This blog has been dormant for a few months due to a variety of reasons (a period of illness, a deadline for manuscript submission, disruption to travel by flooding, and a global pandemic) but I have managed to keep going with the research for ‘Understanding Social Change through Autobiographical Narrative’. Last Autumn, I was in Brighton researching in the Mass Observation (MO) Archive in the Keep and I have been progressed with a number of the strands of the project as listed in my first post on this blog. In particular, I have been working on my own self-reflexive writing so that in best MO fashion I can observe my own subjectivity as part of the project: examining both my own motivations for doing research and how I myself respond to social change by writing about it. To this end, I have been writing a Covid-19 journal for MO, which has turned into a quite substantive diary dealing with many facets of my life. Indeed, I think one way to take this project forward would be to continue this diary and expand its focus more generally to social change in the twenty first century. In the meantime, I am going to take part in the MO call for day diaries for #12May2020. This is the tenth anniversary of this annual call and in celebration of that I shall be posting the day diary (now posted here) I submitted for #12May2010 on this blog on Tuesday 12 May 2020 and then on the following day, I will post the day diary I have written for #12May2020 (now posted here).

I’m also going to post a short series of blogs about my research on ageing carried out in collaboration with colleagues at Brunel, Demos, MO and the University of the Third Age as part of the New Dynamics of Ageing programme. Our project was called ‘Fiction and the Cultural Mediation of Ageing’, but I mainly worked on responses to the MO directives on ‘Growing Older’ (Winter 1992), ‘Age’ (Autumn 2006) and ‘Books and You’ (Winter 2009). I want to blog about this project because it was about the representation of older people and one of the things we emphasised was older people’s dislike of the term ‘elderly’ because of its connotations of vulnerability. We are currently living in a situation in which the media has been discussing the vulnerability of the elderly continually for nearly three months. This cannot be good and therefore I am offering a series of posts on this blog discussing my research on ageing to register a contestation of those representations. At the same time, I will use these posts to reflect on my past practice as a researcher using MO and what I feel about that now.

Ageing Series

1. Why I Chose to Use the Mass Observation Project for My Research on Ageing (13 minutes)
2. Ageing is Not a Social Problem: How people negotiate the fixed categories of ageing created by the postwar welfare state (13 minutes)
3. Growing Old with the Welfare State (9 minutes)
4. Ageing, Gender and Moving Beyond Binary or Hierarchical Thinking (9 minutes)

My paper to the Working Class Studies Association Conference (3-6 September 2019) held at the University of Kent, Canterbury. This is different (especially after the first couple of paragraphs) from the Literary London version of the paper (which immediately precedes this on the blog). I will say more about this conference and more about the changes to the paper and how they affect the project in due course. There is still more to do on the idea of British Proletkult (mentioned at the end of this paper). Other side projects that have suggested themselves to me are (a) to organise a conference/collection on the relationship between proletarian (and working-class fiction) and modernism because in some countries, such as Sweden, modernism is proletarian and the key writers are working-class writers; (b) to rewrite Alick West’s Crisis and Criticism from the kind of perspective I’m trying to get at in this paper (esoteric – maybe I’ll have to self-publish – but a project I think would be interesting to write). Here, though is the paper given on the morning of Friday 6 September 2019:

“Nearer the gate of a strange field”:

Beyond Class and Gender in Interwar Proletarian Autobiografiction.

Nick Hubble (Nick.Hubble@brunel.ac.uk)

The Durham miner Harold Heslop was one of the key proletarian writers of the interwar period and Britain’s representative at the Second Plenum of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers in 1930 in Kharkov in the Soviet Union. While his novels are principally set in the Durham coalfields, the contrast with London (where he lived from 1924-5 while attending the Central Labour College and then from 1928 onwards when blacklisted from the mines) forms a direct or indirect element. In this paper, I focus on The Gate of a Strange Field (1929) and Last Cage Down (1935) as autobiografictional negotiations of complex class and gender politics, which, through navigating the intersections between respectability, sexuality and trade unionism led the way towards a transformed socialist politics, which pointed in more radical directions than the eventual 1945 welfare state, and still holds lessons for the twenty-first century.

‘Autobiografiction’ is an Edwardian term that has been recently revived by Max Saunders. It describes a category of writing which is more than just autobiographical fiction in that it allows writers to transform themselves through their creative practice and not only represent, but also discover, a different, fuller and more complex understanding of selfhood:

Autobiografiction can include material that writers may prefer not to own in their own person; but rather than suggesting that their fiction gives them away, either consciously or unconsciously, they are claiming that the fictional permits a fuller autobiography. This is partly a matter of its being able to include the shameful as well as the honourable, and thus assemble a more complete, more human, picture. (Saunders 2010: 205)

The ability to self-reflexively narrate the self became an alternative source of agency to power rooted in the Victorian systems of patriarchy, class and empire. What we think of as modernism – a self-reflexive technique that incorporates what is ‘unconscious’ to bourgeois consciousness – was originated by those, such as Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson and D.H. Lawrence, marginalised by class and/or gender from Victorian power structures. Following Lawrence, working-class writers – especially those like Heslop who also came from mining communities – rejected autobiography as too complicit with 19th century discourses of progress and the hierarchical ordering of society.

In Crisis and Criticism, first published in 1937, Alick West identified the question facing modernist writers, such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, in the interwar period: “When I do not know any longer who are the “we” to whom I belong, I do not know any longer who ‘I’ am either” (19). The work of these writers may be characterised as an autobiografictional move beyond the limits of the bourgeois self in search of intersubjective social relations. West considered Ulysses (the subject of his penultimate chapter) to be an important step in this direction because it related self to society. However, West goes on to argue in his final chapter that a full answer to the modernist question can only be found by relating self to society in terms of the production process as Heslop does in The Gate of a Strange Field (which is thereby elevated above Ulysses in importance).

This is perhaps rather too much freight for most novels to bear and it appears to be a claim that has not fared well against the test of time. When Crisis and Criticism was republished in 1975, the final chapter on Heslop was omitted and rather than The Gate of a Strange Field being bountifully available to teach as a regularly reprinted Penguin Classic, copies are pretty near impossible to locate and I had to read it in the British Library. However, nonetheless, I think that West was correct and the best way to vindicate his arguments is to consider a range of proletarian literature written by men and women, such as I outline in my book, The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question (2017).

My aim in that book was not to create an alternative canon but to try and lay out a different approach to reading and a different way of thinking about literature that isn’t hierarchical. However, this is not to deny the unofficial existence of a proletarian or working-class canon which includes, for example, Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philantrophists (1914) and Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair (1932-4). Despite Lawrence & Wishart’s 1984 republication of Last Cage Down with an introduction by Andy Croft, Heslop has never quite been accepted into that unofficial canon because of the way his novels don’t fit the changing political positions of the Communist Party over the 1920s and 1930s. As Croft explains, The Gate of a Strange Field was published during the Comintern’s ‘Third Period’ of ‘Class against Class’ at a time when the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), ‘a proletcult organisation who argued for a militant class-conscious literature rooted in Communist-led industrial struggle’ held sway:

A fellow-traveller and ILP novelist like Heslop, writing about the industrial defeats of politically-confused individual trade-union leaders, clearly did not meet the sectarian demands of RAPP literary criticism. . . . [In 1932] International Literature carried a long and damning study of Heslop’s fiction, accusing him of being ‘infected’ with ‘social-fascist bacteria’. In The Gate of a Strange Field … the article complained, Heslop only regarded ‘the workers’ movement from a purely aesthetic point of view … [depicting] the social only though the prisms of the personal … under the influence of sentimental individualism’. (Croft 1984: x)

Croft goes on to argue that Last Cage Down, ‘bears all the marks of a penitent attempt to answer these criticisms’ (Croft 1984: xi). More recently, John Connor has described the novel as informed by ‘pure Third Period orthodoxy, the trade-union movement cast as an adjunct of bourgeois class rule and its leaders as “social fascists” undermining the interests of the workers’ so that ‘the charismatic labour leader Jim Cameron … betrays the men he leads while the quiet communist Joe Frost argues the correct course of action’ (Connor 2019: 325-6). The problem was, however, that by 1935, when Last Cage Down appeared, the sectarian ‘Class against Class’ position had been superseded by the inclusive Popular Front line. Both Croft and Connor cite the contemporary criticism of Charles Ashleigh, who reviewed the novel for both Left Review and the Daily Worker, that it was ‘perhaps a little too sectarian and formalist for these days’ with the character of Frost appearing ‘somewhat dated … rather more in the spirit of a few years earlier’ (qtd Connor 2019: 326; qtd Croft 1984: xii).

Such readings simultaneously illustrate some of the pitfalls of being a working-class writer during the politicised 1930s, account for Heslop’s reception history, and suggest why Alick West came to be embarrassed about his earlier advocacy of Heslop over Joyce as the pinnacle of modern writing. Nevertheless, they are misreadings of Heslop; not only because he is a complex and, at times, satirical writer but also because such readings focus on perceived male class politics and miss the intersectional dynamics of the novels.

For example, The Gate of a Strange Field is a Bildungsroman in which we see Joe Tarrant’s progression from school to pit and on to full-time union representative. In London as an elected representative of the national committee running the General Strike, he spends his time in bed with a prostitute as the Strike falls apart. Unsurprisingly, critics, such as David Bell, have seen the novel as a ‘negative apprenticeship’ in which the protagonist makes all the wrong decisions resulting in personal and political failure and we the reader are supposed to learn the message that we should make the opposite decisions (i.e. think like a Communist, don’t treat strikes as just local issues, don’t fornicate etc.). Yet this is not really how the book reads. In fact, the prostitute who Joe meets in London is his estranged wife, Molly. Previously, Heslop has described in Lawrentian tones how, following an enforced marriage due to pregnancy, they had ‘lived a strange, loveless, over-sexed life, each pulling a different way, each so pitiful’ (Heslop 1929: 139) before separating. Joe then goes on to scandalise the respectable morals of the coalfield by moving in with modern, as signified by her page-boy haircut, ILP socialist, Emily Ritter, who represents a very different model of female agency to Molly: ‘Emily Ritter had completely lost her head. She had to smash through all the Northern conception of morals. It could not be said that she went into the matter blind as a mole, for she knew exactly what she was doing.’ (Heslop 1929: 169). Yet, Joe still feels stuck within the conventions of the coalfield even as he flouts them by living outside marriage with his girlfriend, hence the pleasure he takes in his trips to London on union business:

 In the parochial wilderness of the North men and women had small minds. In London it was different. There nobody knew anybody else, and so morals did not count. Morals were changing. To blazes with morals. (Heslop 1929: 180)

But the irony is, even while indulging himself in London, Joe is still caught up in the limited ‘respectable’ moral outlook of the coalfields. This is made spectacularly clear when Molly interrupts his post-coital mansplaining of the politics of the General Strike: ‘You’re not in the market at Shielding, Joe,’ she said ‘You’re in bed . . . with me.’ (Heslop 1929: 229). The logic of the novel suggests that only an intersectional politics that moves beyond ‘respectability’ would liberate Joe and Molly and Emily. Or, to put it another way, Heslop does not fall into the trap of ‘sentimental individualism’ and an aesthetic focus on personal problems that he was criticised for by International Literature; rather, through fictional exploration of his own feelings and experiences he shows the necessity of moral revolution in order for collective industrial struggle to be successful. He is not trying to slavishly follow the Party line and failing; he is criticising the Party line.

Turning to Last Cage Down from a similar intersectional perspective, we can see that the novel is not intended as a penitential corrective to The Gate of a Strange Field. Yes, Joe Frost is ‘a proletcult literary type’ as Croft suggests, but he is a satirical take on that type; he might understand Marx and listen to the radio but he is also obsessed with his waistline and has the local butcher weigh him once a week by hauling him up on his hook (205), which is hardly a militant, heroic pose. Yes, Jim Cameron, the protagonist, does come to realise he was wrong after losing his position as secretary of the miner’s lodge and going to prison for nine months, during which time his mother is evicted from her cottage. But the novel’s epiphanic moment is not his acceptance that Joe Frost might actually be right about how to conduct a strike, but when he finds himself helping his girlfriend with the washing up:

   She nodded. ‘Good,’ she said, rising to her feet. ‘Now, help me to clear away because I’ve got to be up at the Lion in time for six.’

