“Well, it's only wot yer ought to do, considerin' all the trouble you've been ter me when you was young, and considerin' thet when you was born the doctor thought I never should get through it. Wot 'ave you done with your week's money, Liza?”
Whatever forces of fate colluded and conspired to convince Somerset Maugham that he was not destined to become England’s answer to Emile Zola should receive daily benedictions from every fan of his later fiction. The one thing about Maugham’s fiction that is agreed upon by both his legions of adoring fans and that gaggle of critics who routinely commit absurd acts of malpractice such as insisting that he belongs to the south Ernest Hemingway in the pantheon of famous writers of his era is that Maugham displays a finely attuned ear for dialogue. Imagine if he had chosen to commit to this naturalistic effect of dialect demonstrated here that is pervasive throughout the book. It’s a funny paradox about writing in dialect: the more an author engages it to create a sense of realism, the less realistic the dialogue begins to sound. Page after page after page of this stuff is just too much work to demand from reader, especially when the story being carried by the dialogue is strong enough to thrive without it.
She seized the poker, and in a fury of rage rushed at him.
'Would yer?' he said, catching hold of it and wrenching it from her grasp. He threw it to the end of the room and grappled with her. For a moment they swayed about from side to side, then with an effort he lifted her off her feet and threw her to the ground; but she caught hold of him and he came down on the top of her. She screamed as her head thumped down on the floor, and the children, who were standing huddled up in a corner, terrified, screamed too.
This novel was greeted with both positive and negative reaction to its portrayal of working class marital brutality. To detractors, the usual conventions of complaint: such violence in literature does not serve the purpose of uplifting the human spirit. As if literature’s job was only to that. The positive reaction was even purer: Victorian readers loved a good brawl as much as today’s audiences. It was precisely the darker side of humanity that appeal to readers and made Maugham’s first novel a big enough success that he felt confident enough to quit his day job and pursue writing full time.
She still kept silence, looking away and continually bringing down her fist. He looked at her a moment, and she, ceasing to thump his hand, looked up at him with half-opened mouth. Suddenly he shook himself, and closing his fist gave her a violent, swinging blow in the belly.
'Come on.' he said.
And together they slid down into the darkness of the passage.
It was not exactly love at first sight. The reaction to the persistent domestic violence portrayed in the novel should not be discount purely in terms of Victorian delicacy. Make no mistake, the violence is rough, but it is more than merely that. The metaphor there at the end, about sliding into the darkness of the passage, can be taken a number of ways, but they all end up in the same place. Liza of Lambeth falls for a man—a married man—who has just punched her in the stomach. The result of this assault is eroticism. Rather than running for her life, Liza is aroused. Part of the resistance against the unrelenting unpleasantness of the circumstances of these characters is that they have brought so much of it upon themselves. Bad decision multiply and then grown exponentially. Liza’s tragic end cannot even be traced back to this point as its origination. She is pretty much self-destructed already by the time she confuses a shot to the gut with a bouquet of roses.
