A Hard Life's Work: Cultural Memory and the Working Class Novel of the British Isles, 1900-1920

This project restructures the canon of working class literature by reviving the first novels of a series of early twentieth century working class writers from across the British Isles—from Ireland, Patrick MacGill's Children of the Dead End (1914); from England, Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (1914) and Ethel Carnie's Miss Nobody (1913); and from Scotland, James Welsh's The Underworld (1920), James Haslam's The Handloom Weaver's Daughter (1904), and George Douglas Brown's The House with the Green Shutters (1901). By deploying cultural memory studies as a framework for analyzing these authors' works, I establish the field of the nascent working class novel, and I explore how the formal qualities of these texts derived from larger desires amongst working class people to simultaneously commemorate and reconstitute working class culture and experience through the novel form.