The stories in this book are in fact one story, that of a society adrift, like a shipwrecked crew upon a raft: fifty million people upon a wet and windy island in the Atlantic Ocean. Half of the inhabitants of Great Britain have been sold a patent medicine of peculiar austerity. Some of the characters in these stories complain of this medicine: but there is a far worse corrective others maintain, namely the Red Pills of Old Uncle Joe. The social medicines of the 'kindly' British spare you from the necessity of taking Old Uncle Joe's Red Pills.
'Is this a political book?' some readers may protest. No more, it can with truth be answered, than several of Charles Dickens's books, and all by Mr. Shaw. If Mr. Wyndham Lewis's characters are obsessed by politics, it is because today our lives are saturated with their poisons. It is impossible for a work of narrative fiction worth reading to contain less politics than 'Rotting Hill'.
