Novel: Angel Pavement

Overview
J.B. Priestley’s Angel Pavement (1930) is a panoramic London novel set largely inside a small City firm, Twigg & Dersingham, that trades in veneers and inlays. It captures the fretful rhythm of late-1920s capitalism on the brink of collapse, following clerks, typists, and proprietors as a single charismatic outsider seems to rescue them from decline, only to expose the brittleness of their hopes. With sly comedy and social sympathy, Priestley maps how money, personality, and chance entwine in the lives of ordinary people.

Setting and Premise
The novel unfolds on and around a narrow City street called Angel Pavement, a metonym for the mercantile maze of offices, tea shops, and counting houses. Trade is slack, competitors are ruthless, and credit is fragile. Into this anxious world steps Mr. Golspie, a smooth, foreign-born operator from the Baltic, promising access to cheap timber and new markets. He talks his way into a place at Twigg & Dersingham just as the firm’s partners feel the ground sliding under them.

Plot Summary
Golspie’s arrival brings a gust of confidence. Mr. Dersingham, harried by expenses and a socially aspiring wife, seizes on the prospect of revived business. The staff, Mr. Smeeth, the conscientious chief clerk; Miss Matfield, the bright but weary typist; and Harold Turgis, a lonely junior, sense the office atmosphere change. Orders pick up, bills are paid, and for a moment the firm seems rescued from the slow drag of insolvency.

Golspie installs himself as indispensable, charming suppliers, coaxing clients, and insinuating himself into each employee’s private drama. His daughter, Lena, drifts through this world with a teasing, careless glamour that unsettles the men around her. Turgis, painfully isolated, falls headlong for her. Their encounters, flirtations that blur into humiliations, lay bare his craving for affection and his inability to read the rules of an urbane, transactional city. The episode culminates in shame and anger, leaving Turgis more adrift than before.

Dersingham, meanwhile, clings to Golspie’s promises even as his household finances and social standing feel increasingly precarious. Miss Matfield tests small avenues of escape, new acquaintances, a change of style, a tentative openness to romance, only to find that the office’s gravitational pull and the period’s constricted prospects tug her back. Smeeth embodies the anxious backbone of the firm: cautious, dutiful, status-conscious, forever counting coins and small slights, trying to protect his family from a world that will not steady itself.

As confidence grows, Golspie engineers larger deals, advances are taken, stock moves, papers are signed. Then, suddenly, he and Lena vanish. The promised cargoes are not what they seemed, the money has slipped through clever gaps, and the firm stands exposed to creditors and the cold air of reality. The staff reel, not only at the financial loss but at the collapse of the quiet narratives they were weaving around their work.

Themes and Tone
Priestley blends social comedy with a humane realism. The novel anatomizes the city as a machine of dependency, where small clerks’ fortunes hinge on the charm and cunning of a single man. It studies class anxieties, the seductions of quick prosperity, and the loneliness of urban life, especially for those who lack the polish to play its games. Golspie personifies the modern confidence trick, audacity and opportunity disguised as enterprise, while the office shows how ordinary people absorb shocks, adjust, and go on.

Ending and Significance
In the aftermath of Golspie’s disappearance, Twigg & Dersingham faces ruin. Yet the closing mood is not melodramatic collapse but a chastened persistence. Priestley leaves his characters poised between resignation and resilience, their illusions punctured but their routines intact. Angel Pavement stands as a keen portrait of interwar London commerce, catching the moment just before the deeper storms of the 1930s, and finding drama not in grand gestures but in the fragile hopes of people who live by ledgers, lunch hours, and the next small break.