Love on the Dole
Author | Walter Greenwood |
---|---|
Country | United Kingdom |
Language | English |
Publisher | Cape |
Publication date | 1933 |
Love on the Dole is a novel by Walter Greenwood, about working-class poverty in 1930s Northern England. It has been made into both a play and a film.
The novel
The novel follows the Hardcastle family as they are pulled apart by mass unemployment. The 17-year-old Harry Hardcastle of Mansfield, studying in Lincoln, starts the novel working in a pawn shop, but is attracted to the glamour of working in the engineering factory Marlows Ltd. After seven years working there as an apprentice, he is laid off in the midst of the Great Depression, and is from that point on unable to find work. He becomes romantically involved with a girl on his street, Helen, whom he gets pregnant; this forces them to marry, despite the fact that Harry now not only is unemployed but also has been taken off the dole by the
The novel received much attention from writers, journalists, and politicians, who were all moved by its description of poverty, but, more importantly, by its account of a working-class community attempting to deal with that poverty with dignity and intelligence. Reviewing the American edition of the novel, Iris Barry stated: "Love on the Dole is the real thing."[1] Edith Sitwell, for example, also wrote: "I do not know when I have been so deeply, terribly moved." It was a commercial success, with three impressions that year, and eight more by 1939.
Greenwood said he had "tried to show what life means to a young man living under the shadow of the dole, the tragedy of a lost generation who are denied consummation, in decency, of the natural hopes and desires of youth."
The play
The novel was adapted for the stage by Ronald Gow, and opened at the Manchester Repertory Theatre in 1934, with Wendy Hiller as Sally Hardcastle. The "real" speech and contemporary social themes were new to British audiences. One reviewer said the play had been "conceived and written in blood."[2] It toured Britain with two separate companies, playing up to three performances a day, sometimes in cinemas in towns that had no theatre. A million people had seen it by the end of 1935. Runs in London, New York and Paris followed, making a name for Wendy Hiller, who married Gow in 1937.
But not all reviewers were impressed: writing in the New Statesman, Seán O'Casey said that "there isn't a character in it worth a curse, and there isn't a thought in it worth remembering."[3]
Love on the Dole drew the British public's attention to a social problem in the United Kingdom in a similar way that Look Back in Anger (1956), Cathy Come Home (1966) or Boys from the Blackstuff (1982) would do for future generations (although its style is closer to 1915's Hobson's Choice). The historian Stephen Constantine attributed the impact of Love on the Dole to the way it moved the mostly middle-class audiences without blaming them[4] – Gow said he "aimed to touch the heart".[2] In 1999, it was one of the National Theatre's 100 Plays of the Century.[5]
TV adaptation
In 1967 the play was adapted for
Musical version
A
Film adaptation
Although the book and play were successful, the
It was eventually filmed and released in 1941 by
The film was the first English-made feature film to show British police wielding truncheons against a crowd.[7]
References
- ^ See Matthew Gaughan, "Palatable Socialism or the 'Real Thing'? Walter Greenwood's Love on the Dole."
- ^ a b c Ray Speakman, Introduction to Love on the Dole by Ronald Gow & Walter Greenwood. Heinemann Educational Books, 1986.
- ^ A review – The thing that counts, New Statesman, 9 February 1935.
- ^ Stephen Constantine, "Love on the Dole and Its Reception in the 1930s," in Literature and History (1982), 232–49.
- ^ NT2000 One Hundred Plays of the Century
- OCLC 1009182965.
- ^ Emsley, Clive, Hard Men: Violence in England since 1750. London: Hambledon and London, 2005, p. 141.