Social Issues in Agatha Christie's novels

Table of contents

1 Introductio

2 British Society: Interwar Period and Post-War Years

3 Conclusion and outlook: Christie’s own social position

4 Bibliography

1 Introductio

The issue of social matters has not been a widely depicted one in the literary analysis of Agatha Christie’s work. Early getting fame and being characterized as Queen of Crime, of course it is the detective fiction which is in the foreground of Christie’s work. However, social issues do even play a significant role in her work. Though it might go too far as to state that „class consciousness is […] [the] biggest impression of Englishness from Christie’s work“ (https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180907-agatha-christie-shaped-how-the-world-sees-britain), one recognizes fast that Christie indeed was very conscious about social classes and reflected the changing social landscape of Great Britain and of the British Empire in a subtle way.

[S]he chose to pre. sent the effects of these changes on the everyday world of her char- acters…[and] left a social history of fifty years of upper middle-class English life, recording the changes […], Bargainnier 1980, p. 37.

This paper aims to investigate in which way social issues of her lifetime are reflected in her novels. Since Christie almost always published her novels immediately after finishing them, it will be assumed that the social issues described in her work are adequate to the ones of the publication year (“die Frau, die in jedem Jahr pünktlich zwei Mordromane vorlegt”, https://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-43062429.html)

For this purpose, I have chosen two different novels. As I have already gathered sufficient reading experience with Christie’s novels in order to state that the demonstration of social issues in Christie’s work is more manifold when her investigating figures involved are different, I deliberately have chosen novels with two different detectives. Accordingly, the novels are set in different places, emerge from different historical backgrounds and, consequently, carry slightly different social characteristics which makes a comparison between them more expressive. On the one hand, in The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side (1962), the amateur Miss Jane Marple investigates in her cosy British village St. Mary Mead, which is subject to changes within Great Britain, and reflects the transition from interwar-structures to a modernized society of the 1960s. On the other hand, Death on the Nile (1937) provides us with the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot during investigations on a cruise ship in the exotic surrounding of Egypt. Even though not set in Great Britain, the social structure of the 1930s is clearly visible here as well.

It shall not be forgotten that the hints on social issues in Christie’s novels are rare, compared with the space the carefully puzzled plot, the crime’s investigation and the solution of the murder takes. Nevertheless, this paper shall reveal that Christie’s perception of social matters, regardless of the time period, is evident - be it the 1930s, the interwar years or the 1960s. This is due to the design of setting and characters with their dialogues which are interspersed with remarks and hints on the social backdrop of the story’s time frame. Taking these aspects into consideration, the paper aims to explain how Christie’s perception of social structures changed and how this becomes noticeable in her work. In order to understand and to capture how British society is reflected in Christie’s fiction, this paper firstly will give an insight into British class structures during the time frame when Christie wrote and published the novels I am going to analyze. First I will give a brief overview of British society in the years within and after the Second World War. This is necessary in order to understand how the early novels of Agatha Christie, written and published in the years before the war, carry crucial social features. This overview of her early work will be demonstrated in the next chapter in order to point out the differences to the novel The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side (1962). As a novel from the early 1960s, it is the first of Christie’s novels to carry the changes which occurred in society since the 1930s and 1940s. Death on the Nile, which will be explained in the following chapter, carries characteristics of the 1930s-society in Great Britain are visible. Furthermore, the novel provides some hints on the British attitude to its colonized people. It has to be paid attention to the fact, that the British colonial rule already had begun to crumble around the publication of Death on the Nile in 1937. However, it has to be added that this aspect - the relation of British people and people from their controlled territory - in this case, Egypt - is explained only marginally in this paper: neither is it the aim nor is enough space scheduled to provide detailed investigation about the historical processes of British rule in Egypt and other Oriental countries in the 1930s. Instead, the focus of analysis in both novels is on social classes which refer exclusively to British society.

2 British Society: Interwar Period and Post-War Years

British society in the 1930s, to begin with, has often been ascribed a rigid and inflexible character, where the working class was highly disapproved by the upper-class and upper-middle-class. It is a matter often discussed among historians whether the Second World War influenced the preceding class structure to a large extent or whether the development was too slow and weak to stand the “powerful traditional resistances to change which manifested themselves at all stages during the war“ (Marwick 1976: 207). At least, it is safe to say that “real and long lasting developments towards the modification of the British class structure were in fact taking place“(Marwick 1976: 208) ,which went so far as to even influence Agatha Christie to record these changes in her novels - despite the fact that she was known to prefer sticking to the same setting and social circumstances in her novel, as we shall investigate later. May the basic social structure of upper class, middle class, and working class not have changed between the “'thirties and the late forties, [t]here was, indeed, […] a further flood of social change in the 1960s“ (Marwick 1976: 211).

However, subject to a more remarkable change were the servants: between the 1930s and the 1950s, its number declined enormously by almost 75 %. This is due to the fact that especially female domestic servants had a better deal with jobs in the war industry, and, after the war, frequently expanded in the working area of bar-keeping or waitressing since these jobs then were more accompanied with a sense of dignity, which had not yet been the case in the 1930s. As a consequence, the majority of upper-and-middle-class households apparently struggled to get their servants back in the post-war-years.

As they make up the most important part of society in Christie’s novels as well, the English middle-class in its whole width, containing both the upper and the lower end, was considered to carry the most vital effect on the nation. On the one hand, they were hit hardest by the loss of servants in the years after the war: they had less options to gain servants than the upper-class, which owned a larger variety of networks and probably a more intense relation to their servants. Consequently, they were more likely to give up service in a middle-class than in a noble family because they usually had internalized for generations unconditional service and loyal devotion to their aristocratic employers. On the other hand, exactly for the reason that they suffered worse than the upper-class, the sense of belonging to the middle class was even more strengthened so that a middle-class-identity after the war was related with dignity and importance for the whole nation. As a middle-class lady stresses her personal impression of the middle classes’ significance in her diary of 1940-41, “`the strength and civilization of a nation is shown by the growth of its middle classes, […] people who are neither poor and oppressed or rich and idle“(Marwick 1976: 18)

In the 1960s, however, the changes of the post-war years finally became evident and transformed the British class system to a significant extent. The Swinging Sixties ¹introduced a decade of rapid change in many regards, all of which contributed to a marked sense of individuality. Above all, the youth was in the centre of this development and introduced a whole new era of lifestyle: daring clothes, American consume products, the trend of recreational drugs, an overall liberal attitude. Novelist Agatha Christie as well could not look away any longer and simply ignore these fundamental changes by sticking to the models and settings she had used in her novels over the last three decades.

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¹ Swinging Sixties: Term which refers to a cultural and revolutionary development in Great Britain during the 1960s, especially in its capital London. It is a youth-oriented phenomenon which puts emphasis on a modernized era of independence, freedom and optimism, introduced by the post-war years of recovery and economic upheaval.