Warwick Deeping: Sorrell and Son

Sorrell and Son, the thirty-third of Warwick Deeping's sixty-eight novels, became and remained a bestseller from its first publication in 1925 throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Translated into thirteen languages, running to forty-one editions and filmed twice, 1927 and 1933, the novel achieved what Ross McKibbin calls “a talismanic status” for its admirers. Dedicated to Deeping's own father, this “rapturous wish-fulfilling dream of perfect filial love”, as Kingsley Amis describes it, retains its pathos, as demonstrated by its successful adaptation for YTV in 1983. Sorrell and Son effectively engaged anxieties, widespread amongst the growing middle classes between the wars, about the direction of social change, particularly th