This is Somerset Maugham’s first novel, the first publication in a writing career which went on to last over 60 years.
Maugham trained as a doctor for five year at St Thomas’s Hospital in Lambeth and saw at first hand the terrible poverty in the slums of the area, the drunkenness and the narrowness of working lives and expectations.
But this novel also tapped into a popular movement among the cultural elite, because the 1890s saw a wave of novels and factual books about working class poverty and the slums of London, such as the notoriously brutal and pessimistic A Child of the Jago by Arthur Morrison.
This is the cultural context for Maugham’s relatively brief (120 pages) tale of bright, vivacious Liza Kemp from the Lambeth slums and how she falls in love with another woman’s husband.
The plot
Liza is 18, a lively working class girl who lives with her widowed mother in Vere Street, Lambeth, off Westminster Bridge Road.
Everyone liked her, and was glad to have her company.
Liza works in a local factory. She dresses colourfully and is always the first to make a joke or start a sing-song. For all that she is, in reality, an underdeveloped teenager from the slums.
She looked at her own thin arms, just two pieces of bone with not a muscle on them, but very white and showing distinctly the interlacement of blue veins: she did not notice that her hands were rough, and red and dirty with the nails broken, and bitten to the quick.
Chapter one
The opening scene establishes her as ‘the pride of her alley’, the most confident, best-dressed young woman in the street, who all the men want to dance with. The scene where the young women dance to the music of an organ grinder and Liza finds herself by accident running into the arms of a tall dark stranger could be from a musical, could almost be from West Side Story (though with Victorian bustles and corsets).
Chapter two
This man is Jim Blakeston, tall, bearded and virile, who’s just moved into the street along with his fat wife and five kids.
‘E’s got a big family – five kids. Ain’t yer seen ‘is wife abaht the street? She’s a big, fat woman, as does ‘er ‘air funny.’
Meanwhile Liza has been pursued for some time by earnest young Tom, who works in another factory, earning a respectable 23 shillings (95p) a week.
It was a young man with light yellow hair and a little fair moustache, which made him appear almost boyish; he was light-complexioned and blue-eyed, and had a frank and pleasant look mingled with a curious bashfulness that made him blush when people spoke to him.
The pair had walked out together earlier in the year, but then Liza lost interest. Which doesn’t stop Tom pestering her.
Chapter three
Liza’s home life, i.e. her mother is an alcoholic who steals Liza’s wages and moans about her hard lot in life. Liza steps outside and is confronted by pale, shy Tom who invites her to come on a street outing to Chingford, but she says she can’t cos she doesn’t want to lead him on.
Liza walks over to her friend Sally’s house, and they banter, walk down to the bridge where Sally meets her young man and Liza walks back to the street alone, then comes across the new man, big strong tall bearded Tom, playing with two little kiddies on his knee, who cheekily asks her for another kiss. She gives him what for and strolls on only to be playfully attacked by some of the young boys, wrestling free and finally making it home in time to cook Sunday dinner.
Chapter four
Bank Holiday and the day of the big outing to Chingford leaving from the Red Lion pub. Liza initially says no but allows herself to be persuaded to go by the wheedling of her would-be lover, Tom when, possibly, it’s the fact that big Jim is also going on the outing which decides her.
Chapter five
The Bank Holiday outing to Chingford aboard a horse-drawn carriage, with a riotous crew of proles dressed up the nines and bantering fit to bust. Frequent stops at pubs, much drinking and then, at Chingford, a vast picnic.
Then they all set to. Pork-pies, saveloys, sausages, cold potatoes, hard-boiled eggs, cold bacon, veal, ham, crabs and shrimps, cheese, butter, cold suet-puddings and treacle, gooseberry-tarts, cherry-tarts, butter, bread, more sausages, and yet again pork-pies! They devoured the provisions like ravening beasts, stolidly, silently, earnestly, in large mouthfuls which they shoved down their throats unmasticated.
At one point couples paired off but Liza didn’t want to get caught with Tom, and preferred walking through the woods with Jim and his wife, so that Tom, after some arguing, went off in a huff. More beer, a hilarious donkey ride, a coconut shy, more beer and then the concertinas come out for a sing-song. Tom is too shy to take part, whereas Jim is a big confident singer. You can see where this is all heading.
