Adventures in the Skin Trade and The Death of the King’s canary

Abstract

Mostly written in May–June 1941, the three chapters of the unfinished novel Adventures in the Skin Trade describe young Samuel Bennet’s departure for London and his subsequent adventures on arrival at Paddington Station, in a nearby room full of furniture, in a bathroom where a girl, probably unsuccessfully, tries to seduce him, and a bizarre night club. The opening chapter, ‘A Fine Beginning’, much superior to the later ones largely because its comedy is allied to a fundamental seriousness, begins where Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog leaves off. ‘“A Fine Beginning”,’ averred Dylan Thomas, ‘is the first chapter of a novel in progress to be called “Adventures in the Skin Trade”. The novel is a semiautobiographical continuation of “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog”, and takes the principal character of that book of stories up to the age of twenty.’1 Clearly there are autobiographical elements in its inspiration and context. While the later chapters present, albeit deliberately, a chaotic, undiscriminating transcript of experience, the departure from Wales portrays the gestures, rebelliousness and tribulations of late adolescence with urgency and inner compulsion.KeywordsLate AdolescencePrincipal CharacterVerbal InventionProvincial HomeSubsequent AdventureThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.