4 - John Drink water

Summary

John Drinkwater (1882–1937) belongs to the select band of Georgians who did not study at college or university. His formal education ended when he left Oxford High School, meaning that he was self-educated beyond the age of 15. Unlike Brooke, Abercrombie and Thomas, he did not exist from an early age in a milieu of editors, wits and university friends; and he did not spring from a secure middle-class background which he could rebel against with some sense of confidence. Abercrombie, Gibson and Thomas experienced poverty, but they did not start from a position of financial insecurity, the sort which caused Drinkwater senior to encourage his son into the insurance industry in an effort to provide a prosperous future for the young John. As a result, Drinkwater spent many years in an uncongenial office environment, hoping to cross over from this unpromising start to the artistic life he had desired all along. His literary/theatrical life was achieved against great odds, and it was sustained because Drinkwater, more than most other poets, was able to write for a popular market with little sense of compromise. When he abandoned poetic drama for prose drama between 1917 and 1921, it was because he sensibly recognized its theatrical failure in the long term – and his income was related to the economics of supply and demand in the theatre in a way that other Georgians’ incomes were not. His pragmatic decisions enabled him to continue as a successful playwright long after the Georgian experiment had petered out, and his willingness to tackle any kind of literary work meant that he could sustain his career as a writer even though his poetry attracted much adverse criticism. Owing to his diverse output, this chapter will concentrate on the poetry and some of the drama until 1922, coinciding with the main period of Georgianism and the availability of comments to assist a contextual setting of the works.

Drinkwater himself is an elusive character, subjected to comments which can easily be interpreted in a negative way. A relevant comment by Catherine Abercrombie has already been quoted in the Introduction (p. 3), but in the original source, not quoted by Street, Catherine Abercrombie goes on to say that Drinkwater became a friend of the family.