Product Description

In Hanky Park, near Salford, Harry and Sally Hardcastle grow up in a society preoccupied with grinding poverty, exploited by bookies and pawnbroker, bullied by petty officials and living in constant fear of the dole queue and the Means Test. His love affair with a local girl ends in a shotgun marriage, and, disowned by his family, Harry is tempted by crime. Sally, meanwhile, falls in love with Larry Meath, a self-educated Marxist. But Larry is a sick man and there are other more powerful rivals for her affection. The definitive deception of a northern town in the midst of the thirties' depression. Walter Greenwood's "Love on the Dole" was the first novel to be set against a background of mass unemployment and was instantly recognised as a classic when it was first published in 1933. Raw, violent and powerful, it was a cry of outrage that stirred the national conscience in the same way as the Jarrow march.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12589 in Books
• Published on: 1993-06-17
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Times Literary Supplement
...novel...stands very high, but it is in its qualities as a 'social document' that its great value lies

About the Author
Walter Greenwood was born in 1903 at Salford in Lancashire. He was educated first at Langworthy Road Council School, Salford, and then by himself. He began part-time work as a milkroundsman's boy when he was twelve, then worked, again part-time, with a pawnbroker, before leaving school at the age of thirteen. He later worked as an office boy, a stable boy, a clerk, a packing case maker, a sign-writer, a car-driver, a warehouseman, and a salesman, never earning more than thirty-five shillings a week except while working for a few months in an automobile factory. He was on the 'dole' at least three times. Love on the Dole, his first novel, was accepted for publication in 1932, and when it appeared in 1933 it was at once recognized as a classic. He published ten more novels, a volume of short stories and his autobiography, There Was a Time. He also wrote plays, several of which have been filmed. Walter Greenwood died in 1974.

Customer Reviews

Gritty realism from depression era Salford
Love on the Dole, published in 1933, was Walter Greenwood's first novel and has never been out of print since. Written on scraps of paper as he tramped the streets looking for work, it has since been made into a film, a play and a musical. Set in Hanky Park, a fictional area of Salford during the depression, the novel was the literary bombshell of its day and the prototype for the 'kitchen sink' school of writing. The gritty realism he depicts of clogged rows of back-to-back houses, pawnshops, gas lights and debt, louse ridden people reveals Greenwoods's burning desire to document the social injustices of the time. He is probably the only English novelist since Dickens who was able to combine true mass appeal with passionate radicalism and bitterly honest documentation with writing of high artistic quality. What makes this book a classic, however, is that simple but elusive art of telling a good story and getting the characters right. The book combines personal documentation and outrage with storylines and situations that belong to the novels of the romantic era. Harry and Sally Hardcastle are growing up in grinding poverty but Sally sees a way out by taking up with local crook Sam Grundy. This beauty and the beast relationship is interwoven with that of Larry Meath, our gallant but doomed hero. Everyone who passes in and out of the storyline, from pawnbrokers to petty officials, are all described in convincing everyday detail and all display universal attitudes and fundamental choices. In Love on the Dole, Walter Greenwood eloquently and amusingly depicts an era that is alien to us today. But in our society of mass consumerism and full supermarket shelves it is too easy to forget that not that long ago people did not even have the means to feed themselves. These injustices should not be forgotten and the book should be required reading for all schoolchildren.

not the best edition
The book is wonderful and should be read. Unfortunately the Vintage edition omits the epigraphs at the beginning which indicate the novel's revolutionary analysis of society. Students buying this edition need to find an older edition and photocopy the relevant page - or, better still, look for a second-hand Penguin copy instead.

Walter Greenwood - Love on the Dole
I get the impression that this is one of those novels that could easily catch on again soon in a big way, catching the crest of a wave of social malcontent. It has that kind of feel. Certainly it is very interesting to read in light of the recent financial climate - joblessness, hard times, premonited doom; above all, toil, struggle. Certainly, to be worse off now is probably preferable to being worse off during the time of this novel, but still.

Love on the Dole is a fantastic book. It tells of the struggle of ordinary working class people striving endlessly through life. It has that Dickensian feel of being on the pulse of the normal man in the street, and it also proves that Greenwood (like similar writer's like Patrick Hamilton) is able to write very complex emotions and philisophies in simple ways. The common man expresses himself not eloquently but still beautifully - the constant ruings of fate and the way things are are written i such a way as to strike deep in the stomach. It's a novel of the gut and heart, this. It tells a fantastic story - that of the loves of brother and sister sally and harry hardcastle, through an impossible haze of poverty and worry and constant threat of things getting even worse. It is heartwarming and it is occasionally greatly saddening. It's a rich read.

One of the things that stands out most is the wonderful dislogue: the vernacular is a joy to read, a pure pleasure. it needs careful reading, but it's a great feeling to be able to hear so distinctly the voices of the characters in your head. I recommend this novel very highly indeed. As a novel it's a great story, and it wrenches, and as a slice of British social history I think it's probably invaluable. Excellent.