   Funny. He’d never done this for his mother in all his life. He had never thought about it. He had always taken it for granted that the clean crockery would be placed before him and the dirty crockery carted away from before him and cleansed. And here he was helping the girl to clear way the dishes. Well . . . he was damned . . . ! (Heslop 1984: 195)

As the novel moves to a conclusion (involving, as in The Gate of a Strange Field and other Heslop novels, a mining disaster), Joe Frost is trying to organise an anti-Fascist rally to protest at a Mosley-like figure visiting ‘Tynecastle’ (Newcastle) and dreaming of a Communist revolution following on from it. But then there is an explosion in the mine trapping him and eventually he is rescued by Cameron. The novel’s closing scene finds Frost convalescing in bed, receiving a visit from Cameron and another miner, Paddy O’Toole – suggesting the multi-ethnic composition of the proletariat as discussed in Wednesday’s keynote lecture [at the WCSA conference] by Satnam Virdee – and the last words in the novel are given to Joe’s wife: ‘I’d like to see any of you dare to stop fighting. Just any of you dare, that’s all!’ (361).

Therefore, in the conventional reading of 1930s politics according to communist positions, Last Cage Down might be seen as calling for a ‘United Front’ of socialists, communists and trade unionists rather than the proletcult position that Croft and Connor associate the novel with. Alternatively, Heslop’s fiction might be considered as sharing more in common with the revolutionary politics of ILP writers such as Ethel Mannin and George Orwell. However, I think we need to move away from a criticism that seeks to fit British writers, and working-class writers in particular (and even more so miner writers), to political positions and then finds them failing. Why do we assume that the default ‘proletarian’ position is one of unyielding militant, masculinity – is it purely because the struggle is presented as man versus material nature in the mines? Better to follow the example of McKenzie Wark in Molecular Red (2015) and rethink proletcult from outside the parameters of the Bolshevik Party line and view the struggle -as called for by Mrs Frost – as ‘in its origin and ends not fundamentally against the ruling class’ but rather the quest to find ‘in and against nature’ ‘a totality within which to cultivate the surplus of life’ (11, 23). The reason why Heslop has appeared a politically confused writer to critics is because his work is not orientated towards the shifting political goals of the 1930s but towards an as-yet-unrealised utopian-because-proletarian worldview beyond class and gender.

Works Cited:

Bell, David. Ardent Propaganda: Miners’ Novels and Class Conflict 1929-1939. Uppsala: Umeå University, 1995.

Connor, John. ‘Anglo-Soviet Relations in the Long 1930s’ in Benjamin Kohlmann and Matthew Taunton, eds, A History of 1930s British Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019: 317-330.

Croft, Andy. ‘Introduction’ to Harold Heslop, Last Cage Down, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1984: vii-xiii.

Heslop, Harold. The Gate of a Strange Field, London: Brentano, 1929.

Heslop, Harold. Last Cage Down, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1984 [1935].

Hubble, Nick. The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017.

Saunders, Max. Self-Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, & the Forms of Modern Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Wark, McKenzie. Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene. London: Verso, 2015.

West, Alick. Crisis and Criticism, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1937.

This is the text of the paper I gave at the 2019 Literary London Conference (11-12 July) this year. It is mainly a condensation and refocusing of my previous post, ‘Working-Class Autobiography and Proletarian Autobiografiction: Harold Heslop’ (bibliographic details can be found here). Apart from the fact that it might be of interest to those who heard the paper, I’m putting it up because I’m trying to trace the evolution of this project as it progresses. For me, ideas often develop through writing something up and then leaving it a bit until I realise that actually I might think something different on reflection. I do now think something different, which I will try and work in to an updated version of the paper that I will be giving at the Working Class Studies Association Conference to be held at the University of Kent at the beginning of September. Returning to topic of categorising literature in terms of Communist Party lines (which is something I’ve said we can usefully dispense with in the 21^st Century), I’m now thinking that the standard reading of Heslop as out of step does him an injustice. Rather than see him as responding to criticisms of The Gate of a Strange Field (1929) during the ‘class against class’ period by making Last Cage Down (1935) more proletarian and thereby condemning it to be received as ‘sectarian’ during the ‘popular front’ period, I’m now thinking maybe we should read him as a Proletkult writer in the sense discussed by McKenzie Wark in Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (Verso, 2015). Because in Heslop, more than any other British proletarian writer, the key conflicts and actions are determined by the interaction between the labour point of view and nature. Read this way, Heslop’s work is important for thinking about the expansion of proletarian culture into a general account of the experience of the world. It offers a way of thinking about what Wark calls the ‘progressive selection’ of ideas and social values. As such, it is very relevant to twenty-first century concerns as I shall investigate in future posts.

Here, though, is the version of the paper yet to be updated in terms of Heslop’s British Proletkult status:

“In London it was different”:

Class, Gender, and Metropolitan Values in Harold Heslop’s Proletarian Autobiografiction.

Nick Hubble (Nick.Hubble@brunel.ac.uk)

 

The Durham miner Harold Heslop was one of the key proletarian writers of the interwar period and Britain’s representative at the Second Plenum of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers in 1930 in Kharkov in the Soviet Union. While his novels are principally set in the Durham coalfields, the contrast with London (where Heslop lived from 1924-5 while attending the Central Labour College and then from 1928 onwards when no longer able to find work as a miner) forms a central element of his novels The Gate of a Strange Field (1929) and The Journey Beyond (1930). On one level, this contrast is framed in terms of neighbourhood and community:

In the parochial wilderness of the North men and women had small minds. In London it was different. There nobody knew anybody else, and so morals did not count. Morals were changing. To blazes with morals. (GSF 180)

In practice, however, Heslop’s texts display fascination with a female sexuality, often figured through prostitution, that is located within the capital in contrast to the ‘respectable’ values of the coalfields. In this paper, I will read these texts as part of an autobiografictional negotiation by Heslop of not just the complex class and gender politics of the time but also of the apparently insurmountable divide between London and the regions.

‘Autobiografiction’ is an Edwardian term that has been recently revived by Max Saunders. It describes a category of writing which is more than just autobiographical fiction in that it allows writers to transform themselves through their creative practice and not only represent, but also discover, a different, fuller and more complex understanding of selfhood:

Autobiografiction can include material that writers may prefer not to own in their own person; but rather than suggesting that their fiction gives them away, either consciously or unconsciously, they are claiming that the fictional permits a fuller autobiography. This is partly a matter of its being able to include the shameful as well as the honourable, and thus assemble a more complete, more human, picture. (Saunders 2010: 205)

The appearance of autobiografiction over the fin-de-siècle can be seen as related to the changes in subjectivity referenced by Virginia Woolf’s famous declaration in her essay ‘Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown’ that ‘on or about December 1910, human character changed’. A mixture of technological change, mass education and new thinking (Marx, Darwin, Freud) resulted in the old Victorian hierarchical order tipping over into a fluid modern society which could be navigated by self-invention: or rather, the ability to self-reflexively narrate the self became an alternative source of agency to power rooted in the systems of patriarchy, class and empire. What we think of as modernism – a self-reflexive technique that incorporates what is ‘unconscious’ to bourgeois consciousness – was originated by those marginalised by class and/or gender from those power structures, such as Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson and D.H. Lawrence. Lawrence, in particular, set the template for working-class writers – especially those like Heslop who also came from mining communities – to write autobiografiction rather than straightforward autobiography (which had hitherto been the dominant genre of working-class writing) which was too complicit with 19th century discourses of progress and the hierarchical ordering of society. However, self-reflexive autobiografiction plays out differently for working- and middle-class authors creating the divide between what we know as proletarian literature and modernism.

In Crisis and Criticism, first published in 1937, Alick West identified the question facing modernist writers in the interwar period: “When I do not know any longer who are the “we” to whom I belong, I do not know any longer who ‘I’ am either” (19). What characterises high modernist texts such as Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) is the autobiografictional discovery of modern subjectivity through exploring intersubjective relations with the working class, albeit with the suggestion of a conscious-unconscious relationship (i.e., in crude terms, the modernist subject is made conscious of their unconscious through the interaction with the working-class other). On one level, proletarian literature showed an equally full working-class subjectivity which interacted with the bourgeois individual as other. Furthermore, however, proletarian literature automatically placed the working-class subject in a relationship with other working-class subjects that was not othered but collective; enabling the pronoun ‘we’. We can consider the key works of proletarian literature, alongside those of Woolf and Joyce and some others, as the collective expression of a changed subjectivity that was orientated towards a transformed future, which was dependent on an autobiografictional move beyond the limits of the self as defined by the culture of the period. West considered Ulysses to be an important step on this trajectory and therefore made it the subject of the penultimate chapter of Crisis and Criticism – but he still saw the novel as limited by Joyce’s tendency to focus on acts of consumption while more-or-less ignoring the social relations of the production process and the class conflicts surrounding it. As an example of a novel which does organise the social energy of productive activity, West names Heslop’s The Gate of a Strange Field, to which he devotes the final chapter of Crisis and Criticism and thereby in effect elevates above Ulysses in importance. This is perhaps rather too much freight for most novels to bear and it appears to be a claim that has not fared well against the tests of time. When Crisis and Criticism was republished in 1975, the final chapter on Heslop was omitted and rather than being bountifully available to teach as a regularly reprinted Penguin Classic, copies of The Gate of a Strange Field are pretty near impossible to locate and I had to read it in the BL. However, notwithstanding the current context, I think that West was broadly correct but that in order to vindicate his arguments it’s necessary to consider a range of proletarian literature written by men and women, such as I outline in my book, The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question.

However, Heslop might also be considered particularly unsuitable for representing the superiority of proletarian literature over modernism because the trajectory of his fiction appears to lead to an almost stereotypically crude version of the worker as all-powerful male hero, such as Jim Cameron, the miner protagonist of Last Cage Down (1935):

The whole being of a man must be in tune with the silver rock before him and the frowning strata about him. He must know when to kirve, when to knick, when to smash down the ‘caunch’. He must make this dead coal speak, speak with many tongues of coal, weep as a woman weeps when she mourns. If he is skilful he will make the coal leap voluntarily from its fastness with a shriek of joy […]. (Heslop 1984: 3)

The only other time Jim Cameron feels like a proper man is when he is with Betty, the barmaid from the Red Lion: ‘She was a likeable lass, one with whom a man could become a man because she was essentially a woman possessed of the rich virtues and treasures of a woman’ (Heslop 1984: 55). This apparently unreconstructed sexual politics seems to be linked to what some critics, such as John Connor, have described as Last Cage Down’s ‘class against class’ position which the Daily Worker found ‘a little too sectarian and formalist’ for the now popular-front times of 1935. Yet, a different reading – one not determined by the lines taken by the Communist Party over 80 years ago – might think about Heslop’s fiction as concerned with liberating his subjects and himself from the remnants of a restrictive nineteenth-century subaltern consciousness. In his autobiography, Heslop relates that restricted consciousness to ‘proletarian dreaming’:

The year 1919 was a year of intense proletarian dreaming … Despite the overwhelming victory of Lloyd George and his coalition, the proletarian world of men did not cease to dream. The most outrageous fantasy was the Sankey Commission. … How we gloated over the possibility of the mines becoming nationalised. How we dreamed. How we stretched out our hands towards the towering pit head gearing to take it, and all it signified, into our own dear keeping. Poor, soft, deluded people that we were. (Heslop 1994: 146)

Joe Tarrant, the protagonist of The Gate of a Strange Field falls prey to such ‘proletarian dreaming’ and ends up a comfortable union representative. In London as an elected representative of the national committee running the General Strike, he spends his time in bed with a prostitute as the Strike falls apart. Unsurprisingly, critics, such as David Bell, have seen the novel as a ‘negative apprenticeship’ in which the protagonist makes all the wrong decisions resulting in personal and political failure and we the reader are supposed to learn the message that we should make the opposite decisions (i.e. think like a Communist, don’t treat strikes as just local issues, don’t fall into proletarian dreamings of Sunday outings etc.). Yet this is not really how the book reads. In fact, the prostitute who Joes meets in London is his wife, Molly. They had (with shades of Lawrence) ‘lived a strange, loveless, over-sexed life, each pulling a different way, each so pitiful’ (Heslop 1929: 139) before separating. Joe scandalises the morals of the coalfield by moving in with modern, as signified by her page-boy haircut, Emily Ritter, who represents a very different model of female agency to Molly: ‘Emily Ritter had completely lost her head. She had to smash through all the Northern conception of morals. It could not be said that she went into the matter blind as a mole, for she knew exactly what she was doing.’ (Heslop 1929: 169). Yet, Joe still feels stuck within the conventions of the coalfield even as he flouts them by living outside marriage with his girlfriend, hence his pleasure in his trips to London on mining union business (returning to the quote I had at the beginning):

In the parochial wilderness of the North men and women had small minds. In London it was different. There nobody knew anybody else, and so morals did not count. Morals were changing. To blazes with morals. (Heslop 1929: 180)

When Joe ends up in bed with Molly, Heslop is not implying criticism of him for neglecting his proper union business. Indeed, Molly has to remind him that he is still too stuck in the mental outlook of the coalfield: ‘You’re not in the market at Shielding, Joe,’ she said ‘You’re in bed . . . with me.’ (Heslop 1929: 229). The logic of the novel suggests that a liberalised, transformed and expanded socio-cultural context, as represented by the London scenes of the novel, would liberate not only Joe but Molly and Emily as well. If the novel can’t quite manage to formally resolve all of these possible outcomes it is not for want of Heslop exploring a range of outcomes and subjectivities autobiografictionally.

