As the anonymous reviewer of Liza of Lambeth upon its 1897 release astutely observed, Somerset Maugham’s secret talent was that he could write about “slums, not probably as they are, but as they seem to the casual observer, and he can describe vigorously and effectively.” Thus, the tragic story arc of 18-year-old London factory worker Liza Kemp is conveyed through a series of character sketches which perfectly delineate a working-class world which may not actually resemble reality all that much but resembles an idea most readers will have of that reality. Perception of the truth is rampant in all subsequent novels (and short stories) of Maugham which trace their origin back to this initial effort.
What has made the fiction of Maugham so eminently readable that he became one of the most popular writers of the 20th century is that his stories seem real in a way that doesn’t seem like a writer consciously making an effort toward achieving realism. Maugham’s novels, including his very first one—Liza of Lambeth—achieve their satisfactory perceptual level of seeming realistic for an entirely different reason: much of them mostly likely are deeply steeped in truth. W. Somerset Maugham’s stock-in-trade as a writer—a talent or technique or whatever that would eventually bring a certain level of controversy and engender an even more robust amount of confusion amongst his readership—was to discover real life events that sparked his own interest and reconfigure them to various echelons of fictionalization.
Liza of Lambeth initiated Maugham’s idiosyncratic talent for manipulating truths he either personally witnessed or received second-hand from someone else into works of the imagination. To one degree or another, anyway. The working-class tragedy of Liza Kemp of Lambeth was stimulated by what Maugham saw himself while working in Lambeth himself as St. Thomas’ Hospital as part of his medical student training. What he didn’t see himself he no doubt glommed from fellow hospital staff members, students, patients and assorted flotsam and jetsam in the area. The result is a novel that both its supporters and detractors can agree upon when it comes to one consideration: its brutally frank depiction of the seamier side of London living.
As one of its most pointed detractors asserts, readers “are spared nothing: the reek of the streets; the effluvia of unwashed humanity.” Edward Garnett, a member of the supportive class, notes of the presentation of the women characters in the novel that “their roughness, intemperance, fits of violence, kindheartedness, slang— all are done truthfully.” Whether love, hater or indifferent buyer of whatever is popular at the moment, everyone seemed to agree upon the novel’s initial publication that it is a work defined by its perception of truth. Where the disagreement begins to tear the groups apart is whether this is a good or bad thing. And so, general consensus of reviews of Liza of Lambeth ultimately and inevitably would come down to a moral judgment not on the part of Maugham toward his characters, but on the part of the critic toward the subject: either it is “a very clever study of the semi-criminal class” or it as an artless work with a “horrid power of its own” deserving only of being “swept away room and branch.”
Alas, for the 21st century reader, Liza of Lambeth is neither of these things. Having long since lost any ability to shock a reader at its presentation of the seamy side of life, the book today is primarily of interest only as the opening salvo in what constitutes one of the most peculiarly distinctive literary careers of any best-selling author of the 20th century.
