Liza of Lambeth,W. Somerset Maugham's first novel, offers insight into the everyday lives ofworking class Londoners at the turn of the twentieth century. Liza Kemp is aneighteen-year-old girl working in a factory in the Lambeth slum along London'sVere Street. As Liza enters into a misguided affair with an older, married man,Jim Blakeston, the novel reveals the tragedies and abuses suffered by thoseliving in poverty. A mood of subdued acceptance of one's life conditionsprevails in this novel, which sparked the literary ...
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Liza of Lambeth,W. Somerset Maugham's first novel, offers insight into the everyday lives ofworking class Londoners at the turn of the twentieth century. Liza Kemp is aneighteen-year-old girl working in a factory in the Lambeth slum along London'sVere Street. As Liza enters into a misguided affair with an older, married man,Jim Blakeston, the novel reveals the tragedies and abuses suffered by thoseliving in poverty. A mood of subdued acceptance of one's life conditionsprevails in this novel, which sparked the literary career of one of England'smost successful authors of the twentieth century.
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Sommerset Maugham s' first novel, "Liza of Lambeth" (1897) portrays the life of the working class in the famous London area of Lambeth. I read the book after reading another novel set in Lambeth, George Gissing's "Thyrza", written in 1887 and describing a doomed love affair between a young working class woman, Thyrza Trent, and her would-be suitor, the well-to-do Walter Egremont. Maugham was an admirer of Gissing. The two novels, both products of the late Nineteenth Century, were written ten years apart, with settings also roughly ten years apart. It was fascinating to reflect upon their similarities and differences.
Lambeth and its inhabitants are recognizably similar in both "Thyrza" and "Liza of Lambeth" as the two authors both had an intimate knowledge of the streets. Gissing spent hours walking the Lambeth streets while Maugham was an intern in a Lambeth hospital when he wrote his book. Both writers bring a sense of realism to their description of working class life. But the two novels could not be more different in style. Gissing wrote a long Victorian three-decker full of characters and subplots and written in his own personal and extended narrative voice. In contrast, "Liza of Lambeth" is short, focused, and easy to read. Maugham writes in a more detached voice than does his predecessor. In its manner of presentation, Maugham's book is, much more than Gissing's, a modern novel.
Both Maugham and Gissing take a woman for their major character. Gissing's is the idealized Thyzra, just short of 17 when the book begins, while Maugham's is the far more earthy Liza Kemp. As is Thyrza, Liza has a harsh job of drudgery in a Lambeth factory. Liza lives with her drunken and demanding mother, but she appears at the outset to be spunky, outgoing, and satisfied with her life. A young man, Tom, courts her ardently, but Liza rejects him on grounds she does not love him in that way. Maugham's book includes a lively portrayal of working class behavior during a "bank holiday" that reminded me of a description of a bank holiday in "The Nether World", another of Gissing's books on working class life in London.
In its language and themes, "Liza of Lambeth" is more explicit than "Thyrza". As the book develops, Liza becomes sexually involved with Jim Blakeston, a 40 year old caddish married man with a large family. The couple attempt to carry out their liasion surreptitiously, but it is not long before the entire Lambeth community, including Tom, knows the truth. There are some raw scenes of fighting between Liza and Blakeston's wife, Mrs Blakeston, that would not be out of place in a more modern pulp novel. In the long denouement of the novel, Liza suffers a miscarriage.
Maugham uses a tough street-dialect of the area and time, which requires attention to follow. There is little of social criticism or commentary in the book. Unlike Gissing, with his varied and ambivalent responses, Maugham describes his characters, their working conditions, and their assumptions about class and about gender roles as he finds them, with a sense of irony but little social criticism.
"Liza of Lambeth" is a fast-paced novel that has been made into a musical and that still rewards reading. It is a much more accessible book than "Thyrza" which probes its characters and their environment with much more thought and depth. Gissing's novel has a strongly romantic and idealistic aspect which is absent from Maugham's. I enjoyed learning about Lambeth through both Gissing and Maugham and in exploring two different but related forms of literary realism.