In Journey Beyond, he took a step further – at least for the opening chapters of the novel by making the autobiografictional protagonist, ‘Martha Drake’, which allows him to directly criticise the patriarchal values of the coalfield:

On the floor were a couple of lead soldiers and a sort of spring cannon that shot matchsticks into the air. That was it! No love. To destroy! It is the only task that man can perform successfully. To kill. To maim. To wound. How man loves such tasks! Brutality rising beyond the heights of fiendishness. . . . With a breaking heart she had gone back home. (Heslop 1930: 11)

Reading between the lines, one can see how Heslop’s experiences of London – living there first while studying on a miners’ scholarship at the Central Labour College from 1924-5 and then permanently from 1928 onwards – changed his attitude to his northern birthplace. The differences are figured through women in particular: ‘A woman of the North has not obtained the outlook of her sisters of the South. She knows neither the clicking of a typewriter nor the eternal cigarette.’ (Heslop 1930: 38). Martha’s experiences in London during the depression – having to work as a char, stealing money from an office, getting caught and being sent to prison for a month, and losing a child – turn her to the brink of prostitution and her southern husband, Russell, whose experiences of the labour exchange and various short-term jobs are drawn directly from Heslop’s own, to the brink of jumping off the embankment into the Thames. Their survival, due to Russell getting a factory job after strikers have been laid off, leads them to a version of the modernist question concerning the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ as they ponder whether individualism is really the answer: ‘I suppose we’re all for ourselves in this world?’ (Heslop 1930: 252). This clearly isn’t the political position that Heslop is advocating but it indicates the width of his thinking about possible subjectivities before returning to the problem of how to build a collective class consciousness that doesn’t simply replicate the constraints that Joe, Molly and Emily kick against in The Gate of a Strange Field.

Looking again at Last Cage Down from this perspective, it is possible to see that the establishment of Jim at the beginning of the novel as the stereotypical worker-hero of prodigious activity is something of a set-up because the plot of the novel involves him losing everything, including his position as secretary of the miner’s lodge, and going to prison for nine months, during which time his mother is evicted from her cottage. He realises he is wrong about many things and consequently he changes his behaviour in many respects including in relation to Betty. In this manner, Heslop’s metropolitan consciousness is introduced back in to the Durham coalfield:

She nodded. ‘Good,’ she said, rising to her feet. ‘Now, help me to clear away because I’ve got to be up at the Lion in time for six.’

Funny. He’d never done this for his mother in all his life. He had never thought about it. He had always taken it for granted that the clean crockery would be placed before him and the dirty crockery carted away from before him and cleansed. And here he was helping the girl to clear way the dishes. Well . . . he was damned . . . ! (Heslop 1984: 195)

The eventual conclusion of the novel (involving as in The Gate of a Strange Field and other Heslop novels a mining disaster), in effect, calls for a ‘United Front’ of socialists, communists and trade unionists (as opposed to the broader ‘Popular Front’ of all anti-fascist forces which included liberals and conservatives). Heslop therefore remains opposed to the ‘proletarian dreaming’ implicit to labourism (and as a consequence his books were not compatible with the values of the postwar British state) and committed to an altered form of class consciousness embracing liberated and equal gender relations that he has mapped out through the autobiografictional practice of his writing.

To conclude, the capacity of a working-class writer such as Heslop (aided of course by his socialist education and values) to free himself from the structure of feeling of his background and understand the extent to which social (i.e. class and gender) relations would change outside the sphere of working-class respectability suggests how proletarian autobiografiction might be seen as a means of understanding and adapting to social change, which at the same time generates new cultural forms and social values. Heslop’s novels and proletarian literature in general suggest that the emancipation of women was a key catalyst for the shift from working-class autobiography to proletarian autobiografiction. In terms of Heslop’s texts, this works out in practice through the way a female sexuality that is located within the capital is not just contrasted with but also used to critique the ‘respectable’ values of the coalfields. Reading his novels, it is possible to see how taking an autobiografictional approach to his experiences allowed him to discuss (and analyse) parts of his own life – his response to metropolitan values of gender and sexual fluidity – that would have been difficult to include in an autobiography at the time. However, the autobiography he did finally write in the early 1970s helps us see how those complex autobiografictional negotiations of intertwined class and gender politics reconciled regional and metropolitan values and pointed the way towards the transformed culture of postwar Britain that would emerge in the 1960s, with its social and sexual (or emotional) revolutions. Rethinking literary history and the importance of interwar proletarian fictions like Heslop’s, which are not just regional texts but very much about the intersection and transformation of cultural values across Britain, is also a way of rethinking contemporary British history and the apparent binary divide between ordinary people and metropolitan liberals. Morals have gone to blazes in the London of Heslop’s novels because his characters have been taken outside the respectable constraints of their local neighbourhoods but if they can survive the transition, they become the agents of change.

Perhaps you who read this are a housewife with no ambition to make a career outside the home; perhaps you will say that the coming of Fascism would make no difference to you. But you would be wrong. (202)

 Ethel Mannin’s Women and the Revolution was written in 1937 and first published by Secker and Warburg in 1938 but the copy I have is the US first edition published in 1939 by Dutton. Therefore, I can claim this piece as a celebration of its eightieth anniversary. The contemporary relevance of a book following a very particular and decidedly minority line might seem negligible. Mannin was a member of the Independent Labour Party (I.L.P.) and a supporter of the P.O.U.M. in Spain. The most likely place people will have come across discussions of her politics (very few indeed will have come across any discussion of her fiction) are in books about her fellow I.L.P.-member (and soldier with the P.O.U.M.), George Orwell, such as John Newsinger’s Hope Lies in the Proles: George Orwell and the Left (2018). However, unlike Orwell, Mannin did not abandon the I.L.P. position after the outbreak of the Second World War but remained opposed to it as an imperialist war and adopted a specifically pacifist stance. (It should be noted that this sometimes led her into anti-Semitic positions such as arguing that Jewish interests wanted the war and downplaying Nazi atrocities against the Jews at least up until 1942 – see Newsinger, p. 88).

While those arguments lay ahead in the future, Mannin was aware of a different set of contradictions embodied in her dedication of Women and the Revolution to her friend, Emma Goldman. In the opening ‘Dedicatory Letter’ to Goldman, Mannin writes:

There will be those who will no doubt find it paradoxical that a book which quotes from Marx and Lenin and advocates social revolution for the establishment of a Workers’ State along Marxist lines (though not as interpreted by the Stalinist bureaucracy) should be dedicated to you, an Anarchist, and as such opposed to any Centralized State. (np)

She goes on to specify that the difference between herself and Goldman is that rather than see Marxism as inevitably flawed, she still believes in ‘a real dictatorship of the proletariat which would not deteriorate into the dictatorship of a bureaucracy’. Mannin argues that such a free workers’ democracy would become indistinguishable from the ‘Libertarian Society of Anarchism’ advocated by Goldman. But this isn’t just a hypothetical discussion, the possibility of common ground between the two is rooted specifically in the collaboration between the P.O.U.M. and the Anarchist-Syndicalist C.N.T. –F.A.I. in the Spanish Revolution of 1936 (the details of which are best known today to a British readership from Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia [1938]). Therefore, Women and the Revolution is written for a particular political context as a political intervention during a particular moment in which a window of opportunity had opened up (rather like Walter Benjamin’s concept of the Jetztzeit or revolutionary now-time, when it is briefly possible to act outside the normal circumscriptions of tradition and historical weight). However, as Mannin was aware, this window of opportunity was rapidly blinking out of existence:

At the time of writing this (October 1937) the most that can be said is that though the revolution received a severe set-back after the May rising, all is not lost, though the effects of the revolutionaries are yet to be seen. (185)

Her arguments carry a sense of urgency which speaks out of its time – and the now-dated concerns of the respective ‘lines’ of the I.L.P., the Anarchists and the Communist Party – to us today in the midst of the political and cultural crises of 2019. Mannin focuses on the situation of Spanish women, who, under the influence of the Catholic Church, were kept away from public life and within narrowly delineated passive roles. They didn’t have the social freedom of women in England; a fact presented by Mannin as completely outside the norm for modern life. From the beginning of Women and the Revolution, she seeks to establish female emancipation as not just a facet of modern life but the defining feature of modernity, which has come about not just through progress and reform, but through the radical agency and revolutionary activity of women:

 There has been in our time a revolution for women – the revolt of Woman against the oppression of Men, which culminated in the full enfranchisement of women in 1928. … (30)

Therefore, her discussion of the struggle of Mujeres Libres (Free Women), a group backed by the Anarchist trade unions, ‘to emancipate women from the triple slavery of ignorance, traditional passivity and exploitation’ and find new ways for men and women to live and work together without excluding each other, while supporting women nurses, teachers, doctors, artists, chemists and skilled workers, is key to the whole book. The rapid progress of women in revolutionary Spain by the summer of 1937 is attributed to ‘women’s emancipation marching side by side with the revolutionary movement’. However, all these advances are threatened:

. . . since then the Mujeres Libres organisation has been suppressed – part of the work of the counter-revolution which suppressed the P.O.U.M. after the May rising. But nothing short of a Fascist regime can now suppress the feminist movement itself; the women have tasted freedom and will no more tamely retire behind their grills, to be dominated by husbands, fathers, priests, then the women of England retreated from their new found place in commerce, industry, professions, when the [First World] War was finished. (190)

 Viewed from the condescending and often uncritically historicist perspectives that we so often adopt from our present to the past, the struggles of the Women’s Movement before the 1960s and 1970s often seem like merely precursory steps to a modern progressive, feminist consciousness but Mannin makes clear the absolute centrality of these issues to 1937. While the situation in Spain hangs in the balance, the dystopian spectre of what is already happening in Nazi Germany menacingly overshadows the prospects of all European women:

 All that progressive women have worked for for years has been lost. Women professors, doctors, civil servants, have been sacked. Women are no longer eligible for Government posts, and may not be appointed to municipal positions. That women should be displaced in medicine and teaching, two spheres in which women can do such valuable work, seems fantastic, but it is all in line with the Nazi policy of woman’s subservience to male domination. (196-7)

As discussed in my previous post on Mannin’s Confessions and Impressions (the Penguin paperback version of which was another direct intervention in to 1937 British public life), Mannin addresses her readership as sharing a progressive perspective with her but she is not assuming they are an educated or middle-class reader; rather the assumption seems to be that her readership are the same working- and lower-middle-class women readers who read her fiction in large numbers. The implication of her writing is that there is a mass audience for what she has to say and that she is articulating values with a wider social currency. It is difficult, for example, to pigeonhole Mannin as a highbrow writer such as Virginia Woolf and therefore claim she is only speaking for a minority (although we know from the letters Woolf received, that Three Guineas didn’t just speak for a highbrow readership). Rather, Mannin, her books and her readership suggest that the 1930s were a self-consciously modern decade and that the Fascist project to reverse the emancipation of women was seen as just as much of an antiquated, regressive, reactionary backlash as manifestations of Trumpism and related reactionary movements are seen today. It is in this context, that suggestions of a return of the politics of the 1930s are problematic because Fascist or Trumpist politics were not characteristic of the 1930s but were as much an alien intrusion at that time as they are now. A modern, emancipated society was in place and it is the culture and structures of feeling of that society which we should be trying to make links with from the perspective of 2019. Only a mature, feminist public sphere could give rise to all the cultural, social and economic networks necessary to support the publication in 1938 alone of books such as Women and the Revolution, Three Guineas and Naomi Mitchison’s The Moral Basis of Politics. Mannin’s insistence that there has been a revolution for women and her discussion of the Communard Louise Michel (45-50) remain relevant as interventions today and, indeed, can be found in the work of an activist-journalist such as Paul Mason (see Mason 2015: 290; Mason 2019: 283-8).

