London Themes of Wealth and Poverty - Essay Example

London Themes of Wealth and Poverty The whole novel is majorly based on the themes off wealth and poverty that surround London. When a wealth ornaments manufacturer decides to donate lots of money to his daughter’s (a Salvation Army Officer) organization, she gets disgusted and decides to resign. Eventually, she notices the rationale, truth of her father’s reasoning; that the iniquity existing in the society derives from poverty and it is in the accumulation of power, and wealth that people can eventually be in a position to assist one another. Shaw has portrayed the theme of social and economic inequity with a rich sarcasm. There are many provocative ideas used in the short play. We see a young lady rejects her society in a bid to save the livers, bellies and souls of the poorer people in the society, but the question that strikes is that, is she really a good person? On the other side, her father, who is an arms manufacturer, claims power over the government in a bid to set up wars so he may be able to sell off his weaponry? Again, the question pops that, is he really a good person? Is the idealistic professor’s pragmatic matron more likely to hold sway over the destinies of other people in the family? Or, over their own destinies? Shaw insinuates that poverty is a crime in the play. The inequity and wealth inequality in London is very great and in spite of this, greed and evil still take a larger part of the society. Andrew is an extremely wealthy owner of a successful English ornaments business. His self-proclaimed religion lies in the wealth of his industry. He believes that one must acquire wealth to be able to help the poor and this brings about the contrast of the play; which is about a father and the daughter, one a pragmatist while the other an idealist. However, his wealth, the company is inherited from a long generation of Andrew Undershafts, each of which was foundling adopted by a corresponding initial Andrew Undershaft. Interestingly, Undershafts marry and have families. The current Undershaft has married an aristocratic woman, Lady Britomart, and has fathered three children by her. He does not let the theme involve in the matters of his business though; he would rather bring in an outsider to perpetuate in the matters of the Andrew Undershaft dynasty. Andrew Undershaft feels that poverty are is the mother of all crimes; that poverty is the primordial crime from which other crimes like murder, burglary and robbery all deriver. His ideas are that it is worthwhile to offer the poor employment so they may be able to afford a living other than spend the public money in punishing them should they break the law in a bid to afford a living. He moralizes his ideas when he speaks but actually scoffs at the Christian morals which are kindly professed by his daughter who has even joined the salvation army in her desire to help the poor; she has done her job passionately that she has attained the rank of a major. She tries to find work for the unemployed as she works at the shelter doling milk and bread to the hungry. However, her major goal is to bring these people to salvation and raise their levels of spirituality. Shaw in the play has been portrayed as a socialist as he relates the issues or effects of poverty to society and morality. He does not agree with his characters either and instead portray them as funny in the context of their respective social classes, he portrays his idle rich characters as lovably comical like the mentally retarded Undershaft’s son Stephen who would never know what to do with his father’s wealth even if he had a chance to inherit the fortune. On the other side, his poor characters that come to the shelter for help like Peter Shirley are, however, portrayed as honorably hardworking. The items manufactured by Undershaft shed the blood of many and involves the creation of war as a measure to create their market. Ironically, he believes that the creation of wealth like this in England can eventually help in the war against poverty that has invaded the region. He is idiosyncratic to say the least. This was in the English Victorian period at the brink of the First World War. Many Londoners were poor, but the wealthy existed in abundance too. Different people perceived the inequity differently. The rich and the poor lived differently and lived by different ideologies. Andrew Undershaft, for instance, strongly believed that poverty was the cause of all evil deeds, in the society. He thought that poverty itself was a crime. His business manufactured weapons and this was the basis of his wealth. He perceived that if the society could offer him the alternative of a lucrative destruction and death or the poverty, it could provide him with no choice between humble virtue and opulent villainy; instead, it provided him with a choice between cowardly infamy and energetic enterprise. Shaw finally concludes in the play “if a man is unable to look into the eyes of evil without illusion, it will never be known to him what it really is; neither will he be able to combat it effectively” (Shaw, 2008, p73). The wealthy at the time would think of themselves as the saviors of the poor, and frame poverty as the root of all evil deeds, when actually they were the true evil doers. They had the abnormal share of evil in their hearts corresponding to the share of wealth or strength in their minds. This is why Andrew Undershift had the desire to convince the government into the creation of war in order to establish a flourishing market for his war products. Wealth was, therefore, portrayed as a bearer of evil; ironically, Andrew himself believed that poverty was to cause of evil instead (Shaw, 2008, p65). When Shaw wrote the play, Major Barbara, the world was in a state of major militarization and rapid industrialization. Therefore, it is no surprise that he related the theme of wealth in the book to the prevalence of the business of arms. The text grasps in favor of weapons, which sets in irony given the state of the leftist movement, in the world today. Eventually, the book shows the transition of Barbara from being an idealist into a realist as she finally learns to conform to her father’s conservative rhetoric. A part from denouncing poverty and sanctifying wealth, the whole text derides idealism, undermines religion, and turns morality upside down. How are the London themes of wealth and poverty and/or power and powerlessness portrayed in the Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon The story told in the Sam Selvon’s book entails the struggles faced by West Indian immigrants. They suffer through economic challenges, homelessness and socio-political