Hunger and Love

1931 Britton, Lionel [Erskine Nimmo] (1887-1971). Hunger and Love. London & New York: Putnam, with an “Introduction” by Bertrand Russell (vii-xi). 705 pp. U.S. ed. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1931, with an “Introduction” by Bertrand Russell (vii-x). 623 pp. The author’s papers are held at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. PSt, PU

The novel is mostly concerned with the trials and tribulations of its main protagonist, an intelligent but poor man, and is an attack on the dystopian of the contemporary capitalist order. But the novel also suggests, without going into detail, that a literal unification of the human race is necessary to being about a better life. As Bertrand Russel puts it in his “Introduction,” "It may be that the complete organic unification of the human race, which Mr. Britton regards as the ideal, is the only way in which a scientific civilisation can survive. It is, at any rate, practically certain that it cannot survive while the anarchism of private profit” [x]. The author says that the theory developed in Hunger and Love is presented in his plays Brain: A Play of the Whole Earth. London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1930 and Animal Ideas: A Dramatic Symphony of the Human in the Universe. London: Putman, 1935. 134 pp.