Vol. 27 No. 6 · 17 March 2005
pages 28-29 | 3203 words
Bowling along
Kitty Hauser
- In Search of H.V. Morton by Michael Bartholomew
Methuen, 248 pp, £18.99, April 2004, ISBN 0 413 77138 5
Between 1925 and the mid-1960s, H.V. Morton sold nearly three million copies of his travel books, from The Heart of London (1925) to A Traveller in Italy (1964). Most popular of all were his volumes on England, especially In Search of England, first published in 1927 and already in its 29th edition by 1943. If his books now end up in charity shops alongside discarded copies of the F-Plan Diet or John Seymour’s Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency, it’s because the shimmering and peaceable ‘England’ he promised is not, after all, to be found waiting at the end of a deserted lane, or, if it were, we’d never know, because we’d be stuck in a traffic jam on the M5.
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Letters
Vol. 27 No. 8 · 21 April 2005
From Christopher Small
George Orwell’s 1939 novel, Coming Up for Air, is in part a parody and critique of In Search of England, the stereotyped and hugely popular travel book which, as Kitty Hauser writes, made H.V. Morton’s name and fortune between the wars (LRB, 17 March). Bowling, a fat, vulgar commercial traveller (the narrator of his own story, uniquely in Orwell’s fiction), drives off, like Morton, in his two-seater in search of ‘England’. For Bowling this is the small country town of Lower Binfield (Morton’s ideal village was Binsted). He finds everything horribly spoiled: all the comforting things he remembers have gone bad and the illusion of a traditional, largely rural England, which Morton later promoted for the wartime Ministry of Information, is shattered. Bowling’s reaction seems to have been much like Morton’s: a pathological hatred of the ‘spoilt lower classes’ and the ‘flabby’, pansy, sandal-wearing socialists who have desecrated his boyhood haunts. He stops short of Morton’s loathing of Jews and negroes; but that reminds us that Bowling is, in many respects, speaking for Orwell himself.
Christopher Small
Isle of Lismore, Argyll