The long ride home starts out with drunken singing but soon the couples sink into silence, many falling asleep. Liza is sitting between Tom and Jim and isn’t surprised that Tom sheepishly slips his arm round her waist, but is surprised when Jim slips his hand along her thigh to hold her hand. Torn between two lovers.
Back in Westminster Bridge Road the men peel off to the pub to have a last drink, Liza setting off with Sally and then finally walking by herself, when Jim comes running up the empty street behind her, and insists on having a good night kiss which she at first resists, and then acquiesces in.
Chapter six
Next day at the factor everyone’s nursing a hangover (Maugham doesn’t tell us what is produced in this factory). On the way home Liza and her friend Sally admire the poster for a play. Further on she passes Jim’s house, he strolls out and then along with her for a bit and asks her to the theatre.
Back at her house Liza sits on the stoop with Mrs Stanley whose husband was drunk the night before and battered her so badly she had to go to hospital. Still, he’s a sweetie when he’s sober (how many times have we heard that?) Liza finds her mind drifting off, at work and while chatting to Mrs Stanley, over and again to thoughts of big strong Jim.
Chapter seven
A few days later Sally is late for work and explains she was up late going to the play with her man, ‘Arry, and how Liza ought to get Tom to take her. Liza boils over with contradictory emotions, despising Tom, massively attracted to Jim but also angry with Jim because he hasn’t mentioned going to the theatre again, because he didn’t stroll round to her house the other night as he’d mentioned doing.
On the last night of the play’s run, the night Jim originally suggested taking her, she dolls herself up and goes along and finds Jim waiting for her outside the theatre, but determines to act affronted and offended. In they go to see the play and there’s a full description of the night’s complicated entertainment, with singers while they queue, the melodramatic play itself, which has an interval with a comic turn before returning to the climax.
Then they go for a drink near the theatre, walk back towards the river and sit on a bench between trees under the stars. Maugham describes Liza’s feelings of breathless helplessness, swooning against the big man. He puts his arm round her and they go for another drink at a more local pub, where Liza’s petrified they’ll be seen. Lastly they loiter at the side alley which leads into Vere Street, Jim kissing and her and then – I think – asking to have sex with her.
‘Liza,’ he said in a whisper, ‘will yer?’
‘Will I wot?’ she said, looking down.
‘You know, Liza. Sy, will yer?’
‘Na,’ she said.
He bent over her and repeated –
‘Will yer?’
She did not speak, but kept beating down on his hand.
‘Liza,’ he said again, his voice growing hoarse and thick – ‘Liza, will yer?’
To my astonishment Jim then punches her in the stomach?????
Suddenly he shook himself, and closing his fist gave her a violent, swinging blow in the belly.
‘Come on,’ he said.
And together they slid down into the darkness of the passage.
‘Whaaaaat?’ as my kids, mimicking American TV, like to say, ‘was that all about?’ Is it meant to be an accurate representation of working class playfulness? A violent blow? And she just accepts it??
Chapter eight
Liza awakes yawning and stretching luxuriously on Sunday morning. It seems they did have sex – ‘the delicious sensation of love came over her’ – in which case a) where, in the street? b) wasn’t she a virgin? Wouldn’t there have been some amount of pain and discomfort involved? And fear of pregnancy? And sexually transmitted disease?
Not in this story. Liza wakes, stretches, surveys her sordid little room littered with cheap knick-knacks with pleasure and pride, dresses and goes out into the street where she joins in with a gang of boys playing cricket, even includes Tom, passing by, in her spirit of wellbeing. Then she spies Jim’s daughter Polly emerging from his house, further down the street, and runs over to introduce herself, and then strolls along arm in arm with Polly on the family errand (which is to buy some ice cream).
‘I was just goin’ dahn into the road ter get some ice-cream for dinner. Father ‘ad a bit of luck last night, ‘e says, and ‘e’d stand the lot of us ice-cream for dinner ter-day.’
‘I’ll come with yer if yer like.’
That evening, after dark, Jim taps lightly at her window and she sneaks out of the house to meet him in the dark and kiss passionately.
