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– GRUMBLING AT LARGE – what I am told is a “saurian eye” and a rumbling but resonant voice from which it is difficult to escape. Money could not buy a better grumbling outfit.’ This is from ‘The Grumbler’s Apology’, the opening essay in a 1949 volume called Delight, about the variety of things – 114 in number, varying from dancing to making stew – that bring him joy. Readers of Priestley’s novels love his characters, brought to life via their distinctive voices, including Dickensian quirks that make even villains appealing. Playgoers admire Priestley’s ingenious plots, generally likeable dramatis personae, strong messages. But with a handful of notable exceptions, his essays have tended to be more ephemeral. The essay defies classification, but a habitual essayist must have a vigorously singular voice – it came naturally to Priestley – to be permitted to say, as Hazlitt put it, ‘whatever passed through his mind’. Priestley’s output was prolific, even in his ­twenties. The essays translated into 15-minute broadcasts during World War II, when Priestley’s Postscripts were regarded as more powerful than Churchill’s broadcasts, and just as inspiring. In the 1950s, the pieces he wrote for Kingsley Martin at the New Statesman began to influence public opinion, especially his 1957 piece on why Britain should ban the bomb. He is still regarded as a founding voice of CND. Readers of the early essays in this collection will discover a younger Jack Priestley, not yet famous or polemical, an amiable, inquisitive fellow, curious about x
page 13
– Introduction – everything, prone to find magic in unexpected things. The display and artifice of his youthful essays places them in the Victorian tradition, animated by a talent to amuse. J. B. Priestley’s antecedents were proletarian – one grandfather worked at the mill, his grandmother’s family were silk weavers – but his father, Jonathan, had been sent to teacher training college. Jonathan Priestley ‘was the man Socialists have in mind when they talk about Socialism,’ Jack wrote, ‘but never joined the Labour Party.’ (Nor did Jack.) Priestley senior rose to be headmaster of an elementary school, the first in the country to provide meals for its pupils. Jack describes Bradford as ‘a city entirely without charm . . . but it has the good fortune to be on the edge of some of the most enchanting country in England.’ Enriched by the wool trade, the Bradford of his youth possessed all the progressive and cultural hallmarks of a flourishing Victorian city: two theatres, a permanent orchestra, two choral societies, two music-halls, three daily news­papers and wellstocked libraries. Having left school at sixteen, Jack was aware of this luck: ‘It was not that I went to the right sort of school, but that I was living in the right sort of town.’ Its very atmosphere encouraged intellectual growth. And with his articles and reviews for a local paper Jack Priestley could learn his craft, writing in his bedroom with its fierce little gas fire ‘that could not begin to warm the room without grilling your shins’. His day-job was as a clerk with Messrs Helm & Company xi

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– GRUMBLING AT LARGE –

what I am told is a “saurian eye” and a rumbling but resonant voice from which it is difficult to escape. Money could not buy a better grumbling outfit.’ This is from ‘The Grumbler’s Apology’, the opening essay in a 1949 volume called Delight, about the variety of things – 114 in number, varying from dancing to making stew – that bring him joy.

Readers of Priestley’s novels love his characters, brought to life via their distinctive voices, including Dickensian quirks that make even villains appealing. Playgoers admire Priestley’s ingenious plots, generally likeable dramatis personae, strong messages. But with a handful of notable exceptions, his essays have tended to be more ephemeral. The essay defies classification, but a habitual essayist must have a vigorously singular voice – it came naturally to Priestley – to be permitted to say, as Hazlitt put it, ‘whatever passed through his mind’. Priestley’s output was prolific, even in his ­twenties. The essays translated into 15-minute broadcasts during World War II, when Priestley’s Postscripts were regarded as more powerful than Churchill’s broadcasts, and just as inspiring. In the 1950s, the pieces he wrote for Kingsley Martin at the New Statesman began to influence public opinion, especially his 1957 piece on why Britain should ban the bomb. He is still regarded as a founding voice of CND.

Readers of the early essays in this collection will discover a younger Jack Priestley, not yet famous or polemical, an amiable, inquisitive fellow, curious about x

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