Penguin Modern Classics
Walter Greenwood
Love on the Dole
Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole was the Cathy Come Home of the 30s, the first novel to be set against a backcloth of chronic unemployment. Raw, violent and powerful, it was a cry of outrage that did as much in its way as the Jarrow march to stir the national conscience.
In Hanky Park near Salford, Harry and Sally Hardcastle grow up in a society preoccupied with mean economies, exploited by bookies and pawnbrokers, bullied by petty officials, sliding hopelessly towards the horrors of the Means Test.
His apprenticeship over, Harry joins the shuffling dole queue. As the months pass, he sinks into nerveless apathy: 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 other more powerful rivals for her affections are closing in…
The cover shows a detail from a 1919 Labour Party election poster, by permission of the Labour Party Library
U.K.
£1.75
AUST. $4.95
(recommended)
CAN.
$3.95
FICTION/LITERATURE
ISBN 0 14
00.2827 7
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