London Belongs to Me (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's daily session limit. I felt utterly steeped in the murk and dinginess of pre-war London, and the period details of Lyons’ Corner Houses, trams, and the depictions of London’s once very distinct neighbourhoods were a delight to read.

You will not find it on a map, but there would be no prizes for working out that Collins intended it to be located in the quadrant of streets bounded by Kennington Park Road, Camberwell New Road, and Walworth Road, an area which, despite its refined obscurity, holds a unique literary pedigree for it was right across the road (in the ‘Holland Grove beat’) that Conan Doyle set the scene of Sherlock Holmes’s first appearance (the murder of Enoch J Drebber in A Study In Scarlet). There is one major difference with respect to Sillitoe’s vernacular novels: his characters are resolutely, rebelliously, proletarian; but the residents of 10 Dulcimer Street, especially the landlady, wield their shabby genteel (with the accent on the former adjective) lower middle class manners like weapons, and keep their proverbial aspidistras flying like battle colours. London Belongs To Me is readable because it reflects the experiences of ordinary Londoners as well as those of the better off. Ted, Mr Josser’s married son, personifies mediocre respectability: on becoming manager of the Co-op hardware department – one of Orwell’s ‘five-to-ten-pound-a-weekers’ – he thinks his six pound five a week at thirty-four is as good as it gets (Doris gets four as a typist and Josser Senior two for his pension). Percy is in love with the Jossers' daughter and turns to crime to raise money to impress her with, but he bungles a car theft and finds himself accused of murder.There is the money counting, terrified of poverty landlady, inhabiting the meanest room in the house so she can let the rest And there is also another room to let, waiting on a new tenant . small oily mermaids (reduced to) only tiny white fragments left clinging to the ingenious spring framework of fine bones’. The novel touches on the lives of all the residents of 10 Dulcimer Street, with a number of sub-plots intertwined throughout, but there is no central character or single continuous plot. I was attracted by its newness, its title – I love London-based writing – and its cover photograph, a street scene by the Austrian photographer Wolf Suschitzky.

Her face perpetually made up in a doll-like mask, she forces her way into the lives of the inhabitants of Dulcimer Street, never one to miss the opportunity for a gossip, or a free meal, living hand to mouth as she does since the boards have given her up. But somehow or other it remains London, with the buses that cruise up Park Lane twinkling through the railings, and the air filled with the roar and rustle of innumerable wheels. London Belongs to Me was a massive popular success when first published in 1945, selling not far off a million copies.Mrs Woolf, wife of the manager, is a very celebrated author and, in her own way, more important than Galsworthy. Some of the data that are collected include the number of visitors, their source, and the pages they visit anonymously. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Minor issues present such as mild cracking, inscriptions, inserts, light foxing, tanning and thumb marking. The Grass arena by John Healy has one from Daniel Day-Lewis on it and Robert McFarlane has provided one for John Christopher’s The Death of Grass.