Judd’s statue that shows him gazing towards City Hall apparently ruminating on his surroundings with his coat blowing in the wind (Figure 1)1. However, the setting of the statue is inappropriate since it looks towards modernistic buildings and amorphous road spaces. These resulted from a failure to value Bradford’s Victorian identity with its busy streets and imposing architecture, which Priestley described in some of his most significant work.