Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

John Hampson, the Woolfs, and the Hogarth Press
in prison” in a letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell (L4 347). Several concurrent Hogarth Press
titles suggest an interest in the working class, the most obvious Margaret Llewelyn Davies’s
Life as We Have Known It: by Co-operative Working Women for which Virginia Woolf wrote
an “Introductory Letter” in which she lamented her status as merely a “benevolent spectator”
of working-class women’s lives (xxi). Possibly publishing Hampson’s novels provided
Woolf with an opportunity to do more than merely look on.
Hampson followed the success of Saturday Night with what appears to be at fi rst sight
a quite diff erent work of fi ction. An autobiographical novel, the early chapters of O Providence
are reminiscent of D. H. Lawrence’s short story “Rocking Horse Winner” (1926).
While Hampson’s protagonist, the delicate, quaint, youngest child of the Stonetun family,
Justin, begins his life in luxury at Five Ways, a collapse in his father’s business investments
forces the family into poverty. Th us, later scenes take place against a background of poverty
and hardship.
Again Hampson pays careful attention to the working classes in this story of a Midlands
childhood. 7 While Justin’s mother at fi rst despises both the new place and people
to which her change of fortune has reduced her, Justin, here perhaps echoing Hampson’s
own tastes, fi nds that poverty brings him closer to his family and that his imagination has
much more to work with in a bustling town than in the stifl ing nursery (108).
Family relationships are central to this second Hogarth Press novel as they were to
Hampson’s fi rst. But O Providence is a more diffi cult novel than Saturday Night at the Greyhound
and the fact that the Woolfs recommended it be published after Saturday Night,
even though the two were submitted simultaneously, suggests that they realized they were
taking a risk. As in the earlier novel there is a threatening, cruel undercurrent to the work,
but in O Providence it exists in a broader and deeper fashion. Th e extreme alienation
experienced by the young protagonist on top of the hostile and stifl ing quality of home
and family adds a level of discomfi ture to the reading of this novel that was not there in
Saturday Night. Hampson includes challenging scenes such as the molestation of Justin
and a precocious young girl by a drunk in an unfamiliar park. Th e novel is clear about
Justin’s homosexuality, Justin’s youth, as Mercer Simpson has suggested, making it possible
to include this (28).
Again the style is spare and angular, the novel built on “short unconnected sentences,”
to the degree that William Plomer warns Hampson in a letter that despite his own
distaste for “the sort of ‘fi ne writing’ & pretentiousness which abounds in these days,” he
fi nds Hampson’s work not “quite ‘literary’ enough,” and that the “staccato” style of this
second longer novel renders it almost “too unadorned.” Th is second longer novel, as Mercer
Simpson suggests, is “uneven” and “formless,” in comparison with its tighter and more
energetically paced predecessor (17).
Surrealist John Armstrong designed the cover for O Providence. Th e book was marketed
as a follow up to the “remarkabl[y] success[ful]” Saturday Night. While initial sales
were good, this second novel failed to perform as successfully, perhaps a factor in the
Woolfs’ decision not to continue publishing Hampson. Other reasons might have been
Lehmann’s break with the Woolfs in 1932 and a shift in emphasis at the press onto leftist
politics, as well, of course, as the Woolfs’ perception that the work was inferior in quality
to Hampson’s earlier novels.
Perhaps one of the most intriguing aspects of the Hampson-Woolf relationship is the
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