Nothing to Pay

Front Cover
New Directions Publishing, 1995 - Fiction - 237 pages
When Caradoc Evans's novel Nothing to Pay appeared in 1930, it met with much admiration and also much resistance. His ruthless exposure of the Nonconformist establishment undermined the commonly held view that the Welsh were a pastoral, God-fearing people. As Jeremy Brooks put it The Independent, "What the Welsh could not forgive was that they recognized themselves only too clearly in Evans's satirical portraits." But Dylan Thomas praised Evans's work relentlessly, and H.G. Wells said in a lecture: "There was one, who is too little esteemed, who has done the thing [of telling about the trade shops] with a certain brutal thoroughness, and he tells a great deal of truth. That is Caradoc Evans in his book Nothing to Pay." (In America, H.L. Mencken saw in Evans the fundamentalists of the South laid bare, and offered one hundred free copies of his story collection to the local YMCA.) Nothing to Pay relates the story of Amos Morgan, an ambitious draper from Cardiganshire who works his way up to London through the shop trade. Largely autobiographical, this novel was admired by the Welsh literati and has since become a classic of Welsh literature, not only for its scathing satire, but for its brilliant linguistic inventiveness and poetic style.

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Contents

Section 1
7
Section 2
13
Section 3
17
Section 4
22
Section 5
28
Section 6
33
Section 7
38
Section 8
40
Section 20
108
Section 21
112
Section 22
116
Section 23
126
Section 24
136
Section 25
149
Section 26
155
Section 27
163

Section 9
51
Section 10
55
Section 11
63
Section 12
68
Section 13
72
Section 14
75
Section 15
82
Section 16
86
Section 17
91
Section 18
98
Section 19
102
Section 28
171
Section 29
180
Section 30
190
Section 31
196
Section 32
200
Section 33
204
Section 34
209
Section 35
213
Section 36
221
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