To be sure, women in 1930s Britain didn’t have the same abortion and divorce rights as they do in the 2010s but Mannin’s discussion of ‘Marriage and Divorce’ (214-227) argues that this is an anachronism resulting from pre-contraceptive and pre-state-support history. Here, her argument is again directed at the mass of working- and lower-middle-class women and can be seen as a continuation of positions advanced in her novels, such as Venetian Blinds (1933):

The Mord divorce had an unsettling effect on the street. Feminism ran riot amongst the women. Mrs. Wray expressed it as her opinion that the time would come when women would be able to get divorces as easily as men; a man could divorce a woman for a single act of adultery, whereas a woman had to prove cruelty as well as adultery; it wasn’t fair, and when women had the Vote the men would have to sit up and take notice; things wouldn’t always be as they were, with the men having it all their own way. It was all very well to laugh at the Suffragettes, but there was more to it, all the same, than smashing shop windows, slashing Academy pictures, and knocking off policemen’s helmets; even her husband admitted that. (Mannin 1933: 71)

This scene is set before the First World War but it is written for a 1930s female readership, who had the vote, and therefore could reasonably expect equalisation of rights in these other areas. But Mannin’s wider point is that only revolutionary change can ultimately achieve full emancipation:

Reforms of one kind and another can do much to make the lives of women freer and easier and happier, but women’s real need is for moral revolution in the society in which she lives, and you cannot get moral revolution by reformist methods; to achieve that the whole of the existing form of society must be smashed and something new fashioned nearer to the heart’s desire. (208)

The deployment of the phrase ‘heart’s desire’ by a writer who was certainly regarded in some contexts as a women’s writer or a romantic novelist is significant here because it privileges desire as a source of agency and a force for change. The epigraph for Mannin’s Confessions and Impressions is Edna St. Vincent Millay’s ‘My candle burns at both ends:/ It will not last the night;/  But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends,/ It gives a lovely light!’ This concept of having it all resonates with what I have described as the post-scarcity emotional economy in Mitchison’s We Have Been Warned: ‘there is no inherent conflict between individual self-realisation and group welfare if the type of society is one which is capable of giving expression to, and support for, a diverse range of identities and relationships’ (Hubble 2017: 20). Both Mannin (225-6, 276-7) and Mitchison use the experience of women in the Soviet Union – despite both having criticisms of that society – as support for the argument that revolutionary change is necessary for women to be able to freely express themselves:

These free, natural women will be beautiful with health and freedom and happiness – can you not see them, with their fine teeth, their natural healthy hair, their strong athletically graceful bodies, their good skins whose loveliness is more than skin-deep? These emancipated women getting the most out of life in both work and play. They are the women of To-morrow, the women of the Revolution. (270)

This remarkable book gives the reader a direct sense of what was at stake in 1937 – and, by implication, what is also at stake in 2019 – and implies that there was no default position by which the social situation of that time could have been somehow preserved. There was only social change or social regression – revolution or reaction – on offer. People understood that in the late 1930s and chose accordingly. Even if we view the 1945 political settlement in Britain as a small ‘c’ conservative resolution of the much wider range of possibilities for social transformation opened in the interwar years, it still marked a society radically different from that of before the War. In Women and the Revolution Mannin frames the social questions confronting ordinary women in the late 1930s in explicitly political terms. Although this book is not anywhere near as overtly self-reflexive (it does include reflections on her own schooling and other acknowledgments of personal experience) as Mannin’s autobiographical and autobiografictional output of the period, it raises questions about the relationship between social change, self-reflexive writing and political consciousness that are central to this project.

Further Reading:

Hubble, Nick. The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question, Edinburgh University Press, 2017.

Mannin, Ethel. Confessions and Impressions, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1937 [1930].

Mannin, Ethel. Venetian Blinds, London: Jarrolds, 1933.

Mannin, Ethel. Women and the Revolution, New York: E.P. Dutton & Co, 1939 [1938].

Mason, Paul. Clear Bright Future: A Radical Defence of the Human Being, London: Allen Lane, 2019.

Mason, Paul, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future. London: Allen Lane, 2015.

Newsinger, John. Hope Lies in the Proles: George Orwell and the Left, London: Pluto Press, 2018.

 Orwell, George. Homage to Catalonia. London: Secker and Warburg, 1938.

Ethel Mannin’s autobiographies, including Confessions and Impressions (1930) and Privileged Spectator (1939), are listed in Burnett, Vincent and Mayall’s three-volume critical annotated bibliography, The Autobiography of the Working Class (1984, 1987, 1989) but not included (presumably because they are published works) in the Burnett Archive of Working-Class Autobiographies. According to the Penguin paperback edition of Confessions and Impressions that I am looking at here, the book had passed through its fiftieth impression in April 1936 before publication by Penguin in revised edition in January 1937 (my copy is actually from the fourth impression of the paperback published in February 1938). Burnett, Vincent and Mayall note ‘that the book caused a minor scandal when published because of the frankness of her confessions and impressions’ (1987: 204). They are underselling it. Mannin was already a bestselling professional author by the second part of the 1920s and her story of how she achieved this as a board-school educated child of a Civil Service letter-sorter in Clapham was a huge success. While her refreshing lack of sexual hypocrisy was no doubt partly responsible for this achievement, confirmation that a working-class woman could become a professional writer spoke to the rapid social change of the interwar years and the aspirations of many ordinary people to write, as documented by Christopher Hilliard in To Educate Our Talents (2006).

Mannin’s adventures in the USA, where she travelled as a star author, combine the zest of a flapper at loose in the roaring twenties with a wisecracking wit: ‘it is such a mistake to take a conscience with one on an Atlantic crossing’ (74); ‘In New York City there are no husbands; only married men’ (80). Yet she, herself, was already married with a daughter before she turned twenty and had spent five years combining childcare with writing full time in a small suburban semi before venturing on that first Atlantic crossing. The overall feeling of this short autobiography (only the first 118 pages of the volume – the second half is a series of pen portraits of people she knew – notably Douglas Goldring, Paul Robeson, George Lansbury, Ellen Wilkinson, Holbrook Jackson, Norman Haire, A. S. Neill, Radclyffe Hall, Arnold Bennet, Somerset Maugham and Bertrand Russell), is neither rags-to-riches nor celebrity journalism but an understated progressive politics (as implied by the second-half selection). Writing of her school years, Mannin notes

But that board-school had its shocks. A nurse came once a week and examined our hair for lice. The girls who were verminous had to be segregated and sat at benches together, shamed outcasts. They were generally known as “the dirty girls.” The teachers themselves used to refer to them as such. No, this is not back in the dark ages of history; it was in 1908. In 1914 when I left the school the expression was still in use. (36)

The sense is that Mannin is writing from a position of enlightenment. She advocates that intelligent men and women teachers should leave the orthodox education system and go ‘over to the ranks of radicals like A. S. Neill and Bertrand Russell’:

They are the pioneers of the new education; they educate by not educating; they know that all education is futile. Ultimately there will be no more schools just as there will be no more marriages … (34)

Mannin’s autobiography therefore serves to disseminate progressive ideas to a wide audience and suggests a cultural continuation of social concerns from the 1920s to the 1930s that was to become central to how people negotiated the social change of the period. As briefly suggested in my previous post (and to be further discussed in the future), Mannin’s own progression to a more overt socialist politics during the 1930s – as an ILP member and the author of Women and the Revolution (1938) – is not just reflected but also worked out in her (autobiogra)fiction. Yet even in the heightened political tensions of the late 1930s, Confessions and Impressions remained a significant intervention in British social life by reaching concerns not so prominently featured in the popular front writing of the time, as implied in the following passage from Mannin’s next and very different volume of autobiography, Privileged Spectator. Mannin was staying in a Sussex Inn while she worked on what would become her 1937 novel, Women Also Dream:

to the bewilderment of the chambermaid, who assumed I was typing out the manuscript of someone else’s [book], never dreaming she would ever set eyes on an author in the flesh. When as a result of her curiosity I had to tell her that I was actually composing the manuscript as I went along, and to reveal my identity to her, she was immeasurably shocked. It seems she had read my Confessions and never dreamed. . . . I thought the poor girl would never have done staring. But when she got used to the idea we became the best of friends and she told me all about her married life, its unhappiness, her separation from her husband, how she had been married at seventeen and ‘didn’t know a thing’, how she had read a sex book since, and some people say you shouldn’t read such books, but there it was, she had got hold of it, and being a married woman at the time it couldn’t do any harm, though on the whole she thought these books weren’t really ‘right’, not really decent. We talked about the catering trade and the long hours that prevailed in it, and called each other ‘dear’ and were sorry to part with each other. (Mannin 1939: 139)

This almost stream-of-consciousness intrusion into Mannin’s narrative suggests that the progressive desire to escape the dark ages was working at many different levels in the Britain of the late 1930s.

Further Reading:

Hilliard, Christopher. To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratisation of Writing in Britain, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.

Mannin. Ethel. Confessions and Impressions, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1937 [1930].

Mannin, Ethel. Privileged Spectator, London: Jarrolds, 1939.

A worked-up version of my talk at the ‘Life vs Fiction’ event held on Wednesday 20 March in Brunel University Library. (Note: this includes some points and arguments already made on this blog).

My British Academy funded project, Understanding Social Change through Autobiographical Narrative, asks how do the diaries and memoirs of ordinary British people reflect periods of intense social change? Underpinned by a set of ideas and questions, it sets out to explore the role of narrative self-reflexivity in helping people understand and adapt (sometimes retrospectively) to two key periods of change, 1939-43 and 1981-4, through research into the Mass Observation Archive (Brighton) and the Burnett Archive of Working-Class Autobiography (held at Brunel). Today, I’m talking in particular about the Burnett Archive and one of the writers, Harold Heslop, whose typescript autobiography is included within it.

I have discussed working-class autobiography and proletarian autobiografiction in previous posts on this blog. Heslop is one of several writers whose typescripts in the Burnett Archive record the political experience of trade unionism, socialism and communism during the interwar years (in a later post I will discuss the significance of the prevalence of such accounts) but he was also a novelist during this period. A comparison between his autobiography – published as Out of the Old Earth (1994) – and his autobiografictional novels such as The Gate of a Strange Field (1929), The Journey Beyond (1930) and Last Cage Down (1935) suggests some of the significant features of these two self-reflexive narrative forms and how they link together. Specifically, I am interested in how self-reflexive writing feeds back into the life as it is lived; the question of whether self-reflexive writing is a mode of being in the world. In Heslop’s case, it is further intriguing to consider how his fictional self-explorations might have extended his range of experience and shaped his outlook and opinions. In the further research which will eventually appear on this topic, I will feature other writers as well as Heslop, such as Walter Brierley. However, not only did significantly fewer working-class women write autobiographies of the period but also hardly any of them published books in the 1930s; two notable exceptions being the Labour politicians Jennie Lee and Ellen Wilkinson. Perhaps the most published female working-class writer of the period was the best-selling novelist, Ethel Mannin. Mannin’s autobiographies, including Confessions and Impressions (1930) and Privileged Spectator (1939), are included (as is Heslop’s autobiography) in Burnett, Vincent and Mayall’s three-volume critical annotated bibliography, The Autobiography of the Working Class (1984, 1987, 1989) but she is not represented in the Burnett Archive. I don’t have space within the (time) constraints of this (spoken) paper for more than a couple of brief references to her but I will include a more detailed analysis of her work in the eventual full-length version.

