Beer Literature - Pub Life

I am in the middle of Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square, a brutal 1941 novel of fringe characters spending too much time drinking to excess in London pubs and apartments just before the start of World War II. I was struck by these two passages describing the same pub near London's Earl's Court. The first paragraph brings us into the pub's quaint appearance and gentle ambience as seen through the main character's friend who meets him at the pub for beers:

The long, warm bright days still persisted, and the door of the pub was flung and fastened back. It was cool, dark, and restful inside and pleasant with the peaceful beginnings of the little house’s evening trade – two men talking quietly, another reading a newspaper, the flutter of a canary in a cage, the barmaid vanishing into the other bars and returning, the occasional oily jab of the beer engine and the soft spurt of beer. It was good to sit back in this cave of refreshment, and stare at the blinding brilliance of the day outside, the pavement, the dusty feet of temperate but jaded pedestrians.

The second, much darker passage, is how the pub looks to George Harvey Bone, the main character:

But, of course, he could not see what George could see – the wet winter nights when the door was closed; the smoke, the noise, the wet people: the agony of Netta under the electric light: Mickey drunk and Peter arguing: mornings-after on dark November days: the dart-playing and boredom: the lunch-time drunks, the lunch-time snacks, the lunch-room upstairs: the whole poisoned nightmarish circle of the idle tippler’s existence.

I'll take the first vision of an English pub.