One of the most difficult questions a working-class writer is required to address is the question of audience. This is exacerbated by the widespread assumption – not just among literary critics – that the main role of the working-class or labouring-class writer is to represent their own class experience, making it available for interpretation and emotional responses from a largely middle-class readership. There is a continuing tendency to identify working-class writers in terms of that class only in so far as they fit readers’ expectations, offering seemingly naïve, autobiographical reflections on what they have seen and experienced. This elevates the role of the critic. When working-class writers operate in popular genres, which may enable them to reflect more widely on society, or are formally experimental, they largely elude the working-class tag. Hilary Mantel and George R.R. Martin, despite their working-class origins, are rarely considered in relation to that class – perhaps because their acute observations of the brutal demands and workings of power would be too discomfiting if class were brought into the equation. Meanwhile, after the controversial success of James Kelman’s Booker prize winning How Late It Was, How Late (1994) – too often read as if it were the author’s unmediated stream-of-consciousness – his follow-up novel, Translated Accounts, mystified many reviewers because it was not located in his native Glasgow and treated oppression in a more obviously experimental way than in previous novels. Yet Kelman’s earlier works were carefully thought out literary constructs, written from a concern to challenge the hierarchical tendency wherein readers feel superior to oppressed and suffering characters.

Ethel Carnie Holdsworth (1886–1962), many of whose works are once again in print thanks to the endeavours of Nicola Wilson, may seem as far as is possible from Kelman in terms of literary technique but she was, from an early stage in her writing career, just as aware as he is of the question of audience – in particular of the risk that a working-class writer, dependent on a middle-class establishment for both publication and audience, may find she gratifies her audience by providing an opportunity to wallow in heightened emotions when presented with a portrait of other people’s suffering. This is sharply detailed in Carnie Holdsworth’s Wildean children’s story, ‘The Blind Prince’, published in her 1913 collection The Lamp Girl.¹ The embedded ‘Slave’s Story’, which emphasises the exploitation of creative workers under oppressive hierarchical systems, opposes free life outside the law to the lure of wealth and fame. Before his capture, the slave had worked as a shepherd and played the flute but, against his family’s wishes, he agreed to be taken to the city to entertain the wealthy. As the flute player’s pirate father expressed it:

the life of a mountain pirate was cleaner than many fine lives led in the cities, and for his part he could see less wrong in relieving overburdened travellers of their cares than in stealing the bread of the poor to put learning into the heads of lazy, rich men’s sons, in order that they might still further rob the next generation. (The Lamp Girl, p. 161)

The full horror of his exploitation is brought home to the flute player when, after hearing of his mother’s death and responding in music, his rich listeners ‘thundered such applause as almost lifted the roof’ (p. 164). This is when he realises that by offering both his mother’s life and his own grief to a wealthy audience he evokes neither sympathy nor a will for change; he has simply offered poverty and sorrow as entertaining objects for emotional consumption.

It is impossible to know exactly when ‘The Slave’s Story’ was written or submitted to the publisher but its publication is intriguingly close to the June 1913 premiere of Ethel Smyth’s Three Songs, which included two of Carnie Holdsworth’s poems, in London’s Queen’s Hall. There is certainly a possibility that the ‘Slave’s Story’ was written as an oblique response to Smyth since it makes no particular contribution to the narrative structure of ‘The Blind Prince’ but simply adds a layer of intensity. Certainly Smyth’s settings could be said to have appropriated Carnie Holdsworth’s words and experience for her own musical, emotional and political purposes. The two songs, settings of ‘Possession’ and ‘A Marching Tune’ (retitled ‘On the Road’) (Collected Poems, pp. 134 and 119), with their dedications to Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, redirect the passion of the poems from their original working-class context. When, as in ‘A Marching Tune’, Carnie Holdsworth writes of rebellion and the quest for freedom from slavery, she implicitly refers, as often elsewhere, to class oppression and the exploitation of workers – a struggle in which she hopes women will be involved side by side with men as equal comrades. By contrast the first poem set in Smyth’s three-song cycle, Maurice Baring’s ‘The Clown’, uses images of dungeons and enslavement – very like the subject matter of ‘The Blind Prince’ – metaphorically as a counter to imaginative freedom. Superficially this links well with Carnie Holdsworth’s poem, but it undermines her rootedness in everyday material reality. The most obvious political element in Smyth’s setting, beyond the dedications, is the quotation of a musical phrase from her suffragette anthem, ‘March of the Women’, towards the conclusion of ‘On the Road’, but this narrows down the politics of Carnie Holdsworth’s poem to a single issue, albeit one with which she presumably agreed.

