The Thammasat University Library has acquired a new book that should be useful for students interested in English literature, medical history, sociology, and related subjects.
Liza of Lambeth was the first novel written by the English author W. Somerset Maugham. At the time, Maugham was a medical student at a hospital in Lambeth, then a working-class district of London. The book tells of the short life of Liza Kemp, an 18-year-old factory worker.
Maugham later became known as a popular writer of fiction and plays as well as a world traveler. He repeatedly visited Siam as a tourist, and a suite at the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok is named in his honor.
The TU Library collection includes other books by and about W. Somerset Maugham.
As the publisher’s description page explains,
Following the publication of Liza of Lambeth, W. Somerset Maugham would go on to establish himself as one of the best-selling and most prolific novelists of the twentieth century. For all that Liza did not dramatize life in a thieves’ den or depict the poor as atavistic brutes, its honest treatment of working-class pastimes and appetites troubled middle-class readers as much as the bludgeonings and chivings of Arthur Morrison’s violent A Child of the Jago had one year before. Maugham vividly captured a working-class couple’s illicit romance and a neighborhood’s collective surveillance and punishment of the woman’s alleged promiscuity and the man’s marital infidelity. Today, the novel’s treatment of women’s experiences, working-class life, and health and medicine in the Victorian city are freshly relevant.
Not everyone admired Maugham. Possibly jealous of the numbers of books he sold, the novelist Virginia Woolf wrote to her sister in 1938 about an event where she saw a number of writers:
Then there was Somerset Maugham, a grim figure; rat-eyed; dead man cheeked, unshaven; a criminal I should have said had I met him on a bus.
Here are some thoughts by Maugham from books, some of which are in the TU Library collection. He tended to put his opinions in his novels, although it is up to readers to decide whether they agree or not with his statements:
If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.
- Strictly Personal (1941)
Now the world in general doesn’t know what to make of originality; it is startled out of its comfortable habits of thought, and its first reaction is one of anger.
- Great Novelists and Their Novels (1948)
People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise.
- Of Human Bondage (1915)
You will hear people say that poverty is the best spur to the artist. They have never felt the iron of it in their flesh. They do not know how mean it makes you. It exposes you to endless humiliation, it cuts your wings, it eats into your soul like a cancer. It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one’s dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank, and independent. […] There is nothing so degrading as the constant anxiety about one’s means of livelihood.
- Of Human Bondage (1915)
Life wouldn’t be worth living if I worried over the future as well as the present. When things are at their worst I find something always happens.
- Of Human Bondage (1915)
It’s no good trying to keep up old friendships. It’s painful for both sides. The fact is, one grows out of people, and the only thing is to face it.
- Cakes and Ale: Or, The Skeleton in the Cupboard (1930)
Hypocrisy is the most difficult and nerve-racking vice that any man can pursue; it needs an unceasing vigilance and a rare detachment of spirit. It cannot, like adultery or gluttony, be practised at spare moments; it is a whole-time job.
- Cakes and Ale: Or, The Skeleton in the Cupboard (1930)
The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes…
- Cakes and Ale: Or, The Skeleton in the Cupboard (1930)
I would sooner read a time-table or a catalogue than nothing at all. … They are much more entertaining than half the novels that are written.
- The Summing Up (1938)
There is only one thing about which I am certain, and this is that there is very little about which one can be certain.
- The Summing Up (1938)
Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.
- The Summing Up (1938)
I’ll give you my opinion of the human race in a nutshell… their heart’s in the right place, but their head is a thoroughly inefficient organ.
- The Summing Up (1938)
There is no explanation for evil. It must be looked upon as a necessary part of the order of the universe. To ignore it is childish, to bewail it senseless.
- The Summing Up (1938)
Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.
- The Summing Up (1938)
It’s so wonderful to shut out the world for a few hours. Rest, peace, silence, solitude. You would think they were luxuries that only the very rich can afford, and yet they cost nothing.
- Christmas Holiday (1939)
You know, a thing that has always struck me is people’s fiendish eagerness to give anyone away. They pretend it’s public spirit, I don’t believe a word of it; I don’t believe it’s even, as a rule anyway, the desire for notoriety; I believe it’s just due to the baseness of human nature that gets a kick out of injuring others. There’s a whole mass of people who can’t wait if they have the chance of doing down someone who’s trying to get away with anything.
- Christmas Holiday (1939)
Nothing in the world is permanent, and we’re foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we’re still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it. If change is of the essence of existence one would have thought it only sensible to make it the premise of our philosophy.
- The Razor’s Edge (1943)
In art honesty is not only the best but the only policy.
- The Razor’s Edge (1943)
A god that can be understood is not a god.
- The Razor’s Edge (1943)
It was not till quite late in life that I discovered how easy it is to say: “I don’t know.”
- A Writer’s Notebook (1946)
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)