‘Autobiografiction’ is an Edwardian term that has been recently revived by Max Saunders. It describes a category of writing which is more than just autobiographical fiction in that it allows writers to transform themselves through their creative practice and not only represent, but also discover, a different, fuller and more complex understanding of selfhood:

Autobiografiction can include material that writers may prefer not to own in their own person; but rather than suggesting that their fiction gives them away, either consciously or unconsciously, they are claiming that the fictional permits a fuller autobiography. This is partly a matter of its being able to include the shameful as well as the honourable, and thus assemble a more complete, more human, picture. (Saunders 2010: 205)

The appearance of autobiografiction over the fin-de-siècle can be related to the changes in subjectivity referenced by Virginia Woolf’s famous declaration in her essay ‘Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown’ that ‘on or about December 1910, human character changed’. A mixture of technological change, mass education and new thinking (Marx, Darwin, Freud) resulted in the old Victorian hierarchical order tipping over into a fluid modern society. As Woolf noted, one of the key changes was in the experience of working-class women:

The Victorian cook lived like a leviathan in the lower depths, formidable, silent, obscure, inscrutable; the Georgian cook is a creature of sunshine and fresh air; in and out of the drawing-room, now to borrow the Daily Herald, now to ask advice about a hat. Do you ask for more solemn instances of the power of the human race to change?

As Michael Tratner notes, 1910 was the last year in which the Liberal Party won an election. From henceforward there was a political change in human relations so that the Labour Party became the main antagonist of the Conservatives before going on to form their first government in 1924, the year that Woolf wrote ‘Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown’: ‘after 1910, the working class left its obscurity and began to read and write and exercise its own genius in public’ (Tratner 1995: 54). A key component of this change in class consciousness was the rise of ‘proletarian literature’ (here defined broadly as in Hubble 2017 rather than in the narrower ‘Proletkult’ sense), subsequently dated by George Orwell as originating with the meeting between Ford Madox Ford and D.H. Lawrence leading to Ford publishing working-class stories by Lawrence, such as ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ (1911) in the English Review. Lawrence set the template for working-class writers – especially those like Heslop and Brierley who also came from mining communities – to reject autobiography as a means of communicating their experience because as a genre it was too complicit with 19th century discourses of progress and the hierarchical ordering of society.

In Crisis and Criticism, first published in 1937, Alick West identified the question facing modernist writers in the interwar period: “When I do not know any longer who are the “we” to whom I belong, I do not know any longer who ‘I’ am either” (19). As I argue in The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question (2017), this is the modernist question and the answer was provided by the self-reflexive intersubjective and intersectional practice of proletarian literature, broadly conceived. What characterises high modernist texts such as Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) is the autobiografictional discovery of modern subjectivity through exploring intersubjective relations with the working class, albeit with the suggestion of a conscious-unconscious relationship (i.e., in crude terms, the modernist subject is made conscious of their unconscious through the interaction with the working-class other). On one level, proletarian literature showed (as did Mass Observation) an equally full working-class subjectivity which interacted with the bourgeois individual as other. Furthermore, however, proletarian literature automatically placed the working-class subject in a relationship with other working-class subjects that was not othered but collective; enabling the pronoun ‘we’. We can consider the key works of proletarian literature, alongside those of Woolf and Joyce and some others, as the collective expression of a changed subjectivity that was orientated towards a transformed future (not the Welfare State but one that hasn’t yet come about) which was dependent on an autobiografictional move beyond the limits of the self as defined by the culture of the period.

So if we briefly turn back to Ethel Mannin – ‘Born 1900 in Clapham, South London. One of three children of a letter-sorter in the Civil Service’ (Burnett, Vincent and Mayall 1987: 204) – we see a change of attitude during the 1930s following the publication of her first (very successful) autobiography, Confessions and Impressions, (reissued as a Penguin paperback in January 1937) leading to a transformation in her priorities: ‘The development of a sense of responsibility reaching beyond the individual ego puts an embargo on Hedonism and enlarges the conception of freedom’ (Mannin 1939: 14). This transformation can be traced through her fiction: Crescendo (1929) and Ragged Banners (1931) – autobiografictional novels featuring ‘Mary Thane’ – had been ‘written in … a kind of creative auto-intoxication … It was all flashy and provocative and the succession of books form a more and complete and illuminative record of my mental evolution than any diary could have conveyed.’ (Mannin 1939: 21). As the decade progressed she reworked her autobiographical material firstly to explore her working-class childhood in novels such as Venetian Blinds (1933) and then to allow her ‘political feelings to emerge’ (Mannin 1929: 74) in Cactus (1935), in which ‘Elizabeth Rodney’ is the autobiografictional protagonist. Her fiction was not the vehicle for representing her socialism but the medium through which she developed her own very distinctive approach as reflected in her pacifism, work with the ILP (and her friendship with George Orwell), and her political writing, including Woman and the Revolution (1938). The way that Mannin transformed herself through her autobiografiction can be seen in how she then wrote about her life in her second volume of autobiography, Privileged Spectator.

Heslop’s parallel process of autobiografictional transformation presents an interesting and gendered contrast. Burnett, Vincent and Mayall describe him as a ‘minor novelist’ (1989: 33) alongside his interests (‘reading, gardening and classical music’) rather than occupations, as opposed to Mannin’s unequivocal status as ‘professional author’ (1987: 204). Minor novelist is an old-fashioned designation reflecting a hierarchal perspective no longer found in literary criticism. H. Gustav Klaus made fun of such categories by titling his article on Heslop, originally published in 1982, ‘Harold Heslop: Miner Novelist’ (Klaus 2018: 89-105). But, of course, part of the point of interwar proletarian literature, such as the work of Heslop, was that it contested the literary hierarchies of the time. While, retrospectively, proletarian literature was made fun of in the 1950s and then dismissed as being of any interest whatsoever by Samuel Hynes in his influential The Auden Generation (1972), Alick West argued at the time in the 1930s that ‘the bourgeois attitude to life is unfavourable, and the proletarian favourable, to the creation of good literature’ (1937: 181). This bourgeois attitude was a product of the nineteenth century:

In the nineteenth century, when the antagonism between socialisation of production and capitalist relations had not yet reached the acute stage, when capitalism still seemed to be permanent, the novel in its general construction deals with the direct relations of a limited number of people within bourgeois society, seen from the standpoint of what these relations mean for the hero and the heroine. (West 1937: 164)

For West, modernism in general was a response to the collapse of those apparently stable nineteenth-century social relations but the importance of Joyce’s Ulysses in particular was that it marked a new realisation that: ‘the individual’s world is not within the four walls that protect money, board and bed. His world is his society’ (164). This realisation was an important step towards answering the modernist question of how to relate the ‘I’ to the ‘we’ –indicated by Heslop making Ulysses the subject of the penultimate chapter of Crisis and Criticism – but it was still limited by Joyce’s tendency to focus on acts of consumption while more-or-less ignoring the social relations of the production process and the class conflicts surrounding it. Therefore, West ultimately judges Ulysses to be characterised by weary resentment at, and vengeance against, an array of social forces – capitalism and catholicism – which offer Joyce no sense of social satisfaction: ‘[Ulysses] does not organise social energy; it irritates it, because it gives it no aim it can work for’ (West 1937: 180). As an example of a novel which does organise the social energy of productive activity, West identifies Heslop’s The Gate of a Strange Field, to which he devotes the final chapter of Crisis and Criticism thereby in effect elevating it above Ulysses in literary importance.

When Crisis and Criticism was republished in 1975, at the zenith of critical disregard for the working class and proletarian literature of the interwar years, the final chapter on Heslop was omitted. In The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question, I argued that taking Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair (1932-4) as the next step on from Joyce would have revealed ‘a proletarian-modernist trajectory from the work of Joyce and Lawrence that, unlike the version outlined in West’s Crisis and Criticism as leading to the work of Harold Heslop, would not now appear to be a dead end but actually lead on through Gibbon to contemporary literature in Scotland, such as James Robertson’s And the Land Lay Still (2010). (Hubble 2017: 115). Of course, it would be best to have a whole range of books and authors representing the stage ‘beyond’ Joyce in order to demonstrate a ‘proletarian-modernist’ strategy (and in some ways my book was an attempt to map out that range) but I was trying to make the point that if you limit yourself to picking one text, then a Heslop novel might not be the best example. The reason for his unsuitability is that the trajectory of his fiction appears to lead to an almost stereotypically crude version of the worker as all-powerful male hero, such as Jim Cameron, the miner protagonist of Last Cage Down (1935):

The whole being of a man must be in tune with the silver rock before him and the frowning strata about him. He must know when to kirve, when to knick, when to smash down the ‘caunch’. He must make this dead coal speak, speak with many tongues of coal, weep as a woman weeps when she mourns. If he is skilful he will make the coal leap voluntarily from its fastness with a shriek of joy […]. (Heslop 1984: 3)

The only other time Jim Cameron feels like a proper man is when he is with Betty, the barmaid from the Red Lion: ‘She was a likeable lass, one with whom a man could become a man because she was essentially a woman possessed of the rich virtues and treasures of a woman’ (Heslop 1984: 55). Heslop’s frank (for the time) depiction of sex between Jim and Betty provoked Mannin to write to him in admonishment on 7 December 1935:

I thought the incident a mistake, myself, not on moral grounds, but on artistic ones. And dammit, all adult people know how [it’s] done; why go into the details? […] I mean it’s gratuitous. Of course, ‘he went into her.’ [Heslop 1984: 190] What else would he do? If he had done something original it might be worth recording. (qtd Croft 1993: 216)

The criticism here has an edge to it. The subtextual implication is that Heslop could do something more interesting with his portrayal of gender relations alongside the more overt account of class relations in the novel. It is also significant that Mannin is making this criticism on aesthetic grounds; she clearly doesn’t see Heslop as purely a writer of propaganda. One of the reasons that I’m currently working my way through Mannin’s extensive oeuvre of the period is to see if there is a way of reading her work both alongside and against Heslop’s that reveals cultural coordinates invisible to the dominant reception paradigms that have consigned both to relative obscurity (neither are currently in print). However, even before that project is completed, it is possible to revise a stereotypical reading of Heslop by expanding the analysis of Last Cage Down to include his other fiction and comparing to this to the autobiography he wrote in later life. The subject of West’s praise in Crisis and Criticism, The Gate of a Strange Field is now so rare that the only accessible copy I could find was in the British Library). Although Goaf was written earlier and published in Russian translation in the Soviet Union, the (original) English language edition did not appear until 1934, meaning that GSF was Heslop’s first novel to be published in English. GSF is interesting because of its gendered criticisms of male worker subjectivity as predicated on the acceptance of the conditions of capitalism and the British national interest (i.e. there is an implied critique of ‘Labourism’ in the novel). In other words, as we shall see, GSF seems to have more in common with Mannin’s implied position than that which Heslop adopted for LCD. It should also be noted that shifts in the Communist Party line have coloured the reception of Heslop’s novels, which are in fact relatively consistent in their anti-Labourist positions. The critical, proto-intersectional stance of GSF (1929) was seen as undermining proletarian subjectivity and therefore reviewed as ‘social fascist’ in the class against class (third) period; whereas LCD (1935), which Heslop had shaped to avoid the criticisms made of GSF, appeared after the onset of the Popular Front period and therefore was viewed as an attack on social democrats and the unions and so rejected in some quarters as a hangover from the class against class period.

In his autobiography, written in the early 1970s, Heslop refers to a frequent desire to rebel against the social constraints of mining life which he links to his compulsion to write. Describing his experience of returning to mining after service in the First World War (joining up late in 1917, Heslop spent 1918 in a camp at Tidworth and never went overseas) as the ‘utter forlorness that follows after the shearing of individual freedom’, he implies that this depression was only leavened by hope he would regain the urge to write:

Before I enlisted I had responded to an urge to write what I thought might turn out to be a novel. I do not recall that early effort of mine now except the denouement which was a spectacular suicide of the heroine by throwing herself from the topmost tower of Durham Cathedral. I forget it all but that savage ending. And yet the urge was there. I had always wanted to write. All the time I had been at Tidworth the flicker had not died out. I still felt the urge to write even in the furthest reaches of the mine, close against the goaf. Now that I was back where I belonged I might feel the urge again. (Heslop 1994: 146).