The question of audience is not merely one of how a particular written experience might be contextualised, framed or appropriated. There are also material differences in how creative work – whether music, art or writing – is received. These differences, especially in relation to the act of reading, make frequent appearances throughout Carnie Holdsworth’s writings. She is interested in particular in how and where reading takes place, the needs it may meet, and the different ways in which readers respond. Her treatment of reading raises crucial questions about what is critically valued in literature and what forms and aspects tend to be dismissed.

Carnie Holdsworth’s most direct writings about the oppression of women as workers come in her early stint as editor and columnist for The Woman Worker in 1909 where, in an article titled ‘The Factory and Content’, she wrote: ‘The factory worker is practically a beggar and a slave. | So are all other workers dependent upon the whims of a master class’ (1 March 1909, p. 312). This allusion to factory workers as slaves runs through her work and is most notable in the title of her radical novel of 1925, This Slavery. But while she identifies the oppression of workers by powerful bosses and owners and sees the need for revolutionary political change (not necessarily violent) she is also alert to the need many workers – especially women workers – have for escape and the way in which some of those means of escape, including reading, may function as a mode of resistance. Three weeks before her comparison of factory work with beggary and slavery, her article ‘Factory Intelligence’ describes cotton mills as a place where reading happens during working hours and against the rules:

If you ever took a stroll through a cotton factory whilst the ‘hands’ were away in their homes having dinner, and were inquisitive enough to poke into the square, tin boxes that are for the purpose of holding weft, you would find a varied assortment of literature. You might find, deftly hidden (lest the eagle eye of the overlooker pop on them), Conan Doyle, Rider Haggard, Silas Hocking, Dickens, ‘Daily Mail,’ ‘Comic Cuts,’ and (sometimes) the ‘Clarion.’

Have you ever tried to read in the working hours of a factory? It is a weird experience.

So between the breaking of the threads and the throwing of the shuttle we thieve back a little of the time that they are thieving from us. It needs patience, too. In some six hours, with good luck, you may manage two pages of pretty open print.

Does it not argue a love of learning when we attempt to read in such hells as these? And it is better to pursue the adventures of the Pink Kid in the ‘Comic Cuts’ than never get out of one’s self – it does at least save us from going mad. Taken from the ugly schoolroom and plunged into the factory we waste our youth, our health, our beauty in weaving cotton. Shade of Shakespeare, what have we to do with thee? Surely thou wast meant for the rich and not for us!

(Woman Worker, 10 March 1909, p. 219)

This passage indicates several key aspects of Carnie Holdsworth’s awareness which feed into the treatment of reading in her works. First she notes the practical difficulty of reading in a life dominated by the need to work – a need which, for women, is frequently exacerbated by the ‘double shift’ of paid work and unpaid domestic labour. In another Woman Worker article of this period she urges women to free themselves from domestic drudgery by going out onto the moors and being willing to play (‘Our Right to Play’, 14 April 1909, p. 342). But for working-class women in a factory who are poor in both money and time, the opportunity to read is something they steal back from their employers as they give what attention they can snatch from repetitive paid labour to the books and magazines they have concealed from the overseer. This is far from the pleasant middle-class image of the reading woman who reclines on a couch or in an armchair as she fends off the boredom of a leisured life. The wealthier reader may have time to spend on a lengthy build-up of plot, slow revelation of character or convoluted sentence constructions. The stolen reading of factory workers demands that every sentence and paragraph offers something immediate, whether an exuberance of expression, a joke to be relished, or a mystery about character or plot which will feed the imagination when work needs active attention or the overlooker patrols. Aesthetic values are often slanted toward reading methods available to a more leisurely lifestyle but there is no reason why this should be so. It is worth considering what kind of writing works best in snatched moments; their technique as well as their views and plot might help to explain the long popularity that Dickens and Dumas had among working-class readers before they were admitted to the canon or pantheon of literary greats. Short chapters, powerful emotion, high tension, frequent action and vivid language all provide welcome counters to the tedium and exhaustion of the factory’s ten-hour day.

Carnie Holdsworth’s concern with the partial fulfilment that reading provides as a form of imaginative escape dates from her first published poem, ‘The Bookworm’ (Rhymes from the Factory, pp. 1–3), in which she sees reading as a space of mental freedom and metaphorical wealth. By 1909 she is concerned with what happens to the women who have no imaginative or real outlet but are most strongly aware of their confined and oppressive circumstances. In her article ‘How Colour is Introduced’ (Woman Worker, 7 April 1909, p. 323), she suggests that consciousness of their material circumstances is liable to drive women into flirtation and sexual liaisons (with the implication of prostitution), just as men who cannot bear factory life might take up soldiering. This suggests that what is lacking in workers’ lives is a recognition of feelings and an outlet for strong emotions, including desire. If reading provides a vicarious means of experiencing strong emotions through reaction or sympathy, it has particular value. Those emotions may well include, when reading the work of Dickens and Silas Hocking, strong sympathy for the plight of the poor, if not an effective remedy for their poverty.

