Disgusted by the class system in 1930s Britain and wary of finance capitalism, the novelist set off to Scandinavia and wrote England Made Me
England Made Me is an overlooked early Graham Greene novel, set in Stockholm, a city about which, he admitted, he knew very little. Despite the overseas location, it was an attack on the English class system, rooted in public school education, underpinned by his growing disquiet with international capitalism.
Greene had reviewed George Soloveytchik’s The Financier: the life of Ivar Kreuger for the Spectator in March 1933. That August he made a brief visit to Scandinavia, much preferring Oslo to Stockholm. However the latter, caught as summer was fading, washed in drab “liquid grey” light, gave him a fitting atmosphere, spiced with a big pinch of puritan moral hypocrisy, as he wrote in an essay on the two cities. In November he began England Made Me, which was published in 1935.
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