The Good Companions
A Picaresque Comedy of Provincial England, Music Hall Adventures, Class Encounters, and Postwar RenewalBy J. B. Priestley
Length27h 34m
About this audiobook
J. B. Priestley's The Good Companions (1929) is a richly episodic novel about the Dinky-Doo concert party, a struggling theatrical troupe whose fortunes briefly rise as it travels through the English provinces. Its central figures—Jess Oakroyd, an unemployed Yorkshireman; Elizabeth Trant, a dissatisfied schoolmistress; and Inigo Jollifant, an ambitious young entertainer—embody different forms of social displacement and longing. Combining comedy, sentiment, romance, and social observation, Priestley adopts a deliberately expansive, picaresque structure reminiscent of Dickens, while drawing on the popular traditions of music hall and touring theatre. The novel's warmth is balanced by an acute awareness of class, economic insecurity, provincial life, and the fleeting nature of success, placing it within the interwar revival of socially attentive English popular fiction. Priestley's own background helps explain the novel's distinctive sympathy and range. Born in Bradford to a working-class family, he experienced the industrial North, served in the First World War, and later became a prolific novelist, dramatist, essayist, and broadcaster. His knowledge of ordinary speech, provincial communities, performance culture, and postwar disillusionment informs the book's vivid social panorama. Yet Priestley's outlook is not merely documentary: he imagines fellowship and collective enterprise as temporary but meaningful alternatives to isolation and commercial competition. The Good Companions is especially rewarding for readers interested in English social history, theatrical culture, and the development of the modern popular novel. Its humane characters, comic reversals, and atmospheric evocation of a vanishing entertainment world make it accessible, while its class consciousness and formal ambition invite sustained critical reflection. It is an engaging introduction to Priestley's art and to the cultural tensions of interwar Britain.
Audiobook details
Rating★★★★ 4.1 (1.5K)
Includes Goodreads, Amazon, LibraryThing, StoryGraph
GenreLiterary Classics, Humor
Length27 hrs 34 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateJan 5, 2025
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1The Heir (Annotated)
2Book 1
31 Mr. Oakroyd Leaves Home
42 Miss Trant Takes a Holiday
53 Inigo Jollifant Quotes Shakespeare and Departs in the Night
Show all chaptersShow less
64 Mr. Oakroyd on t’Road
75 Miss Trant Is Almost a Second Columbus
86 Inigo Meets a Member of the Profession and Turns Pianist
9Book 2
101 In Which They All Become “Good Companions”
112 Very Short, and Devoted to Rehearsals
123 In Which Colonel Trant’s Daughter Goes Into Action, Sticks to Her Guns, and May Be Considered Victorious
134 Mr. Oakroyd Plays “The Hunted Man” for a Short Season
145 Inigo Jumps Out of a Train and Finds Himself in Love
156 The Black Week
167 All Stolen from the Mail Bag
17Book 3
181 A Wind in the Triangle
192 A Chapter of Encounters
203 Inigo in Wonderland
214 A Benefit Performance
225 Long, and Full of Salvage Work
236 Mr. Oakroyd Goes Home
24Epilogue
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