Impromptu in Moribundia

<div><p>A stunning anomaly within the literary oeuvre of Patrick Hamilton, <i>Impromptu in Moribundia</i> (first published in 1939) is the most explicit production of his interest in a Marxist analysis of society. It is a satirical fable about one (nameless) man's trespass (through a fantastical machine called the 'Asteradio') into a parallel universe on a far-off planet where the 'miserably dull affairs of England' are mirrored and transformed into an apparent idyll of bourgeois English imagination.</p><p></p><p>Moribundia - in the words of Peter Widdowson, editor and annotator of this edition - is the 'physical enactment of the stereotypes and myths of English middleclass culture and consciousness.' Yet the narrator comes to discover that he has stumbled among a people characterized by 'cupidity,</p><p>ignorance, complacence, meanness, ugliness, short-sightedness, cowardice, credulity, hysteria and, when the occasion...