Threepenny Novel

This satirical novel, published in 1934, is set in London during the Boer War. The central character, George Fewkoombey, is an invalid soldier returned from South Africa with the lower half of one leg having been amputated. He quickly ends up in poverty and vulnerable to exploitation. His employer, Jonathan Peachum, operates an extensive professional begging business; Fewkommbey is responsible for the dogs that have to be kept severely lean in order to attract the appropriate sympathy. Peachum’s capitalist ambitions lead him to invest in a corrupt enterprise to provide ships to transport military recruits to South Africa. His daughter, Polly, is courted both by a murderous crook called MacHeath and by Coax, the broker who has instigated the enterprise.

The author, Bertolt Brecht (born 10 February 1898), grew up in Augsburg, Bavaria. With his father’s support, he avoided the immediate rush of recruitment for the army by opting to study for a medical degree. He was conscripted into the army in the autumn of 1918 but his short military service was in his home city as an orderly in a military clinic for venereal diseases. Brecht’s first full-length play was written in 1918 but was not performed till 1923. His second play, Drums in the Night, was first produced in 1922 and dealt with the aftermath of the First World War. That year he was awarded Kleist Prize, the country’s most prestigious literary award. With strong socialist conviction, Brecht went into exile in early 1933 soon after the election of the Nazis to government. He wrote forty plays, several screenplays, hundreds of poems and a few works of fiction.

The central character, Fewkoombey, is not only a victim of warfare but also a victim of the society that he returns to. Though innocent, he's brought under suspicion for the murder of one of MacHeath’s shopkeepers. The court hears that logic “will not let us believe that the prosperous banker MacHeath could have murdered Mary Sawyer” and that same logic “convinces us that it must have been the penniless, brutalised ex-soldier, Fewkoombey”. The solicitor maintains that “fighting in the war... arouses in the coarser type nothing but the most brutal impulses”.