It is evident that Carnie Holdsworth does not value all reading matter equally. Comic Cuts, a magazine reproducing largely American comic strips comes near the bottom of her implied hierarchy because she feels obliged to make an excuse for its presence in the factory. Dickens is listed among the popular authors because in 1909, when Carnie Holdsworth was writing, he tended to be seen as a popular rather than the canonical writer he has become today. Moreover, the existence of a canon of English literature, although beginning to be implicitly accepted by critics and the authors of colonial textbooks, rarely impinged on twentieth-century working-class readers who, as in earlier centuries, tended to be led by chance rather than critical guidance in their reading choices. The inclusion of the Clarion is presumably partly because of Robert Blatchford’s role as owner of The Woman Worker and mentor to Carnie Holdsworth. It is also a reminder of the extent to which any evaluation of writing is not simply a matter of literary taste but also relies on our own ethical and political concerns. The concluding ironic reference to Shakespeare indicates not so much his absence from working-class reading (Carnie Holdsworth alludes to Romeo and Juliet in ‘The Bookworm’ and was clearly familiar with Shakespeare’s work) but as someone whose writings working-class people are not expected to understand, both because of their paucity of education and because of condescending attitudes which see working-class people as lacking both value and taste.

Later novels suggest the possibility of interest in a wider range of reading matter by working-class people. For instance, Bill Cherry in The Taming of Nan is given a copy of Southey’s Life of Nelson (1813), Helen of Four Gates features Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776), while Rachel Martin in This Slavery is an enthusiastic reader of Marx’s Capital (1867–94, trans. into English from 1887), borrowed from the local Co-operative Library. This indicates considerable access to books and willingness to read complex works among people with minimal access to formal, state-provided education. However, romantic novelettes do come in for occasional criticism. In The Taming of Nan, the romantic novelette may seem to offer escape but when life offers her no easy romantic resolution, Polly finds such novelettes unsatisfactory because they are so ‘dreadfully unreal’ (Taming of Nan, p. 262).

In several of her works Carnie Holdsworth suggests that the highest value of books may lie in their connection to truth and feeling but that these connections do not often receive an adequate response from the middle-class readers among the employing class. A bleak assessment of the inadequacy of middle-class reading comes in the poem ‘His Books’ (Voices of Womanhood, pp. 18–21), written in the voice of a domestic servant who has fallen in love with the cold employer who pays twenty pounds a year for her humility, quietness and distance. Loving him, she uses his bequest of a hundred pounds to purchase his books, which she cannot read because they are ‘mostly dry’ – but she keeps them so that their presence can remind her of the man who gave them far more care and attention than she ever received.

The 1924 novel of domestic service, General Belinda, is clearer about what Carnie Holdsworth considers the responsibility of both readers and writers. As the protagonist Belinda takes on a series of jobs as a general domestic servant, the novel with its episodic structure provides a variety of depictions of members of the employing class. These include readers and a writer while Belinda herself enjoys and is affected by her reading. The employers Belinda encounters include Mr Wells, who admires Silas Marner but can think of ‘nothing but getting on’ in life (General Belinda, p. 110), as well as a fourth-rate writer who lectures on ‘Genius and Poverty’ (p. 126) but is annoyed when Belinda remarks that a woman accustomed to stand at her factory work for ten hours a day is unlikely to faint from the stress of sitting beside a patient for the same length of time (p. 122). Meanwhile Belinda, reading about Fantine in Les Misérables, finds the book a call to action and responds by giving her favourite skirt to a poor woman with many children to support (p. 126). She eventually draws the conclusion that ‘the people who made other people weep on their printed pages achieved their success, not from greater feeling, but a shade less feeling, which allowed them to stage-manage their effects’ (p. 130). However, she remains convinced that for the greatest writers – she names Charles Lamb and Victor Hugo – there can be no such disconnection between their lives and works, and Carnie Holdsworth addresses the reader directly, declaring that in the greatest writers there is a unity between their lives, their feeling and their writing which is ‘deep and intense’ (p. 136).

The kind of sincere authenticity which Carnie Holdsworth values is presented in the chapter in which Belinda reads one of her father’s dialect poems praising the pleasures of home to the Bransworth Poets’ Society. When the poem meets with respect and applause, Belinda is reassured that the authenticity and sincerity of his words, despite flaws, is combined with ‘the true poetic spark’ and that, as a result, his ‘sterling worth’ will not be forgotten (pp. 244–6). It would be easy to dismiss Belinda’s view of writers and their works as naïve, especially since her admiration for writers and expectations of them and their readers are so frequently disappointed by her employers. However, her more generous and humane responses are implicitly endorsed by Carnie Holdsworth and serve as a reminder that the activities of reading and writing do not take place in a vacuum apart from human ethics and responsibilities.

