Ruggles do not listen to the radio or read any of the national papers. Instead the Ruggles solve their crises and enjoy their adventures as a family, surrounded by other families in similar circumstances, but somehow apart, a world unto themselves. Yet, just as the events summarised above do not enter into the novel, neither do scenes of working class poverty highlighted, for example, in another bestseller of the nineteen-thirties, George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. The book was written, partly, in response to what she had seen. Commissioned to illustrate a book about the lives of children in London, she was shocked by the conditions in which the poorest of them had to live. The tale of the working class Ruggles family living in the fictional town of Otwell-on-the-Ouse was itself born out of the suffering witnessed by its author in the 1920s. Britain contemplated a what-might-have-been in the marriage of Wallis Simpson to the Duke of Windsor, the former Edward VIII. A quick look at some of the key events of that year reminds us that this lonely and unloved decade did not have far to go to find its sorrows: the Moscow trials Condor Legion bombing raids in the civil war in Spain the Hindenberg disaster the disappearance of Amelia Earhart the Japanese occupation of Beijing Italy leaving the League of Nations. The Family from One End Street was published in 1937.
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