It is interesting that this early attempt to write includes one of the two melodramatic elements – suicide and prostitution – that often feature in Heslop’s earlier novels, where they function to enable a break from the constrained structure of feeling or class consciousness inculcated by the Durham minefields. In his autobiography, Heslop relates that restricted consciousness to ‘proletarian dreaming’ (the influence of Lawrence is perhaps discernible here):

The year 1919 was a year of intense proletarian dreaming … Despite the overwhelming victory of Lloyd George and his coalition, the proletarian world of men did not cease to dream. The most outrageous fantasy was the Sankey Commission. … How we gloated over the possibility of the mines becoming nationalised. How we dreamed. How we stretched out our hands towards the towering pit head gearing to take it, and all it signified, into our own dear keeping. Poor, soft, deluded people that we were. (Heslop 1994: 146)

Joe Tarrant, the protagonist of GSF falls prey to such ‘proletarian dreaming’ and ends up a comfortable union representative. In London as an elected representative of the national committee running the General Strike, he spends his time in bed with a prostitute as the Strike falls apart. Unsurprisingly, critics (such as David Bell) have seen the novel as a ‘negative apprenticeship’ in which the protagonist makes all the wrong decisions resulting in personal and political failure and we the reader are supposed to learn the message that we should make the opposite decisions (i.e. think like a Communist, don’t treat strikes as just local issues, don’t fall into proletarian dreamings of Sunday outings etc.). Yet this is not really how the book reads. In fact, the prostitute who Joes meets in London is his wife, Molly. They had (again, with shades of Lawrence) ‘lived a strange, loveless, over-sexed life, each pulling a different way, each so pitiful’ (Heslop 1929: 139) before separating. Joe scandalises the morals of the coalfield by moving in with modern, as signified by her page-boy haircut, Emily Ritter, who represents a very different model of female agency to Molly: ‘Emily Ritter had completely lost her head. She had to smash through all the Northern conception of morals. It could not be said that she went into the matter blind as a mole, for she knew exactly what she was doing.’ (Heslop 1929: 169). Yet, Joe still feels stuck within the conventions of the coalfield even as he flouts them, hence his pleasure in his trips to London on mining union business:

In the parochial wilderness of the North men and women had small minds. In London it was different. There nobody knew anybody else, and so morals did not count. Morals were changing. To blazes with morals. (Heslop 1929: 180)

When Joe ends up in bed with Molly, Heslop is not implying criticism of him for neglecting his proper union business. Indeed, Molly has to remind him that he is still too stuck in the mental outlook of the coalfield: ‘You’re not in the market at Shielding, Joe,’ she said ‘You’re in bed . . . with me.’ (Heslop 1929: 229). Rather, the logic of the novel suggests that a liberalised, transformed and expanded socio-cultural context would liberate not only Joe but Molly and Emily as well. If the novel can’t quite manage to formally resolve all of these possible outcomes it is not for want of Heslop exploring a range of outcomes and subjectivities autobiografictionally.

In Journey Beyond, he took a step further – at least for the opening chapters of the novel by making the autobiografictional protagonist, ‘Martha Drake’, which allows him to directly criticise the patriarchal values of the coalfield:

On the floor were a couple of lead soldiers and a sort of spring cannon that shot matchsticks into the air. That was it! No love. To destroy! It is the only task that man can perform successfully. To kill. To maim. To wound. How man loves such tasks! Brutality rising beyond the heights of fiendishness. . . . With a breaking heart she had gone back home. (Heslop 1930: 11)

Reading between the lines, one can see how Heslop’s experiences of London – living there first while studying on a miners’ scholarship at the Central Labour College from 1924-5 and then permanently from 1928 onwards – changed his attitude to his northern birthplace. The differences are figured through women in particular: ‘A woman of the North has not obtained the outlook of her sisters of the South. She knows neither the clicking of a typewriter nor the eternal cigarette.’ (Heslop 1930: 38). Martha’s experiences in London during the depression turn her to the brink of prostitution and her husband, Russell, to the brink of suicide.  Their survival, due to Russell getting a factory job after strikers have been laid off, leads them pondering the question of individualism: ‘I suppose we’re all for ourselves in this world?’ (Heslop 1930: 252). This clearly isn’t Heslop’s position – in the same year as Journey Beyond’s publication he was the sole British delegate to the Second Plenum of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers in Kharkov in the Soviet Union – but it indicates the extent of his exploration of possible subjectivities before returning to the problem of how to build a collective class consciousness that doesn’t simply replicate the constraints that Joe, Molly and Emily kick against in GSF.

Looking again at Last Cage Down from this perspective, it is possible to see that the establishment of Jim at the beginning of the novel as the stereotypical worker-hero of prodigious activity is something of a set-up because the plot of the novel involves him losing everything, including his position as secretary of the miner’s lodge, and going to prison for nine months, during which time his mother is evicted from her cottage. He realises he is wrong about many things and consequently he changes his behaviour in many respects including in relation to Betty:

She nodded. ‘Good,’ she said, rising to her feet. ‘Now, help me to clear away because I’ve got to be up at the Lion in time for six.’

Funny. He’d never done this for his mother in all his life. He had never thought about it. He had always taken it for granted that the clean crockery would be placed before him and the dirty crockery carted away from before him and cleansed. And here he was helping the girl to clear way the dishes. Well . . . he was damned . . . ! (Heslop 1984: 195)

The eventual conclusion of the novel (involving as in GSF and other Heslop novels a mining disaster), in effect, calls for a ‘United Front’ of socialists, communists and trade unionists (as opposed to the broader ‘Popular Front’ of all anti-fascist forces which included liberals and conservatives). Heslop therefore remains opposed to the ‘proletarian dreaming’ implicit to labourism (and as a consequence his books were not compatible with the values of the postwar British state) and committed to an altered form of class consciousness embracing liberated and equal gender relations that he has mapped out through the autobiografictional practice of his writing.

Conclusion

The capacity of a working-class writer such as Heslop (aided of course by his socialist education and values) to free himself from the structure of feeling of his background and understand the extent to which social (i.e. class and gender) relations would change outside the sphere of working-class respectability suggests how proletarian autobiografiction might be seen as a means of understanding and adapting to social change, which at the same time generates new cultural forms and social values. I think my analysis of the fiction of Ethel Mannin, once I’ve completed it, will support this position. However, it’s in any case obvious that the emancipation of women was a key catalyst for the shift from working-class autobiography to proletarian autobiografiction. In terms of Heslop’s texts, this works out in practice through the complex mix of fascination, horror, desire and shame they display towards a female sexuality that is located within the capital in contrast to the ‘respectable’ values of the coalfields. Reading his novels, it is possible to see how taking an autobiografictional approach to his experiences allowed him to discuss (and analyse) parts of his own life in a way that would have been difficult to include in an autobiography at the time. However, the autobiography he did finally write in the early 1970s helps us see how those complex autobiografictional negotiations of intertwined class and gender politics reconciled regional and metropolitan values and pointed the way towards the transformed culture of postwar Britain that would emerge in the 1960s, with its social and sexual (or emotional) revolutions. Not only did writing those novels allow Heslop to produce a fuller autobiography of himself but they also helped him to adapt to, and shape his own role in, the rapid social change of the 1930s and beyond.

Further Reading:

Croft, Andy. ‘Ethel Mannin: The Red Rose of Love and the Red Flower of Liberty’ in Angela Ingram, ed., Rediscovering Forgotten Radicals: British Women Writers, 1889-1939, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

Heslop, Harold. The Gate of a Strange Field, London: Brentano, 1929.

Heslop, Harold. Journey Beyond, London: Harold Shaylor, 1930.

Heslop, Harold. Last Cage Down, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1984 [1935].

Heslop, Harold. Out of the Old Earth, Newcastle, Bloodaxe, 1994.

Hubble, Nick. The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017.

Mannin, Ethel. Privileged Spectator, London: Jarrolds, 1939.

Saunders, Max. Self-Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, & the Forms of Modern Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Tratner, Michael. Modernism and Mass Politics: Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Yeats, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.

West, Alick. Crisis and Criticism, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1937.

 

The Brunel Centre for Contemporary Writing (BCCW) presents a session on the relationship between fiction and autobiography inspired by the Burnett Archive of Working-Class Autobiographies held in the Special Collections of Brunel University Library. Philip Tew will discuss writing about his relationship with his working-class father in his new novel, Afterlives, and I will draw on ideas from my The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question (which came out in paperback this February) to talk about the relationship between working-class autobiography and proletarian autobiografiction revealed by this British Academy-funded research on the Burnett Archive. This event will feature students from Brunel’s MA Creative Writing and MA Creative Writing: The Novel courses, who will open the evening with readings from new works inspired by the Burnett Archive. There will be complimentary refreshments and free admission. Register for entry here.

I have discussed working-class autobiography and proletarian autobiografiction in the last two posts on this blog. As I explain in the latter of those posts, one individual writer that I am particularly interested in is the Durham miner Harold Heslop. While his novels are principally set in the Durham coalfields, the contrast with London (where Heslop lived from 1924-5 while attending the Central Labour College and then from 1928 onwards when no longer able to find work in the mines) forms a direct or indirect element of The Gate of a Strange Field (1929), The Journey Beyond (1930) and Last Cage Down (1935) and his autobiographical typescript in the Burnett Archive, a shortened version of which was published as Out of the Old Earth (1994). On one level, this contrast is framed in terms of neighbourhood and community:

In the parochial wilderness of the North men and women had small minds. In London it was different. There nobody knew anybody else, and so morals did not count. Morals were changing. To blazes with morals. (The Gate of a Strange Field, 180)

In practice, however, Heslop’s texts display a complex mix of fascination, horror, desire and shame towards a female sexuality that is located within the capital in contrast to the ‘respectable’ values of the coalfields. Reading his novels, it is possible to see how taking an autobiografictional approach to his experiences allowed him to discuss (and analyse) parts of his own life in a way that would have been difficult to include in an autobiography at the time. However, the autobiography he did finally write in the early 1970s helps us see how those complex autobiografictional negotiations of intertwined class and gender politics reconciled regional and metropolitan values and pointed the way towards the transformed culture of postwar Britain, with its social and sexual (or emotional) revolutions. Not only did writing those novels allow Heslop to produce a fuller autobiography of himself but they also helped him to adapt to, and shape his own role in, the rapid social change of the 1930s and beyond.

Philip Tew’s debut novel Afterlives, which was published in February 2019, is the autobiografictional account of university lecturer, Jim Dent, who nearing retirement, is inspired by the death of a friend known in the 1970s, writer Sue Townsend, to review various premature deaths over the past fifty years of others once close to him, and recollect their lives. They include a school-friend, his working-class father, and other talented chums all denied their creative potential. Among scenes featured are his work with Sue on a local arts magazine on her stories of Nigel (later, Adrian) Mole, and a trip with an oddball scholar of the Beats to interview poet, Basil Bunting. Afterlives is not an old man’s lament, rather a poignant and yet comic narrative of eccentric, talented people whose lives are celebrated. However, it raises implicit questions concerning the contemporary advantages of autobiografiction over autobiography in an age when there are no apparent limits to confessional self-revelation. I am hoping to press my esteemed colleague on why he didn’t write a traditional memoir and what this choice tells us about how we understand, variously, ourselves, others and the complicated and fractured nature of the zeitgeist we all inhabit.

As Alison Light points out, the contemporary (post-1970) popularity of biography and autobiography can be interpreted as either the ideological product of ‘an increasingly aggressive individualism in Europe and the West where politics, history and social life are now seen through the optic of the personal’ or ‘an attempt at compensation, a way of creating ad hoc communities in the absence of sustaining ones, of making those temporary affiliations and identifications which are one of the marks of “postmodern” living’ (753). Postmodernism is a problematic and (now) somewhat derided term but it regains meaning in Light’s highlighting of the political dimension to literary choices and the need ‘to remain sceptical but not traumatised as the moderns were by this new sense of the contingency and indeterminacy of our identities’ (767). I would argue that the proletarian autobiografiction of the 1930s and, more generally, the democratisation of self-reflexive narrative through initiatives such as Mass-Observation led the way in this respect towards a world in which we all view ourselves as the heroes (or, sometimes, anti-heroes) of our own stories. However, the reality of 2019 is that many of those stories have turned out to be apocalyptic dystopias. Psychoanalysts sometimes say that their job is to help out individuals whose stories have gone wrong, but who helps us when our collective stories go wrong? Not everyone pins their faith in politicians today and maybe it would be better if even more followed suit given the apparent propensity of the twenty-first century to produce false prophets and charlatans. Once upon a time, in the postwar golden years, literature and the criticism of it played a key role in maintaining a stable positive sense of our selves but do we even fully trust writers let alone critics today? One answer would be for all of us to study the working-class autobiographies and proletarian autobiografiction of the 1930s to see how a generation wrote a future in the middle of the chaos and confusion of one of the darkest periods of history. I think we would find lessons to learn and examples to follow even as the world around us is turned on its head. Who knows what the future holds? After all, as Light concludes, ‘The lives we write and read in the twenty-first century make new subjects of us all’ (767).