Chapter nine
There follow weeks of happiness as the couple meet at various locations along Westminster Bridge Road where they stroll hand in hand, or in the park where they lie in the summer sunshine in one another’s arms, or, when September rains comes, she sits on his knee on benches on the Embankment, wrapped in his coat, safe in his enfolding arms, saying nothing, exchanging long passionate kisses.
But they are spotted, a few times that they’re aware of and probably plenty of others, with a predictable response from ‘the community’. Polly stops talking to her. Mrs Blakeston regards her with anger in her eyes. Jim reports that his wife has stopped talking to him. Clumps of women gossip about her, then go silent and frigid as she walks by. Even the boys she used to play cricket with start mocking her and her ‘husband’. Everyone knows about the affair.
Sally gets married to her ‘Arry. (I wonder if this is where they got the names for the movie from. I doubt it.) Their comic marriage service (with a few pints in the pub beforehand to stoke up courage and much sniggering and poking in the ribs by ‘Arry’s mates at the most suggestive parts of the service) brings the community together and is obviously designed – in its innocence and community – to provide a comparison with the bad feeling generated by Liza and Jim’s affair.
Chapter ten
November comes. It’s cold and foggy. Liza and Jim take to meeting in the warm waiting rooms of railway stations at Waterloo and Charing Cross, but they’re smelly and packed with people. One day Liza says she can’t go on like this. Jim asks her to move in with him. She says she can’t leave her mother. Anyway, they’d have to get married and live together decent-like, and they can’t do that while Jim’s married to his missus. And so on. They’re both miserable.
One day she bumps into Tom, who is nowadays embarrassed to talk to her. She reflects how simple and innocent life with him would have been and wishes he’d make a first move and they could be friends again, but he blanks her.
Sally is disgustingly happy with her married state for the first few weeks, but ‘Arry is a traditionalist who insists his missus stops working in the factory and stays in the kitchen and gets ready for baby care. He’s backed up by Sally’s mother who points out that she herself:
‘ad twelve, ter sy nothin’ of two stills an’ one miss.’
But quite soon ‘Arry starts beating Sally. Only when he’s had a few drops, mind. Otherwise he’s a sweetie, Sally tells Liza through her sobs.
Liza spends so long comforting Sally that she’s late for that night’s rendezvous with Jim. He emerges from a local pub, quite drunk and irritated that she’s late. For the first time they argue, she tries to restrain him from going back into the pub, he lashes out and, not really meaning to, catches her face with his arm. He is instantly full of contrition and apologies and they make up.
But next morning she has a black eye and passersby and loafers in the street call out all kinds of hilarious banter about her and her big-fisted lover. Mortified, LIza runs home sobbing tears of shame.
Chapter eleven
‘Arry’s behaviour gets worse.
”E ain’t wot I thought ‘e wos,’ she said. ‘I don’t mind sayin’ thet; but ‘e ‘as a lot ter put up with; I expect I’m rather tryin’ sometimes, an’ ‘e means well. P’raps ‘e’ll be kinder like when the biby’s born.’
Sally warns Liza that Mrs Blakeston (Jim’s wife) is gunning for her and, sure enough, Mrs B finally confronts Liza outside the Vere Street pub. Quite a crowd gathers to cheer her on as she accuses Liza of stealing her husband, breaking up a happy home, taking his money, and being nothing more than a common prostitute. She slaps Liza, then spits in her face, at which point it becomes a cat fight.
This is bitter fighting with teeth and claws and blows rained everywhere. The watching men ironically shout ‘Time’ and start to organise it as a proper fight, with seconds to refresh each of the fighters and time out between rounds. The women without exception back Mrs Blakeston, calling Liza a homebreaker and whore.
Suddenly Jim pushes through the crowd and forces the two women apart. Then another man pushes through. It is mild-mannered long-suffering Tom and he takes Liza home, up to her room and gently dabs away the blood and sweat with a wetted towel. She bursts into tears, says what a bad woman she is, how she is not worthy of him, apologises for snubbing him. Tom accepts it all and asks her if she will marry him. But she says no, she is not worthy, and then clinches it by telling him she thinks she’s in the family way. Taken aback for a moment, Tom girds his loins and still offers to marry her. But Liza still says no. He leaves. She sinks on her bed in utter misery.
