Theodore Dalrymple - The Pleasure of Thinking: A Journey through the Sideways Leaps of Ideas

My copy of Somerset Maughams first book, Liza of Lambeth, has the small and neat inscription , E.S. Labouchre, in it. Labouchre is not a common name and I suppose or rather I like to suppose that E.S. was some relative of Henry, the liberal politician and journalist.

The latter, born to immense wealth, ran up debts to 6000 (equivalent today of perhaps 500,000) while a student at Cambridge. An idler and a gambler in his early life, his family got him accepted in the Foreign Office without his knowledge. Offered the Second Secretaryship at the embassy in Buenos Aires while he was playing roulette at Baden Baden at about the same time as Dostoyevsky, he replied that he would accept the job on one condition only: that he could fulfil his duties from Baden Baden.

Henry Labouchre owes such undying fame in literary history as he possesses to something uncharacteristic of him. Although a radical liberal in politics, anti-imperialist and favourably disposed to Irish nationalism, as well as unconventional in his private life, it was he, as a Liberal MP, who introduced and argued for the clause in the Criminal Justice Amendment Act of 1885 under which Oscar Wilde was prosecuted in the following decade.

What E.S. thought of all this I cannot say, of course. The copy of Liza of Lambeth is a second, not a first edition, but published in the same year as the first, 1897, when Maugham was still a medical student. I came across it for sale for two pounds in a small bookshop run in what is now euphemistically called an inner city. (Frankness and plain speaking about things formerly taboo, it seems, is always accompanied by the erection of new taboos elsewhere .)

The shop was owned and run by a communist of the Enver Hoxha faction, a member of a small but select band of harmless fanatics. Albania was his Valhalla. He ran the shop half as a business and half as a missionary enterprise to the local population, whom he hoped to convert to the Albanian road to socialism. He had a technical vocabulary which was especially rich in terms of abuse, but not vulgar abuse.

For example, anyone associated with or supporting the Labour Party was a Labourite. The scorn with which he managed to imbue this word, without however any excess of emphasis, was quite something to experience, and was a triumph of intonatory implication. He hated the Labourites (indeed anyone whose appellation ended in the suffix ites, for example the Titoites and the Khrushchevites) much more than the Tories. The latter were good old-fashioned class enemies, whom one could respect or even pity in a way, for they were on the losing side of history, but the Labourites were class traitors, much worse than mere enemies. They confused the potentially revolutionary proletariat with ideas of reform, to say nothing of bread and circuses. The local council being in the control of the Labourites, he was always in dispute with it.

It was a matter of deep regret to him that it was a member of the relatively moneyed middle classes in short, I who was much his best customer. Indeed, as far as I could tell his stock scarcely varied until, that is, it grew smaller by of my purchases.

The local population was not very literary in its pursuits. He would have been hard put to find a less auspicious place, the low rent notwithstanding, for a second-hand bookshop. The passing trade was all but nil, and he refused, on ideological grounds, to advertise. On the other hand, the lack of interest did make him relatively immune to shoplifting and burglary . He could put books outside on a shelf outside his shop and no one would take them. He would probably have had to pay people to do so.