WELLS AND PRIESTLEY

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 49, 27 February 1937, Page 27

WELLS AND PRIESTLEY

Like Mr. H.G. "Wells', Mr. J. B. Priestley finds much to interest him in the of a mechanised world, but not in the:same way. Wells revels in building us cities of glass and steel to show us the shape of things to come. Priestley shuns the'prospect. At any rate, the great metropolis in his new book, "They Walk in the City," proves rather a stumbling-block to his hero and heroine. He calls his story "a simple,romantic tale of ~two. simple yourig lovers, a story symbolic of all the difficulties that confront young people in the contemporary world." And the world in which he dumps them down is a land of giant cinemas, department stores, cocktail bars, and petrol ■ stations—"a mass production England cheapened by American commercial influences," as someone describes it. The reader will be, reminded strongly of "Angel Pavement." Mr. Priestly calls New York a "nightmare," and suggests that -English urban life has become too Americanised to be healthy.- And he dedicates his book to Mr. Wells'in "renewed exasperation, admiration; and affection," Presumably the feeling of exasperation has to do: with Mr. Wells's intemperate preoccupation -with- the intricacies of the mechanised world of the future.

r All dbwn one street he went without making,a sale. He determined to try a new method.. At the next house he came to, a frowsy female answered the knock. "Have you a Charles Dickens in your home?" he asked politely. "No!" snapped the-female. "Or a Robert Louis Stevenson?" "No!" "Or a Walter Scott?" continued the canvasser, hdpe dawning in his eyes. "No, we ain't*," said the woman sharply. "Arid what's more, I don't take in lodgers. ■"■■ Try next door; they do."—From "The Bookseller."