The Last Victorian
Playwright, novelist, critic, journalist, broad- caster, and sometimes prophet of doom—John Boynton Priestley has been all these things and many more. I'm glad to see that on his seventieth birthday a first-class study of our last great Vic- torian man of letters has been published—I. B. Priestley The Dramatist, by Gareth Lloyd Evans (Heinemann, 35s.). As Mr. Evans remarks in his book, Priestley has been reviled, admired, praised, and, more recently, ignored. Evans goes on to bring out the richness of much of Priest- ley's work--I've always thought it a great pity that this complex man is so 'often presented as either Jolly Jack or the pipe-smoking Cassandra of the post-war world. Little doubt, I'm afraid, that in an age of literary specialisation, Priestley's Johnsonian personality has been at an increasing discount. After all, what I 'suspect offends his critics most of all, the man can write.
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