experiences that were based on crippling prejudices in London during the mid-1950s. The Trinidadian narrator takes the readers through unfortunate but humorous episodes of immigrants’ thoughts the anecdotes and thoughts of Moses. Moses is a Trinidadian immigrant serving as a very important link to the newer immigrant characters in the novel because of his kindness and seniority as an immigrant. The suffering these immigrants go through in London obliges most of them to denounce their originality and sever family tries to acculturate and assimilate with the Londoners. The immigrants gather weekly to reminisce about their homelands and the cold indifferences and prejudice that they experience in London. There is utmost poverty among them as the hustling for money becomes so usual and personal dilemmas of the Londoner’s worsens; the new Londoners find laughter in the suffering instead of worrying about their fate. Over the book, the immigrants make use of optimism in a bid to cope with the soreness caused by homelessness, alienation and conflict. Unlike the themes of power and powerfulness portrayed in Lady Barbara, the Lonely Londoners focuses on the suffering of non-English people (or immigrants) from the West Indies. Lady Barbara tells of the poverty and wealthy lives of the native Englishmen. The immigrants are left to find energy and hopes by tolerating alienation caused by the racist’s Londoners prejudices. Even though the London racists prejudice against the immigrants are fundamental causes of newcomer’s alienation. The cold indifference is caused by the business of the life in London. London at the time was just like that; it was a place divided into many different places and people had to stay in their own places. “London is a place like that, divided in little worlds and you stay in the world you belong and fail to know what’s happening in the other worlds apart from what you read in the papers” (Selvon, 2006, p74). When Moses logded with Galahad, he describes to him some of the racial experiences that he had faced in the country. Galahad, however, describes Moses statements as only intended to scare the new newcomers. The unemployment in the country is spread and it occurs in the time after war when the country was war-stricken and the West-Indians were encouraged to come into England and help with the workforce that would help revive the economy. For this reason, Galahad strongly believed that the racism experienced by the West Indians at the workplaces was Induced by the fear if the Londoners for losing their jobs to the immigrants. He tells of the racists who were also foreigners in the country like the polish restaurant’s owner to whom he describes as “only a foreigner, we have more rights than the other people who came from the continent to live and work in England, we who bleed to make England prosperous” (Selvon, 2006, p40). Helplessness and poverty are also portrayed in the book through the new Londoners; who embraces optimistic attitudes in order to cope with the homelessness incited by their fiscal need, alongside their experiences with the foreigners. As Galahad travels through the Bayswater road in his elegant suit, he thinks “Oh lord this is life, to walk like a king with money in the pocket, and no worry in the world”. This attitude makes him indifferent to the impolite replies from a passerby to his greetings (Selvon, 2006, p87). Before the war, poverty was mainly experienced by Londoners who were disadvantaged to the wealthy and greedy politicians and businessmen like Andrew Uplift from Shaw’s Lady Barbara whose sole objective in business was to oblige or influence the government into creating the war so he may find the market for his war products. After the war, things take an uplift social twist and the immigrants become the disadvantaged in London. In an instant, a Nigerian immigrant sees the London’s fog and retreats in disgust; the fog represents a melancholy and foreign air to the new Londoners (Selvon, 2006, p52). Unusually, Moses lapses in an idealized nostalgic reverie: “I would purchase an old house and rear some goats and cattle, and sit down in the grass in the sun all day long, hit a good corn and calaloo every now and then (Selvon, 2006, p125). This is an idealistic vision of a Caribbean life at odds bearing rural poverty that in the first place made the immigrants leave Caribbean; that Moses is trying to project into the future. England has driven him away from the essence of his native home and the alienation he has experienced in London has given him a feeling of physical displacement (Hinterholzer, 2007, p77). Throughout the book, we are made aware of the sufferings of the immigrants. The foreign land of England has not been a blessing at all, as they had hoped for before leaving the Caribbean. The immigrants had initially thought of England as a Land of opportunities; little did they know about the fate that awaited them. Racism coupled with poverty is what awaited them in England and they were now left with the memories of their native land. This is the reason they always met and reminisced about their native land: Trinidad. The economic state of England after the war was hard, and many Londoners protected the job opportunities that were left with aggressiveness. This is the reason racism reached its prime especially at the workplaces. The blacks from Trinidad were, therefore, left with helplessness and to make the matters worse, other immigrants from Europe, like the polish, too discriminated the immigrants from Trinidad following the struggles and need for resources. Unlike before the war like depicted in George Bernard Shaw’s play Major Barbara, the struggle of poverty was based on greed, political and socio-economic inequities that prevailed among the citizens, post war London powerlessness and powerfulness lied entirely on competitive advantage and racism and favoritism. Foreigners suffered the effects and the natives had advantage over them. The foreigners especially the blacks from Trinidad exhibited the poverty states of helplessness, homelessness and joblessness. Poverty in a society can be caused by a number of factors; which depend on the differences in identity of the people in that given society. In other words, other factors would emerge to create the state of economic and political inequities in a case of a society made up of people of a common identity. Bibliography Hinterholzer, S. (2007). Acculturation in Sam Selvons "The Lonely Londoners". München,. http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:101:1-201008229826. Selvon, S. (2006). The lonely Londoners. London, Penguin Books. Shaw, B. (2008). Major Barbara. [Auckland, N.Z.], Floating Press. Read More