A Babylonian Touch

Susan Pedersen

• Buy‘We Danced All Night’: A Social History of Britain between the Wars by Martin Pugh
  Bodley Head, 495 pp, £20.00, July 2008, ISBN 978 0 224 07698 2

The Left Book Club edition of The Road to Wigan Pier, published in 1937 with a print run of more than forty thousand, had an inset of a dozen or so grainy photographs. They offered shocking visual confirmation of Orwell’s already shocking text. There were the bent figures scavenging for loose coal on slag heaps, the squashy-faced women and children crowded into damp basements, the cloth-capped unemployed men leaning against lampposts. These are the canonical images of the 1930s: seemingly a ‘devil’s decade’ of economic collapse and supine politics on which a revitalised postwar democracy resolutely turned its back.