A People's History of England by A.L.Morton

I mentioned this book in my last post, in connection with The Left Book Club.  I dug out my previous review of the book, reproduced below.

A find from the Salvation Army bookshop.   It cost 10p, but I had difficulty buying it even at that price, because the volunteer behind the counter showed a preference for putting it into the rubbish bin.  I expressed horror, and he tried to placate me by saying that actually it would be recycled.  I continued to declaim against pulping books.  Was it perhaps a literal interpretation of the wording on the cover: “Not For Sale to the General Public” – that caused his attempt to prevent me buying the book?

I persisted, and ultimately, giving me the impression that he was doing me a great favour, he let me pay 10p for it, so I shut up about the sin of pulping books in case he changed his mind.

It is true that, on the cover, the words "NOT FOR SALE TO THE PUBLIC" appear in bold capitals.  However, the book was published in 1938, and has passed through at least one second-hand store, as there is a price of 50p pencilled on the flyleaf.  I doubt whether such scruples were the cause of the problem, more the ancient and run-down condition of the tome, perhaps lowering the tone of the “Sally Ann”.

Anyway, I finished it.  Oh, how glad I was to come to the end.  I had to force myself to persevere to the last page.

The book, from which I had high hopes of learning what it was like to be a peasant or a woman throughout history, (under-represented, I agree, in conventional histories)  disappointed me hugely on this score.

It presents English history entirely in terms of class struggle.  This interpretation was muted in the first eighteen centuries of the Christian era, since the classes then struggling against their persecutors were, in turn, the upper middle, then the merchant and then the bourgeois class.

For none of these will a true leftie will have the slightest sympathy. In fact the author can barely disguise the disgust with which he is forced to acknowledge their role in paving the way for the only people worth anything, the industrial working class.

By the time we got to the industrial revolution, I was considering suicide.  I realised that I was suffering from survivor guilt.  It was hard, in fact, to understand quite how the human race has survived at all, given the poverty, exploitation and general misery described. One begged for mercy, as one traced the steps by which the ruling class tramped on, starved and extracted wealth from the rest of mankind.

The increasingly frequent cycles of bust, following increasingly short and fragile periods of boom, present a further cause for ongoing anxiety. It was only huge wars, World War One in particular, (the book was completed in 1937), which interrupted this process of terminal decline.  The economic theory underpinning the book insists that capitalism really does not have any future. But wait, isn't that what the left is really all about? The book is propaganda, after all, not history.   And only members of the “oppressed working classes” count as the “People” of the title.  Anyone who is not oppressed by a minority elite is not a person at all.   This is a book written in a single key – the tone-deaf propaganda of the hard left. 

Another Old Book

I picked this up in the local library.

People donate their old books for library funds.

This one was inscribed by its owner with a date of 1970.  I realised immediately that this owner was someone whose tastes I probably shared, and this was confirmed. The only other book I chose to buy that day had the same inscription.

I knew, as soon as I saw the book, that I would most probably buy it.  The reason was, that yellow jacket.


The yellow jacket was the house style of the publishing house Victor Gollancz. Throughout my teens and early twenties, you could still find plenty of yellow-jackets in second-hand book shops.  They are much thinner on the ground these days, hence my instant decision.



The book harks back to my early reading days.  Victor Gollancz was the first publisher of Vera Brittain's masterpiece, "Testament of Youth".  Victor Gollancz was the imprint of the influential Left Book Club,  (If you scroll down the page that this link opens, you will see a book called "The People's History of England - Not for Sale to the Public" I own a copy of this book, and my copy looks exactly like the one in the picture! Will try to find my review and post in due course).

Victor Gollancz was the nephew of Israel Gollancz, who was a founder member of the National Theatre, and a director of the Early English Text Society.

It wouldn't really matter what the book was about at this stage.

I scanned the jacket but it contained nothing about the plot, so I was really buying it "blind".

Have started the book, and am enjoying the sedate, steady old-fashioned pace which suits me very well.  I don't like modern dystopian thrillers (written in threes, almost always to publishers' orders, and often to a formula).

I like realism, and books written in the third person and the past tense.   This one is about a lawyer who encounters ethical problems.

The great thing about a second-hand book stall is that you can pick up a new interest.  I've already put in a request for a collection of Louis Auchincloss's short stories from a county library archive.

After a somewhat turbulent six months so far this year, I feel I am gaining some equilibrium by re-establishing an old custom - buying second-hand books.