Cut to Jim dragging his wife home (her nagging all the way) upstairs to their room where she refuses to shut up, bating him till he snaps and really violently attacks her. Daughter Polly tries to drag him off but Jim slaps her hard and sends her reeling across the room, so she runs downstairs to the two men and a woman having tea in the flat below. One man refuses to interfere between man and wife on principle and the other is scared of being hit, so it is the exasperated woman who runs upstairs to find Jim kneeling on his wife’s chest and beating and beating and beating her in the face.
The woman drags Jim off and shames him into stopping so, with one last vicious kick of his bleeding wife, Jim slams the door and goes to the pub.
Liza’s mum comes home to find her daughter bedraggled from the fight outside the pub, with a blood-stained face and one eye swollen up. She offers Liza a nip of spirits. In a long scene the two women get slowly drunk, Liza realising, for the first time, how spirits (previously she was a beer girl) make you feel just fine. I think we are witnessing the birth of an alcoholic – like mother, like daughter.
Chapter twelve
For a day and two nights Liza lies sweating and in increasing agony. Her mum thinks it’s her first whiskey hangover, but in facts it’s fever leading to a miscarriage. Mrs Kemp runs upstairs to fetch Mrs Hodges, who turns out to be a sort of nurse who helps with confinements. Only then do they fetch the doctor, who makes an examination and predicts that Liza is going to die. A crowd gather in the hallway outside. Tom pushes through into the room, and tries to make Liza hear him but she is unconscious. Later Jim comes, seizes her face in her hands and tries to apologise. She hears nothing as her life ebbs away.
What makes this chapter a tour de force is the fact that, amid Liza’s slow decline and death, Maugham depicts the friendship that quickly grows between whining, complaining Mrs Kemp (Liza’s mum) and the tidy, discreet, nodding Mrs Hodges from upstairs. They discuss which liquor is best and swap stories about coffins and undertakers, all the while sipping brandy – purely for medicinal purposes – as Liza slowly dies.
The cackling camaraderie of the two old ladies is brilliantly done, and much more vivid and eerie than all the love scenes which preceded it. They are like two alcoholic Norns, prattling inconsequentially while life drains out of the young girl on the bed.
Eventually, there is a dry rattle from Liza’s emaciated body and everyone in the room feels the cold, blanking presence of Death.
It’s a genuinely macabre and spooky ending, and it strongly anticipates Maugham’s gift for creating powerful scenes and prattling characters, which he would turn out to be able to express better in the stream of plays he wrote in the Edwardian era, than in his less-successful novels.
Social history
Well, they’re not as poor as the Jagos depicted in Arthur Morrison’s brutal novel, A Child of the Jago. In the Jago (an East End slum) nobody has a job so they literally starve unless they can steal something every day.
Whereas all the characters in Vere Street appear to have a job, and enough wages to splash around on drinking and eating at pubs. Nobody seems to think twice about going to the theatre, or splashing out on the Bank Holiday outing to Chingford. These are all things the inhabitants of Morrison’s novels could only dream of.
The women are baby factories. Jim’s wife has borne him nine children – of whom only five are still living – plus the miscarriage, and she’s pregnant again. Sally’s mum had twelve live births, two still-births and a miscarriage. Liza’s mum had 13 children. Obviously, only free birth control and sex education could begin to tackle this plague of babies.
Alcohol is the only escape (none of the mass-produced drugs of our era, or the addictive medicines like American opioids).
Men beat their wives, sometimes unconscious. Everyone accepts this, including the wives. (Compare with Kipling’s story about a beaten working class wife, ‘The Record of Badalia Herodsfoot’.)
Maugham’s style
There’s something very flat and mechanical and literal about Maugham’s descriptions. He doesn’t jump to the interesting bit of an action, as a narrator he doesn’t make any sudden moves, but describes every event flatly and factually, like an instructions manual.
