Published in late 1953, Hurry on Down can be said to be the first novel that articulated many of the ideological and aesthetic outlooks of the Movement. It preceded by a year Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, which is probably still the best known of the novels associated with the Movement. Although Hurry on Down was his first novel, Wain was a fairly established figure in British literary culture by the early 1950s due mainly to his journalism and poetry, and in the same year it was published, he was appointed editor and presenter of the BBC Third Programme’s new literary arts show, First Reading. One of the first programmes he presented included a review of Amis’s novel, and as Harry Ritchie has noted, Wain and Amis became inextricably linked in early Fifties literary culture as representative of a new breed of irreverential and iconoclastic novelists who were capturing the attitudes of post-war Britain.3 Like Amis, Wain was later incorporated as one of the Angry Young Men, although this association is largely misrepresentative of his fiction. There is a certain amount of annoyance with conventional society in Hurry on Down, but this is never given the left-wing political or ideological direction that was assumed by later Angry writers such as Osborne and Sillitoe. The main protagonist, Charles Lumley, has a broadly anti-establishment outlook, eschews identification with any social or political group, and endeavours to pursue an individualistic resistance to all forms of collective activity. But despite Hurry on Down being best described as a novel of resentment rather than rebellion, it does reveal aspects of an oppositional stance to the prevailing attitudes of the 1950s, and it reveals many of the contradictions and anxieties about the new England that was emerging during the period.

In terms of form, the dominant critical reading of Hurry on Down is as a conventionally realist novel. However, it is a realism based on an eighteenth-century picaresque model rather than nineteenth-century ‘classic’ realism. The novel represents a series of adventures for the main character Charles, who, after graduating from University, rejects his middle-class background and becomes involved in various working-class, and sometimes, criminal occupations, which include window cleaner, drug trafficker, hospital porter, chauffeur, and eventually gag-writer for a Radio show. The picaresque form allows Wain to comment critically on several aspects of English society and culture, and the episodic structure of the novel suits one of the novel’s main themes: the search for individual freedom in the face of a society that wishes to contain resistance. In this way, the novel rejects the typical realist and bildungsroman pattern of the adventures of a hero trying to find his place in the social world. It does this by emphasizing that Charles rejects all of the potential social spheres in which he might be contained.