Novel: Let the People Sing

Overview
J.B. Priestley’s 1939 novel Let the People Sing is a panoramic social comedy with a campaigning heart, set in a northern English industrial town on the eve of war. It follows ordinary townsfolk as they rally to defend their right to shared culture, specifically, the continued life of their municipal concert hall, against small-time corruption, philistinism, and the dead hand of officialdom. Priestley blends satire and warmth to argue that communal music, amateur arts, and local fellowship are not frills but the lifeblood of a decent civic society.

Setting and Premise
The town, grimy and bustling, is recognizably one of Priestley’s composite northern boroughs: soot-streaked mills, tramlines, corner pubs, and a civic center whose pride is its concert hall. As budgets tighten and speculative interests circle, the hall is declared wasteful, unfashionable, even unsafe. A coalition of councillors, businessmen, and compliant press voices begins to push for closure and redevelopment. The impulse is presented as modern and efficient, but its effect is to silence the spaces where the town meets itself.

Plot
The threat to the hall sets off intersecting storylines among a broad cast. An elderly choirmaster, a school music teacher, and leaders of an amateur choral society vow to fight. A young reporter, newly alert to the gap between civic slogans and civic reality, exposes backroom deals and the sleepy malice of committees. Mill workers and shopkeepers who rehearse in drafty rooms, a brass band whose uniforms are worn thin, and a retired music-hall performer past his peak all find fresh purpose in the campaign.

Opposition is sly rather than grand: a tight-fisted finance chairman who speaks in figures but not feelings; a newspaper magnate who sneers at “highbrow” culture while profiting from scandal; a town clerk who hides indifference behind procedures. When the campaigners propose a public concert as proof of the hall’s value, they meet delays, inspections, and a sudden ruling that the building cannot be used. The battle shifts to the streets and the airwaves; sympathetic clergy offer back rooms, pub landlords spare their function rooms, and a popular radio singer with local roots agrees to appear.

The novel’s climax centers on a night when authorities attempt to stop a mass gathering. Doors are barred and power fails, but the crowd stays. One voice begins a familiar hymn, then another joins, and soon the hall and square resound with unaccompanied singing, work songs, anthems, and tunes that cross class and generation. Officials quail at the spectacle of peaceful, irresistible solidarity. The political tide turns, the press pivots, and the council retreats. The hall is reprieved, not by decree alone but by the unmistakable fact of a town that insists on being heard.

Characters
Priestley draws a gallery of recognizable types without reducing them to caricature: the pragmatic mayor who bends when he hears his constituents; the self-important clubman out of his depth; an idealistic schoolgirl discovering her voice in the chorus; an unemployed man who becomes a tireless organizer. Their personal arcs are modest but telling, stitched into the wider fabric of communal action.

Themes
The novel champions popular culture as a democratic good, not a luxury. It attacks the cozy alliance of money, bureaucracy, and cynicism that smothers public life, and it celebrates the ordinary heroism of people who gather to make something beautiful together. Beneath the humor lies pre-war anxiety: a sense that if a community cannot defend its own song, it will be defenseless against harsher forces.

Style and Tone
Written with Priestley’s trademark blend of genial humor, sharp observation, and lightly worn socialist conviction, the prose moves briskly among households, meeting rooms, workshops, and rehearsal spaces. The effect is choral in itself: individual voices converging into a single, resonant statement that the town’s spirit lives wherever people lift it together.