The organ-man was an Italian, with a shock of black hair and a ferocious moustache. Drawing his organ to a favourable spot, he stopped, released his shoulder from the leather straps by which he dragged it, and cocking his large soft hat on the side of his head, began turning the handle. It was a lively tune, and in less than no time a little crowd had gathered round to listen, chiefly the young men and the maidens, for the married ladies were never in a fit state to dance, and therefore disinclined to trouble themselves to stand round the organ.
The text is marked by the heaviness of phrasing which was never really to leave him, as well as the occasional odd infelicity of word order.
The dancers stopped to see the sight, and the organ-grinder, having come to the end of his tune, ceased turning the handle and looked to see what was the excitement.
Wouldn’t that be better as ‘what the excitement was’ – or the more flowing ‘what was causing all the excitement’? ‘Stilted’ might describe the relationship between young William and his language.
‘Look at ‘er stockin’s!’ shouted another; and indeed they were remarkable, for Liza had chosen them of the same brilliant hue as her dress, and was herself most proud of the harmony.
He was sitting on a stool at the door of one of the houses, playing with two young children, to whom he was giving rides on his knee.
On every pages there are sentences which make you stumble and choke a bit. Compare and contrast with the bounding fluency of the writer I’ve just been reading, E.W. Hornung and his high-spirited Raffles stories.
Raffles had been leaning back in the saddle-bag chair, watching me with keen eyes sheathed by languid lids; now he started forward, and his eyes leapt to mine like cold steel from the scabbard.
Exciting and melodramatic, Hornung is always zeroing in on the vivid look and gesture. Maugham is the exact opposite, describing mundane details in a very mundane style.
It really seemed an age since the previous night, and all that had happened seemed very long ago. She had not spoken to Jim all day, and she had so much to say to him. Then, wondering whether he was about, she went to the window and looked out; but there was nobody there. She closed the window again and sat just beside it; the time went on, and she wondered whether he would come, asking herself whether he had been thinking of her as she of him; gradually her thoughts grew vague, and a kind of mist came over them. She nodded. (Chapter 8)
On the plus side, Maugham’s prose is remarkably free of the facetiousness and irony of a writer like Arthur Morrison who, in his stories of slum life, is addicted to sometimes archaic and ponderous phraseology.
Scarce was it dark when the Dove-Laners, in a succession of hilarious groups – but withal a trifle suspicious – began to push through Mother Gapp’s doors. (A Child of the Jago, chapter 22)
By contrast Maugham’s prose is – for its period – surprisingly clean and streamlined.
Bank Holiday was a beautiful day: the cloudless sky threatened a stifling heat for noontide, but early in the morning, when Liza got out of bed and threw open the window, it was fresh and cool. She dressed herself, wondering how she should spend her day; she thought of Sally going off to Chingford with her lover, and of herself remaining alone in the dull street with half the people away. She almost wished it were an ordinary work-day, and that there were no such things as bank holidays. (Chapter 4)
Compared to the elaborate facetiousness and sprinkling of archaisms in Morrison or Wells, this is the streamlined prose of the future. In her brilliant biography of Maugham, Selina Hastings points out that he deliberately chose the style of the French realists, of Zola and especially Maupassant:
I had at that time a great admiration for Guy de Maupassant…who had so great a gift for telling a story clearly, straightforwardly and effectively.
(Liza of Lambeth‘s composition, publication and reception are discussed on pages 53 to 57 of Hastings’s biography, including the accusation that he had plagiarised some of it from A Child of the Jago.)
Censorship
When I read A Child of the Jago I was very struck by the remark of Robert Blatchford, a contemporary socialist activist, whose review of the book is included in the appendices and who said A Child of the Jago was hopelessly unrealistic for two glaring reason:
- it omitted the fierce swearing which the underclass used incessantly
- it omitted sex
Maugham addresses the issue of swearing in the text, calmly explaining that due to the censorship he cannot reproduce working class speech:
That is not precisely what she said, but it is impossible always to give the exact unexpurgated words of Liza and the other personages of the story, the reader is therefore entreated with his thoughts to piece out the necessary imperfections of the dialogue. (Chapter 1)
‘Oh, you ——!’ she said. Her expression was quite unprintable; nor can it be euphemised. (Chapter 1)
‘I know wot yer mean, you —— you!’ Her language was emphatic, her epithets picturesque, but too forcible for reproduction. (Chapter 2)
‘Bli’me if I speak to ‘im again, the ——.’ (Chapter 7)
‘Well, I think you’re a —— brute!’ She felt very much inclined to cry. (Chapter 7)
‘You’ve come in at last, you ——, you!’ snarled Mrs. Kemp, as Liza entered the room. (Chapter 8)
‘I tell yer I shan’t shut up. I don’t care ‘oo knows it, you’re a ——, you are!’ (Chapter 11)
‘Be quiet!’ he said, and, closing his hand, gave her a heavy blow in the chest that made her stagger.
