The most astutely symbolical novel of igth century England was Dickens' Great Expectations. Young Pip. packing his bags for London to become a gentleman, fulfilled the dream image of a confident and ambitious middle class. Since 1954, an equally symbolic novel has come to stand for the small expectations and raddled nerves of null century Britain — and especially its middle-class intellectuals—under the Welfare State. The novel: Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim.
Its hero, James Dixon, is a barely competent provincial instructor in medieval history who has no desire to be a gentleman; he wants merely to be a safe and smug academic bureaucrat. His character has not been tempered on the playing fields of Eton, and he is as proud of his beer tastes as he is irritated by his beer income. To hold on to his teaching post he becomes involved in a series of tawdry, inept and sometimes hilarious maneuvers. This display of self-serving clownmanship has catapulted his saga through 18 printings and left countless Britons alternately fuming and guffawing.
Lucky Jim's 35-year-old creator is foremost among a group of postwar writers, e.g., John Wain, John Osborne, Thomas Hinde, Peter Towry, John Braine, who have given British writing in the '50s a specific trend and a unique temper.
In their hands the old school tie has become a garrote for genteel traditions. Moral and political neutralists, they expend their limited energies avoiding social commitments. As writers, they have taken fhe drawing-room comedy and turned it into kitchen-sink satire. As a new social breed, they have spearheaded the revolt of the Non-U's (for Non-Upper Class), a petty intelligentsia of teachers, technicians, journalists, veterinary surgeons and welfare officers, characterized (in the words of one critic) by "their long-playing records and their ponytail-haired wives." Drab, insular and irritable, the "new men" suggest that, in the semi-Marxist Welfare State, it is the people who wither away.
In Merrie England. Although Lucky Jim took the Somerset Maugham Award, the grand "Old Party" of British letters loosed a choleric blast at the "whitecollar proletariat." Said old (83) Somerset Maugham: "They do not go to the university to acquire culture, but to get a job, and when they have got one. scamp it ... Their idea of a celebration is to go to a public house and drink six beers. They are scum."
Novelist C. P. Snow (The New Men) issued a prompt rejoinder as to why the kept canaries of the Welfare State warble such sour notes from their badly gilded cages: "Lucky Jim will not accumulate enough money to change his way of life. He is never going to starve, but he cannot have a dramatic rise in the world ... It is an unexpected result of the Welfare State that it should make the social pattern not less rigid but much more so."