John Boynton Priestley was a fecund but second-rate man of letters who was lucky. In 1929 he published what he called a picaresque novel, The Good Companions, about a jolly troupe of travelling entertainers. Written deliberately against the fashion of the time, it was an unexpected best-seller, and put him on the road to becoming a public figure. During the Second World War, when he made morale-boosting broadcasts for the BBC, it seemed that everyone in Britain knew about J. B. Priestley and his tweed jacket and his pipe, and his large, avuncular, baggy face. But not everyone was fond of him. George Orwell placed him among Communist sympathizers who could be “very dangerous” because of their public position. This, however, was an extravagant opinion. Like many of his contemporaries, Priestley was one of the soft-headed bourgeois Left, harboring a streak of contempt for the working class while flattering them with sentimental praise. His best-seller had given him the image of a jovial “good companion” when in fact he was a rough-edged Yorkshireman, apt to be cantankerous and self-centered, not to say arrogant. He certainly had an overblown idea of his talent, and his literary pose of bluff common sense did not conceal a coarse Grub Street sloppiness in the style and content of his writing.

These qualities are abundantly present in English Journey, re-issued by University of Chicago Press (!) in a “Jubilee” edition, illustrated (as the original was not) by eighty 1930s vintage