"There are three basic rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately nobody knows what they are". 

Somerset Maugham, !874-1965, was prolific author of novels, short stories and plays, a number of which use his medical background. He was born in Paris, but lost his mother at 8 and his father at 10, so was educated by his uncle and aunt in the UK and at Heidelberg. He graduated in Medicine from St Thomas’ in London, and by 1897 had released his first popular novel, ‘Lisa of Lambeth’. By 1908 he had 4 plays running in London alone, and had made an impressive debut as a novelist. He married Sylvia Wellcome, daughter of Dr Barnardo. He spent little time with his wife and during the Great War, after a stint as an ambulance driver in France, was posted as a secret agent to Geneva then Petrograd, where his mission was to prevent the Bolshevik revolution(!) In the early 1920’s he went to South America and the Pacific with his (boy)friend Haxton, a time that generated many tales.

Sheppey 

In 1933 he wrote Sheppey, a play in some respects a return to his first novel, set in grimy, poor, cockney London. In 3 acts, it was dedicated to the famous actor John Geilgud. 

Sheppey was first performed in 1933, at the peak of the Great Depression in England. Maugham uses his character’s illness, apparently a hypertensive stroke resulting in a paranoid, religiose mania, as a mirror in which to reflect his society’s religious and secular value judgements related to poverty. Here is an (edited) conversation in his shop one day:

SHEPPEY (of the thief)  …e’ ‘adn’t ‘ad a bite for two days. You couldn’t ‘ardly ‘elp feeling sorry for him really.

MISS GRANGE  You’re too soft hearted, Sheppey. All this unemployment…I believe if you really want a job you can find one.

BOLTON Of course there’s a good deal of distress about nowadays, but there’s nothing to do about it.

MISS GRANGE  That’s what I says, there’s always been rich and poor in the world an there always will be.

SHEPPEY  It seems funny in a country like this there should be a lot of starving people.

MISS GRANGE  …Be thankful I says, and don’t worry about anybody else. 

…BOLTON You can earn good money because you’re steady and industrious. 

…SHEPPEY  But p’raps if they’d ‘ad my chances, they’d ‘ave been just as good as me. 

…MISS GRANGE  I hope you haven’t caught something sitting with all those dirty, unhealthy people. 

 …MISS GRANGE: Oh, don’t harp so. Why, you might be a Socialist to hear you talk.

                                  …My belief is that a lot of those people who sleep out on the Embankment sleep there because they really like it.

                                  …And if he’s hungry I should have thought he was better in prison than outside.

 

Sheppey is a high-street hairdresser nicknamed after an island he wants to retire to. After he wins a lottery, his family and friends find it hard to accept his new-found religious zeal and extravagant generosity towards the underprivileged, especially when he invites a thief and a prostitute to stay in their home. When Sheppey turns down a long-cherished partnership in the business that employs him, the doctor is called in and diagnoses high blood pressure and perhaps a stroke.

MRS MILLER  The doctor says the shock and the excitement of the winning all that money and Sheppey ‘aving such a ‘igh blood pressure and all, ‘e’s convinced it wasn’t just an ordinary faint in the shop, but that was a sort of stroke too.

 

Surreptitiously the family and their doctor arrange a consultation with a psychiatrist, as a result of which Sheppey is to be offered voluntary or compulsory hospitalisation.   

MRS MILLER  E’s one of  the ‘eads at Bethlehem.

ERNIE  The lunatic asylum!

MRS MILLER  E’s going to pretend ‘e’s just dropped in for a cup of tea...and they’re going to get him in conversation…I can’t bear the idea of letting my poor old man walk into a trap like that. 

 

Sheppey’s expectant son-in-law has his own view of reality: 

ERNIE  That’s absurd. Sanity means doing what everybody else does, and thinking what everybody else thinks. That’s the whole foundation of democracy. If the individual isn’t prepared to act the same way as everybody else there’s only one place for him and that’s the lunatic asylum.

 

To think about: Why is mental illness a good dramatic medium through which to explore the contradictions inherent in any complex economy? 

Shortly after the house-guests are moved back out, Sheppey dies in his favourite armchair. 

One major fault-line through Christianity in particular is exposed in the play. The philosophical division between punishing and forgiving the same crime is unresolved today, reflected, for example, in the activities of the Salvation Army (there but for the grace of God go I; the meek shall inherit the earth; the vision of human progress) versus those of pro-war evangelists (the poor will never change, they deserve God’s punishment for being lazy, the righteous are capitalist). In Sheppey the crime is poverty. 

SHEPPEY … sometimes I think the kingdom of ‘Eaven’s in me own ‘eart.

FLORRIE  You’re barmy.

SHEPPEY  Because I want to live like Jesus?

FLORRIE  Well, no one ever heard of anyone wanting to live like Jesus at this time of day? I think it’s just blasphemous. 

References and Further Reading 

Six Plays (1934) William Heinemann