Play: The Linden Tree

Overview
J.B. Priestley’s 1947 play The Linden Tree is a domestic comedy-drama set in a provincial university town in the first austere years after the Second World War. It centers on Professor Robert Linden, a humane, stubborn historian in late middle age, who is pressed to accept compulsory retirement as part of a wave of postwar economizing. Across a single evening in his cramped, book-lined sitting room, Linden’s scattered family gathers and unwittingly stages a debate about the shape of the new Britain: the pull of security and consumption against duty, learning, and civic purpose.

Setting and Premise
The action unfolds in the Lindens’ university-owned house, which they may have to vacate if the professor retires. The home’s disorderly warmth, stacked with papers, tea-things, and worn furniture, contrasts with the tidy efficiencies being urged on him by administrators and several of his own children. News has arrived of retirement terms and a polite but firm expectation that Linden will step aside. The family converges: a son energized by peacetime money-making, a daughter married into bureaucratic advancement, another child weary from wartime sacrifice and nursing a wish for stability, and a youngest who still believes their father’s vocation matters to more than himself. Linden’s wife, pulled between affection for her husband and fear of hardship, wants clarity and rest after years of anxiety.

Plot
Visitors come and go, and each scene layers pressures onto the professor. Colleagues convey the university’s line about economies, while family members dangle tempting alternatives: a move to London with better comforts, a dabble in popular history that could pay handsomely, a graceful acceptance of pension and an end to worry. With each proposal, Linden listens and deflects, often with dry humor. He speaks of adult students, demobilized workers and clerks who attend his evening lectures, and insists that, at precisely this moment of reconstruction, abandoning humane learning would be a mistake.

Arguments sharpen as the practicalities intrude: if he refuses, the pension is at risk, and losing the house seems likely. Domestic crosscurrents flare, resentments about old sacrifices, envy of siblings’ prospects, generational misunderstandings. In quiet moments with his wife and the youngest child, Linden reveals both fatigue and resolve. The house slowly empties as the visitors head back to trains and late suppers. At the close, the professor decides to stand his ground. He will remain, teach if he can, and fight the retirement, even if it means discomfort. The choice is modest and stubborn, and it restores a measure of peace to the room. He is not triumphant, but he is certain.

Characters and Dynamics
Linden is genial, absent-minded, and morally clear, a man whose decency is his argument. His wife is the emotional weather of the house, shifting between exasperation and loyalty. The older children embody postwar trends: technocratic confidence, commercial swagger, and weary pragmatism. The youngest, still idealistic, acts as the play’s moral echo, hearing in her father’s decision something larger than family pride.

Themes and Symbolism
The play weighs security against vocation, bureaucracy against humane values, and the marketplace against common citizenship. The “linden tree” in the title, folded into the family name, suggests rootedness, shade, and continuity. Priestley uses it to counter the brisk winds of postwar modernity, arguing for patience, memory, and the slow work of education. The tone is affectionate and wry, more conciliatory than polemical, yet firm in its belief that a decent society depends on the unglamorous persistence of teachers like Professor Linden.