‘Oh, you ——!’ she screamed.
Fill in the blanks. Are they just ‘damn’, ‘bastard’ and ‘bitch’? Or something much worse? (In fact these blanks cant be concealing the word ‘bitch’ because ‘bitch’, to my surprise, is actually spelled out in chapter 11.)
As to the sex, because Maugham’s subject is several love affairs so there are numerous moments of, generally chaste, physical contact between the sexes, with strong hints of something more. On the Chingford outing ‘Arry boldly puts his arm round Sally’s waist, Tom tries to put his arm round Liza’s waist (‘Keep off the grass’, she banters).
On the tense night when, as far as I can tell, Liza loses her virginity, there is a heavily symbolic moment when Liza puts her hand on a bollard and Jim puts his big strong one on top and refuses to move it, despite her pleas.
And this bollard scene is full of feverish descriptions of Liza’s feelings as she alternately rebelling against Jim, and then swoons against him overcome by the sex urge, eventually looking up into his face to be kissed.
So there is much more treatment of the sex instinct in Maugham than in Morrison, although the cultural censorship of the time still meant he can’t possibly describe anything like actual love making. The couple go off into the night and then… Liza awakes luxuriously in bed, thinks of Jim and ‘the delicious sensation of love came over her’. The reader is left to fill in the gaps.
Dialogue
A lot of the book is in dialogue form. Is this a good depiction of working class London speech from 1897?
Leaning against the wall of the opposite house was Tom; he came towards her.
”Ulloa!’ she said, as she saw him. ‘Wot are you doin’ ‘ere?’
‘I was waitin’ for you ter come aht, Liza,’ he answered.
She looked at him quickly.
‘I ain’t comin’ aht with yer ter-day, if thet’s wot yer mean,’ she said.
‘I never thought of arskin’ yer, Liza—after wot you said ter me last night.’
His voice was a little sad, and she felt so sorry for him.
‘But yer did want ter speak ter me, didn’t yer, Tom?’ she said, more gently.
‘You’ve got a day off ter-morrow, ain’t yer?’
‘Bank ‘Oliday. Yus! Why?’
‘Why, ’cause they’ve got a drag startin’ from the “Red Lion” that’s goin’ down ter Chingford for the day—an’ I’m goin’.’
‘Yus!’ she said.
He looked at her doubtfully. (Chapter 3)
Whether it is quite accurate or not, there’s certainly a lot of it, I’d estimate that more of the book is dialogue than descriptive prose.
This clearly prefigures Maugham’s success as a playwright in the years ahead, particularly the sombre final scene where Liza lies dying and the two old biddies drink together and swap inanities. It feels like it is on stage, a simple but very effective scene.
And the turns of phrase
Maugham uses one or two Cockney turns of phrase which seem to have disappeared without trace, but deserve to be remembered.
‘Two pints of bitter, please, miss,’ ordered Jim.
‘I say, ‘old ‘ard. I can’t drink more than ‘alf a pint,’ said Liza.
‘Cheese it,’ answered Jim. ‘You can do with all you can get, I know.’
Me an’ ‘Arry, we set together, ‘im with ‘is arm round my wiste and me oldin’ ‘is ‘and. It was jam, I can tell yer!’
‘Swop me bob, ‘e’s gone and lorst it!’
You ‘it ‘er back. Give ‘er one on the boko.’
‘When a man’s givin’ ‘is wife socks it’s best not ter interfere.’
Related links
Somerset Maugham’s books
- Somerset Maugham reviews
Books & Boots 