posted on 31 Aug 2016

Tramps, Workmates and Revolutionaries edited by H.Gustav Klaus

Professor Klaus is a pioneer when it comes to the archaeology of British working class literature. In his career he has held posts in numerous British, Australian and German universities and he has published a range of indispensible critical works on the subject. In Tramps, Workmates and Revolutionaries he breaks new ground and pushes our understanding of working class writing into hitherto undocumented territory.

It’s fair to say although the study of working class fiction has had something of a renaissance in recent years, a good deal of the focus has fallen on writing from the 1930s onwards – mirroring the way in which influential middle class writers and academics began to find common cause with working class activists and artists. As Klaus himself points out in his useful introduction, working class writers from the 1920s remain largely undiscovered and recognised because there were so few places where this work could find a welcome – quite often formal publishing houses were not interested and so publication was often via newspapers or broadsheets.

What Klaus has done here is to pull together twenty short stories and occasional pieces and themed them around a series of common issues – tramping, the workplace, moments of struggle – and includes in the selection writers who have subsequently achieved a substantial reputation as well of those who are justly or unjust still largely unknown. You’ll be surprised, I think, to find examples of work by D.H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield but Klaus makes a compelling case for their inclusion whilst acknowledging that what he has included isn’t ultimately representative of their work as a whole.

To be honest, as you’d expect, the quality of the contributions included here are very variable and some of it, whilst I’m glad it has been saved, is in my opinion of only marginal interest. Some of it, on the other hand, is completely knock-out. One of my favourites is the first one included in the anthology, The Tramp by Liam O’Flaherty, which makes a compelling case for a tramping life which has cast off the expectations and demands of the capitalist system and which asserts the dignity of a simple life lived in nature. O’Flaherty, who went on to publish quite extensively, writes with great, rough-hewn vigour, humour and humanity and is a cut above quite a lot of the bourgeois, lack-lustre professional authors who found it relatively easy to get a publishing deal simply because of their social networks.

Klaus identifies the lack of women writers represented in this selection – he has only a couple of pieces that make the cut here. This is not because Klaus hasn’t tried hard enough to put in a decent gender balance but because there simply weren’t women writing out there – a situation brought about by a whole series of personal and institutional reasons that would only start to be systematically challenged in the next decade.

You may be tempted to go to the stories created by the bigger names that you’ll certainly recognise if you are the kind of person likely to be interested in a book like this – Walter Greenwood is there; so is Harold Hislop and James Hanley – but it really is worth looking beyond these fine pieces and sampling the more obscure material because this will give you a sense of the real variety working class authors offer.

The book was first published in 1993 by Journeyman Press  and is still in print today. New paperback copies will cost you around £15 but, if you’re happy to buy second hand, you will get one for under a fiver.

 

Terry Potter

August 2016