David Lodge's first four novels, The Picturegoers, Ginger, You're Barmy, The British Museum is Falling Down and Out of the Shelter were published between 1960 and 1970. They contain settings and topics drawn from his own experience which were to recur in different guises in his subsequent work. These include South London suburbia; the academic world, particularly university English departments; Catholicism; and the attractions of the American way of life. The first two novels and the fourth are works of sober realism, but the third, The British Museum is Falling Down, brings together realism and farce and formal invention in a way that looks forward to Lodge's later novels.

The Picturegoers (1960) was published when Lodge was twentyfive, but had been completed two years earlier, and is a strikingly precocious achievement for so young a writer. The setting is the suburban milieu in which he grew up, here called ‘Brickley’, as opposed to the real-life Brockley, and the formal and thematic focus of the novel is a large local cinema, the Palladium, where the characters go for their Saturday night outings. The Picturegoers is precisely located in social history: in the mid-1950s cinema-going was still popular, as it had been in the thirties and forties, though it was under threat from television. The Palladium has come down in the world; once it had been awell-known variety theatre, and now, seedy and dilapidated, it is only just holding on as a cinema.

For the central characters, Saturday evening at the cinema is followed by Sunday morning at Mass. (Lodge has remarked that Alan Sillitoe's title Saturday Night and Sunday Morning would have suited his novel very well.) The Mallory family are Catholics, some fervent, some merely dutiful. Mr Mallory is an Englishman and a convert, but his wife is an Irishwoman, and they have had eight children. The eldest son is a priest, and another, still at school, is expected to follow the same path. Their eldest daughter, Clare, is back at home after unsuccessfully trying to be a nun. Other people are brought into the story, because they know the Mallorys or spend Saturday nights at the Palladium.