Proletarian Literature - Britain

Britain

An early British proletarian or working class writer was the poet John Clare (1793-1864). Clare was the son of a farm labourer, and came to be known for his celebratory representations of the English countryside and his lamentation of its disruption. His poetry underwent a major re-evaluation in the late 20th century and he is now considered to be among the most important 19th-century poets. His biographer Jonathan Bate states that Clare was "the greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced. No one has ever written more powerfully of nature, of a rural childhood, and of the alienated and unstable self".

Walter Greenwood's Love on the Dole (1933) has been described as an "excellent example" of an English proletarian novel It was written during the early 1930s as a response to the crisis of unemployment, which was being felt locally, nationally, and internationally. It is set in Hanky Park, an industrial slum in Salford, where Greenwood was born and brought up. The novel begins around the time of the General Strike of 1926, but its main action takes place in 1931.

The following are some other important working class novelists and novels from Britain, who were writing in the 20th century: Robert Tressell The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist (1914); James C. Welsh The Underworld (1920); Rhys Davies The Withered Root (1927); Jack Jones Rhondda Roundabout (1934); James Hanley The Furys (1935); Lewis Jones Cwmardy (1937); Harold Heslop The Earth Beneath (1946); John Braine Room at the Top (1957); Alan Sillitoe Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958); Stan Barstow A Kind of Loving (1960); Sid Chaplin The Day of The Sardine (1961).