Further Reading:

Light, Alison. ‘Writing Lives’, in Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls, eds, The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 751-67.

The literature of the 1930s has a quite specific reception history bound up with the period’s status as ‘the hungry decade’, marked by the ideological clash between Fascism and Communism which led to the all-out brutality of the Second World War. The culture and society that arose after 1945 in Britain were markedly different to how they had been before. On the one hand, collective ideals and realist forms of representation were dominant over the individualist and modernist/experimental values of the interwar period. On the other hand, the fictions of political commitment which were so central to the 1930s were anathema to 1950s literary opinion. When the celebration of the ‘Auden generation’ – those young upper/middle-class men, such as Auden, Orwell and Spender, who had ‘gone over’ to the side of the working class – began in the 1970s, there was very little immediate interest in working-class writers themselves. Notoriously, Samuel Hynes simply declared in The Auden Generation (1972) that ‘virtually no writing of literary importance came out of the working class during the decade’ (qtd Hubble 2017: 23). It wasn’t until the end of the 1980s that wider-ranging accounts of the literature of the 1930s began to appear, with Andy Croft’s Red Letter Days: British Fiction in the 1930s (1990) a milestone text in the recovery of the work of both working-class writers in particular and the wider communist and socialist literary circles of the time in general. Over recent years, my The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question (2017), henceforth PAMQ, is just one of a number of texts that situates both working-class writing (reconfigured by me as part of a broader category of ‘proletarian literature’) and an expanded ‘long 1930s’ as central (rather than exceptions to) the main lineages of British literatures across the twentieth century.

In To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Britain (2006), the cultural historian, Christopher Hilliard, argues that it was the support of established publishers and left-wing intellectuals that made the 1930s not only especially important to the long-standing tradition of British working-class writing but also for the democratisation of culture in Britain. While the more traditional approach to this democratisation has been to see it as a process of dissemination in which reforms to the education system and technological developments in printing (e.g. penguin paperbacks) and broadcasting brought the work of cultivated intellectuals, such as Virginia Woolf, to the masses, Hilliard argues that a democratic cultural life can’t be defined by a widely shared corpus of texts and ideas; in this sense there is not one common ‘Culture’ but common cultures of production:

My focus, in contrast, is on people who were at once members of the less ‘cultivated’ populace and intellectuals or producers of cultural goods. I locate the democratization of culture in their acts of production, rather than in the nature of what they produced. (5)

 It is the fact that worker-writers, amateur writers and wartime popular writing are widespread phenomena, which Hilliard traces out in detail in his book, which indicates the real democratisation of Britain and its constituent nations. However, my point is not to privilege working-class writers over their upper-class counterparts, or to oppose the literary canon with an alternative democratic and working-class canon. Rather, the need is to undermine such binary oppositions altogether and construct a new system of cultural and literary value predicated not on restricted access to the cultural means of production but on those democratically-shared common cultures of production. Valuable products of such a new system would still include canonical writers such as Woolf and James Joyce but they would be valued alongside writers such as Harold Heslop, whose novels are principally set in the Durham coalfields. I mention Heslop because I am intending to study his work (amongst others) in some detail over the course of this project (with further blogposts, conference papers, book chapters and articles forthcoming). This is because (i) a copy of the typescript of his autobiography (a shortened version of which was published in 1994 as Out of the Old Earth) is included in the Burnett Archive of Working-Class Autobiographies (another copy is included in the Harold Heslop Papers held at Durham University Archives); (ii) he was one of the key working-class novelists of the interwar years and Britain’s representative at the Second Plenum of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers in 1930 in the Soviet Union; (iii) his work is compared favourably with Joyce’s Ulysses in Alick West’s Crisis and Criticism (1937); (iv) his novels such as The Gate of a Strange Field (1929), Journey Beyond (1930) and Last Cage Down (1935) are clearly ‘autobiografictions’.

‘Autobiografiction’ is an Edwardian term that has been recently revived by Max Saunders. It describes a category of writing which is more than just autobiographical fiction in that it allows writers to transform themselves performatively and not only represent, but also discover, a different understanding of selfhood:

Autobiografiction can include material that writers may prefer not to own in their own person; but rather than suggesting that their fiction gives them away, either consciously or unconsciously, they are claiming that the fictional permits a fuller autobiography. This is partly a matter of its being able to include the shameful as well as the honourable, and thus assemble a more complete, more human, picture. (Saunders 2010: 205)

Saunders’s discussion of Woolf’s Orlando (1928) – and its complex interplay between ‘mock biography’ of Vita Sackville-West, autobiographical expression of Woolf through her biography of another, and the different ‘selves’ readers read into the text – indicates some of the ways in which autobiografiction represents not the unity of the self but its multiplicity and intersubjective nature (i.e. the way in which any person’s subjectivity is dependent on the relationship with other subjectivities). Orlando (or, for that matter, the equally autobiografictional Ulysses) can be read as attempts to answer what I call the ‘modernist question’, as posed by West in Crisis and Criticism: “When I do not know any longer who are the “we” to whom I belong, I do not know any longer who ‘I’ am either” (19). West’s point was that for modernist writers to fully answer this question they would have to take into account the class relations of industrial capitalism; to which we might also add gender and colonial relations. I argue in PAMQ that Naomi Mitchison was one writer who succeeded in doing this. The autobiografiction of We Have Been Warned (1935) allows her to express herself in a way that was not otherwise possible at that time for a woman (albeit at the cost of her literary reputation) and to produce a complex identification with socialism, feminism and Scotland (in opposition to an England which turns fascist) which points forward to a radically-transformed future rather than back to the liberal norms of bourgeois society. Writing the novel enabled Mitchison to free herself from the constraints of her (upper-class) background and move beyond a progressive politics of the dissemination of social and cultural goods towards an understanding of the sheer scale of change a democratisation of the means of cultural production would entail.

Similarly, a working-class writer such as Heslop was able to free himself from the constraints of his background through his autobiografiction and thus understand the extent to which social relations would change outside the sphere of working-class respectability generated by the industrial capitalist process. In Bread, Freedom & Knowledge (discussed in my previous post), David Vincent noted that nineteenth-century working-class autobiographers do not discuss their private and family life. As Nicola Wilson points out in Home in British Working-Class Fiction (2015), ‘This was partly to do with the inherited tradition of autobiography as a public and moral genre’ (33). Certain things are just not assumed to be of public interest. Even though autobiography and biography changed in the opening decades of the twentieth-century to include more private life, there was still the problem that it is difficult to disclose information about yourself without giving it away about others also. By fictionalising his experience, Heslop was able to generate a space in which to reveal the personal and sexual aspects of working-class life that had been hidden in working-class autobiography (I will discuss this in relation to his novel The Gate of a Strange Field in a subsequent post). Part of the impetus for this fictionalisation was the change in the public status of women (which was itself a reflection of a longer process of change in women’s rights, educational and employment opportunities) following their acquisition of the right to vote in 1918 and the subsequent equalisation of the franchise in 1928. Men’s proletarian literature of the 1930s – by writers such as Heslop, Walter Brierley, Walter Greenwood, Lewis Grassic Gibbon and James Barke amongst others – is a prime example of the use of autobiographical narrative to understand and adapt to social change. Although this change took many forms and was happening on many fronts, I would argue that the emancipation of women was probably the most significant element of it; a social shift so profound that it required the replacement of working-class autobiography with proletarian autobiografiction as the primary means of representing working-class experience in the 1930s.

I am using the term ‘proletarian autobiografiction’ rather than ‘working-class autobiografiction’ because, as argued in PAMQ, I see the designation ‘proletarian’ as circumventing the problems attendant in defining who is working class: ‘Proletarian literature was able to represent this classlessness precisely because it did not focus directly on the authentic experience of the worker but on the intersubjective connections between the worker and people of other classes’ (7). What characterises this proletarian literature of the 1930s – which is often autobiografiction – is an imagining of intersubjective social relations prefiguring a post-capitalist future. Such a literature is not restricted to male-authored accounts of male industrial workers but may include the work of writers such as Mitchison and even Woolf (see, for example, her ‘Introductory Letter’ to Life as We Have Known It (1931) and the discussion in PAMQ, 165-74). In The Communist Horizon (2012), Jodi Dean suggests that the term ‘proletariat’ is not useful if tied to an empirical social class (e.g. industrial workers) but ‘proletarianization’ is still a valid term of description for the ‘process of exploitation, dispossession, and immiseration’ (18) that is characteristic of capitalist accumulation. She argues that a twenty-first century equivalent of the historical communist party would need to be conceptualised continually as a complex, adaptive system whose ‘end is proletarian revolution, that is, the destruction of the capitalist system of exploitation and expropriation, of proletarianization, and the creation of a mode of production and distribution where the free development of each is compatible with the free development of all’ (20). This closing idea of the necessary interdependence of the ‘I’ and the ‘We’ (which comes directly from Marx) is central to the future-orientated imagined intersubjective social-relations that characterise proletarian autobiografiction. If, following the arguments of Vincent in Bread, Knowledge & Freedom, we see nineteenth-century working-class autobiography as generating a working-class consciousness, then we can think of proletarian writers as not just the victims of ‘proletarianization’ but also as the vanguard of a new kind of intersubjective subjectivity compatible with a transformed future society. Such proletarian subjects (potentially of any gender or class or ethnicity) are constructed as much by writing (and reading) as by class struggle. Therefore, proletarian autobiografiction may be seen as a means of understanding and adapting to social change, which at the same time generates new cultural forms and social values (analysis of examples to follow in future posts).

Further Reading:

Croft, Andy. Red Letter Days: British Fiction in the 1930s, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990.

Dean, Jodi. The Communist Horizon, London: Verso, 2018 [2012].

Hilliard, Christopher. To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratisation of Writing in Britain, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.

Hubble, Nick. The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017.

Saunders, Max. Self-Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, & the Forms of Modern Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

West, Alick. Crisis and Criticism, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1937.

Wilson, Nicola. Home in British Working-Class Fiction, Farnham: Ashgate, 2015.

According to Wikipedia, the first use of the word ‘autobiography’ was in 1797, but David Vincent, drawing on Cassandra Falke’s Literature by the Working Class: English Autobiographies, 1820-1848 (2013), gives the first use as ‘by a writer from a humble background’, Ann Yearsley ‘the “Bristol Milkwoman and Poetess”’ who ‘attached an “Autobiographical Memoir” to the fourth edition of poems published in 1786’ (Vincent 2016: 165). Given that, as Vincent records, working-class autobiography was an established genre by the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the question arises as to what extent autobiography is a working-class genre that became widely adopted throughout society? Or, whether it is a middle- or upper-class genre that the working class adapted for their own purposes? What is important here, rather than establishing precedence, is a question about the politics of working-class autobiographies: do these texts represent the assimilation of the ‘respectable’ working class to middle-class values or the vanguard of an independent working-class consciousness?

I will be looking at more recent research on working-class autobiography, such as Falke’s book, during the course of this project but I wanted to start with work connected with the Burnett Archive of Working-Class Autobiographies and the three-volume critical annotated bibliography, The Autobiography of the Working Class (1984, 1987, 1989), compiled by John Burnett, David Vincent and David Mayall. I find it interesting, for example, that in the preface to his 1974 anthology of working-class autobiographies, Useful Toil, Burnett mentions John Goldthorpe’s Affluent Worker studies to make the connection that for both contemporary car workers and nineteenth-century workers, job satisfaction was not a priority and work was a means to an end. Viewed purely historically, we might therefore interpret the attitudes of 1960s car workers as a product of a British working-class consciousness formed in the Victorian period (which would be in keeping with some of the dominant strands of British historiography during the 1960s and 1970s) but, from today’s perspective (when all of these assumptions seem less certain), we might wonder how much Goldthorpe’s influential studies were shaping the way that newly-rediscovered nineteenth-century material was received.

In Destiny Obscure, the 1982 sequel to Useful Toil, Burnett tells us that ‘the happiest memories of child life generally came from large working-class families, which by modern standards, had no luxuries and few comforts, but which stood somewhat above the level of the very poor’ (16). This was, he makes clear, the ‘respectable’ working class who respected education, hard work and self-improvement ‘but not usually at the expense of a close, affectionate family life’. On the one hand, this all sounds a bit too close to George Orwell’s vision of the working-class interior in The Road to Wigan Pier, in which dad reads the racing results while mum knits and the kids play with the dog. On the other hand, this equation of Victorian working-class autobiography with respectability quite possibly does reflect the common conception of the genre in the twentieth century (at least, up to the 1970s) and indicates one of the reasons why the politically-motivated (socialist or communist) working-class writers of the 1930s turned to fictionalising their experiences in order to avoid respectability and its implied acquiescence to bourgeois values (this is a topic I will be returning to in subsequent posts).

More generally, Burnett seems from the prefaces to these two volumes (this is, therefore, a provisional assessment) to be presenting what I would think of as a small c conservative view of working-class autobiography. In Useful Toil, he tells us that ‘their intellectual and cultural horizons are strictly limited’ (18) but suggests that the working classes maintained ‘an inner, secret life which perpetuated traditional values and patterns of behaviour, essentially of rural origin into the new urban industrial society’ (18). It was this ‘secret life’ which allowed the working classes to resist the Victorian cult of work as the centre of human existence. I rather like this latter thought (as I sit typing into my laptop on a Saturday) which recalls both Walter Benjamin’s notion of the ‘tradition of the oppressed’ and suggests something of the way that Lewis Grassic Gibbon injects rural values into the industrial proletariat in Grey Granite (1934), the final volume of A Scots Quair. I’m less enamoured of Burnett’s argument that ‘the chief defect of the use of diaries and autobiographies as a source must be the self-selectivity of the “sample”’ (Useful Toil, 11). Yes, to the extent that one person’s experience of the weaving industry is not sufficient evidence to make generalised claims about that industry; but no, when, as so often happens, the catch-all accusation of non-representativeness is used to dismiss the utility of an entire category of research (for example, the pointlessness of much of the discussion of representativeness that dogs Mass Observation research makes it tedious beyond belief). Burnett goes on to argue that the activity of keeping a diary or writing an autobiography automatically sets that person apart from their fellows, that there is more writing from skilled workers, and that this writing is not necessarily trustful because the material is selected and sometimes ‘improved’ to show the individual in a better light for future family readers. Refreshingly, these potential flaws are addressed directly in David Vincent’s Bread, Freedom & Knowledge (1981), a revised and extended version of his 1975 PhD thesis, ‘The Growth of Working-Class Consciousness in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century: A study of the autobiographies of working men’.

Discussing the reliability of autobiography in the introduction to his book, Vincent states:

In the end, however, the truth of an autobiography is not dependent on a certain relationship, however it is controlled, between the autobiographer’s statements and the reality of the outside world, but rather on the quality of the relationship which he establishes between the various aspects of his personality as he seeks to reconstruct its development. It is not a matter of honesty or deceit, but rather of a capacity to grasp imaginatively the complexity of the life-long interaction between the self and the outside world. (6)

 It’s this capacity for autobiography (in its various forms) to lay bare the relationship between self and the world (which in practice is the world as constructed by the social structures surrounding the self) that is central to my project, ‘Understanding Social Change through Autobiographical Narrative’. Vincent goes on to quote Wilhelm Dilthey to the effect that autobiography is only the literary expression of a process of reflection that is frequently made by everyone, before concluding: ‘The mere fact, therefore, that the action of recollection was translated into a written form and then, in the majority of cases [of the working-class autobiographies Vincent analyses], published, does not in itself isolate the contents of an autobiography from the experiences of those who have remained silent’ (7). Far from being unrepresentative, nineteenth-century working-class autobiographies give us an insight into all the unrecorded memories of the masses who lived through the same rapidly-changing social conditions. In terms of adapting to radical social change, Vincent is surely right when he points out that ‘an autobiography, however doubtful its conclusions, represents a victory over the uncertainties of life’ (68). However, as he also insists, the autobiographies should be treated as literary works rather than ‘primary’ sources to be mined for historical snippets; not least because treating them as literary works draws attention to the relationship between autobiographical self-analysis – that process of reflection open to all – and the formation of class consciousness. This key question also touches on ‘the precise relationship between the pursuit of knowledge and the pursuit of bread and freedom’ (132).

Vincent’s account of the various ways his autobiographers acquired books and intelligent conversation of their contents is particularly compelling. What he reveals, is that the autobiographers came from all parts of the working class and not just the skilled artisans who would go on to form the ‘labour aristocracy’ in the second half of the nineteenth century. Nor did they follow the prescriptions of those middle-class societies set up to spread ‘useful knowledge’ and they certainly didn’t apply this knowledge to the work they did for others (although many did use their learning to eke out an income from book dealing, teaching or writing). Rather than orienting themselves to middle-class patterns of behaviour, the autobiographers responded to the break-up of pre-industrial popular culture ‘by the rapid development of every form of communication’ even as they tried to harness those forces of change: ‘It was in this sense that they may be seen as representative of their class as a whole. As they explored the consequences of the decline of the oral condition and pushed forward the process of secularisation, they were engaging with developments which eventually would permeate every aspect of their culture’ (195). Vincent’s autobiographers were not just a working-class intelligentsia (predating Marx) but the vanguard of a working-class consciousness that embraced the rapid change of the industrial revolution for all its horrors because it realised it was the means of alleviating precarity and establishing the new material conditions which would support an independent working class.

My favourite line in Vincent’s book is when, discussing how his autobiographers’ reading patterns were completely at odds with the paternalistic attempts of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge to restrict and channel them in the interests of moral improvement and reason, he notes, ‘Once they had discovered its existence, they approached the higher class of literature with the indiscriminate enthusiasm of a child let loose in a sweet shop’ (156). This reminds me of myself in my late teens and early twenties before I eventually started my degree in Philosophy and Literature. My parents had left school at 15 and 16 but were both readers. My dad’s favourite books were The Riddle of the Sands and The Swiss Family Robinson, while the favourite authors of my mum (who several times came top of the year for English at her secondary modern school) were Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer. As a teen I read John Wyndham, J.R.R. Tolkien, Alistair MacLean, Gerald Durrell, James Herriot and George MacDonald Fraser until, seduced by Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews in the Granada television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited (1981), I branched into Evelyn Waugh. Thereafter, I plundered libraries and second-hand bookshops with ‘indiscriminate enthusiasm’ to read Lawrence, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Böll and Grass, but also Mailer, Kesey, Thompson, Irving (and not many women apart from Lisa Alther). Of course, there is no parallel in conditions with Vincent’s autobiographers as I was generally happily ensconced in a centrally-heated bedroom rather than struggling to find time, space and a candle. However, where the connection does lie is in the shared sense of intoxicating freedom that reading opens up beyond otherwise restrictive mental outlooks, whether they are those of the early-nineteenth-century working class or post-war lower-middle-class suburbia. As with the autobiographers, I have also experienced friction from fellow workers for reading in the workplace – something that has disastrous consequences for Arthur Gardner in Walter Brierley’s autobiografictional novel, Sandwichman (1937). In my next post, I will consider proletarian autobiografiction of the 1930s in relation to the longer-established tradition of working-class autobiography discussed above.

Further Reading:

Burnett, John. Destiny Obscure: Autobiographies of Childhood, Education and Family from the 1820s to the 1920s, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984 [1982].

Burnett, John. Useful Toil: Autobiographies of Working People from the 1820s to the 1920s, Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1977 [1974].

Vincent, David. Bread, Knowledge & Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Working Class Autobiography, London and New York: Methuen, 1982 [1981].

Vincent, David. ‘Working-Class Autobiography in the Nineteenth Century’, in Adam Smyth (ed.), A History of English Autobiography, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016, pp. 165-178.

As I wrote in my previous post, working-class and proletarian writing are long-term interests of mine; most recently reflected by two publications. Working-Class Writing: Theory and Practice (2018), edited by Ben Clarke and myself, includes my chapter ‘Respectability, Nostalgia and Shame in Contemporary English Working-Class Fiction’ which examines gendered working-class responses ranging from shame to nostalgia for what Eric Hobsbawm called ‘the common proletarian way of life’ in novels by Pat Barker, Gordon Burn and Zadie Smith. I follow Stuart Hall’s suggestion that Thatcherism was a form of nostalgia for the bygone proletarian style of life displayed by those who were moving out of the working class and relate this to Raphael Samuel’s argument that a right-wing version of history from below contested the social changes instituted by 1960s liberalising legislation (on abortion, divorce, homosexuality, anti-racial discrimination) by privileging ‘ordinary people’. I link shame – as theorised by Helen Merrell Lynd in the 1950s and subsequently discussed by literature academics such as Pamela Fox and Rita Felski – to the notion of respectability – as discussed by Lynsey Hanley, Beverley Skeggs, and Carolyn Steedman – in order to suggest the mechanics of a transcultural movement beyond class consciousness (and the limiting concepts of ordinariness and nostalgia). I aim to expand this conceptual framework as part of my approach to analysing the relationship between self-reflexive narrative and class consciousness in the context of social change. In particular, I am interested in the relationship between narrative self-understanding and what is being called ‘National Populism’ and how this relationship has played out in the politics surrounding ‘Brexit’.

I have also recently written a book on working-class and proletarian writing, The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question (2017), which, in the words of a recent reviewer, redefines the category of proletarian writing ‘to refer to a particular way of figuring intersubjective relations of class and gender constituted by fantasy and desire, relations that by their nature overrun stable identities and point forward to the future transformation of social relations’. In this respect, proletarian writing has affinities with modernism but rather than limiting itself to individualist responses, incorporates those individualist responses into collective practice as proletarian modernism. The democratisation of self-reflexive literary practice by Mass Observation is a particular incidence of the proletarian-modernist project.

The above two paragraphs summarise my position coming into this project of ‘Understanding Social Change through Autobiographical Narrative’, but having gained the funding for this, I looked back to my first ever academic publication – a co-written (with William De Genaro) entry on ‘Working-Class Writings’ for the Encyclopedia of Life Writing (Ed, Margaretta Jolly, 2001) – and was surprised to see how many of my current concerns were directly anticipated. In discussing the question of what counts as working-class writing, I referred to Burnett, Vincent and Mayall’s introduction to their bibliography, Autobiography of the Working Class (of which a number of the examples of the source material are held in the Burnett Archive at Brunel University) and their claim that the autobiography of self-improvement is the most characteristic work of 19^th-century life writing. In other words, class consciousness was channelled towards a conformist self-understanding in which the literate working classes anticipated sharing the status and prosperity of the British nation. However, following the collapse of such dreams with the First World War, self-consciously literary working-class writers eschewed autobiography as too complicit with 19^th-century discourses of progress:

Instead, they wrote about their experiences in novels to produce a different kind of working-class life writing, which needs to be considered as such, despite its superficial ineligibility owing to its status as fiction. The obvious British example is D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913), but equally relevant are works such as A Scots Quair (1932-34), the trilogy by James Leslie Mitchell (writing as Lewis Grassic Gibbon), Jack Common’s Kiddar’s Luck (1951), and Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole (1933). In Britain today there are novels of working-class existence by such diverse writers from working-class backgrounds as Pat Barker, James Kelman and Jeanette Winterson, to mention only the most well known. This is the nub of the debate concerning what constitutes working-class life writing: if only the spare-time writing of those with dirty hands is accepted, then working-class life can only ever be the alienating experience of labour. The fear of incorporation into the bourgeois discourses of society that lingers from the 19^th-century experience cannot be used as an excuse to abandon the finer points of imagination and sensibility: these too are acts of work. (De Genaro and Hubble, p.962)

I went on to discuss how the documentary and imaginative traditions became entwined in the 1930s. Today, following Max Saunders’s work on ‘Autobiografiction’ and how it represented a break from typical Victorian modes of writing, I would characterise work by writers such as Lawrence, Gibbon and Common as ‘proletarian autobiografiction’. In subsequent posts, I will discuss working-class autobiography and proletarian autobiografiction, in order to make this distinction clearer, before proceeding to consider the Burnett Archive in general and, then, some of the particular texts within it.