While writers and readers have moral responsibilities and may in some cases unite great writing with human sympathy, Carnie Holdsworth does not assume that virtue is the key to writing. As she says, ‘There can be mediocrity with sincerity’ (General Belinda, p. 136). Nor is an ability to be moved and influenced by books an exceptional marker of sensitivity or worth. Many of Carnie Holdsworth’s characters are moved and influenced by books though other sympathetic, kind and hardworking characters – Bill Cherry in The Taming of Nan (1919) and Bess Hind in All On Her Own (1929) – attempt to engage with literature but find it does not fit their needs.

It is reasonable to assume that Ethel Carnie Holdsworth’s interest in the way readers respond to literature and the role reading can play in working-class lives affected the form and structure of her own novels, but this cannot be entirely disentangled from the demands of publishers and the marketplace. As a working-class writer, Carnie Holdsworth wrote for money and was liable to encounter middle-class gatekeepers at her various publishers. However, we can assume a largely working-class audience for at least some of her works, such as her writing for The Co-operative News, including the 1915 serialised novel The Iron Horses, and her final novelette, All On Her Own. Here and elsewhere in her work is a form of writing distinct from the kind of literary ‘realism’ often favoured by middle-class critics. Working-class writers are often expected to be literary realists, perhaps because if such writers are seen simply as reporters of their everyday situations, the first responsibility of the critics becomes one of interpretation and evaluation rather than active response. Yet literary realism, with its focus on the predictable and everyday, has its own constraints, especially when the everyday is viewed from a perspective of middle-class security. It avoids the juxtaposition of extremes of wealth and poverty and assumes an overarching continuity, allowing no space for dramatic external events or sudden changes of circumstance. This has limitations when considered in relation to working-class lives. By contrast, the popular form of melodrama focuses on bodily vulnerability, permits the intervention of luck, acknowledges the fact of oppression and permits – even encourages – strong emotion. This means that melodramatic elements can reflect the precariousness and anxieties of working-class life more accurately than literary realism, which responds most readily to the security and unquestioning certainties of the comfortable middle classes. Melodrama, with its frequency of action, extreme characters and intensity of emotion, can also fulfil the requirements of the secret women readers in the factory Carnie Holdsworth described in 1909, allowing them to relish both emotion and incident in the ten hours of their draining and repetitive daily work. Pamela Fox finds melodramatic romance in tune with Carnie Holdsworth’s socialist-feminist aims; I think it is also important to consider the ways in which melodramatic tropes can bring fiction closer to the rhythms of impoverished working-class life than a realist approach can achieve.

Although the 1917 novel Helen of Four Gates was probably Carnie Holdsworth’s most successful novel in the melodramatic mode, it is possible that her later novels, written in popular genres, are more consciously suited to an audience of her own class. While The Quest of the Golden Garter (1927) begins as though it were an aristocratic thriller, it is prefaced by a poem which attacks those who, under the protection of the law, rob the poor and weak. The story includes flashes of anger at oppression, exploitation and ignorance of suffering so that one central character can declare to a wealthy man: ‘I hated you all, hated all you who could pass by on the other side – whilst humanity clawed and ate the dust, as though it was vermin, not flesh of God, left there to die, or rot, or prostitute itself’ (p. 73). A footman likewise betrays a ‘blaze of absolute hatred’ for a moment when patronised by an upper-class man (p. 79). This acknowledgement of class anger, published in the year following the General Strike, is presumably something that working-class readers would recognise, whether or not they shared that perspective.

Ethel Carnie Holdsworth’s final novel, All On Her Own, was published on 23 November 1929 as a cheaply produced fortnightly ‘Ivy Stories’ novelette (no. 178) published by Leng, a subsidiary of DC Thomson, and priced at 4d (fourpence). Its two-colour cover in red and black shows a woman half reclining in a bleak moorland landscape with an expression and gesture presumably intended to suggest romantic longing. The advertisement inside the cover is for Dr J. Collis Browne’s Chlorodyne – a popular panacea aimed at working-class people who might struggle to afford a doctor’s fees and advertised as a remedy for everything from influenza to diarrhoea and from asthma to gout. It’s hard to find an exact comparison today but in terms of production values the nearest are probably the Pocket Library series produced by the People’s Friend – a descendant of the People’s Friend Library novelettes (also produced by DC Thomson but with the slightly higher price of 6d, sixpence). The production values are low: the paper is cheap and the type, in two columns on each page, while clear enough, is small with occasional smudges and defects, comparing poorly with the larger clear type of her final hardback novel, Eagles’ Crag (1928). Its expected audience might be identified by the use of metaphors familiar to mill-workers, such as ‘the flying shuttle-weft of the sunrise’ (All On Her Own, p. 15) or the fear that a metaphorical thread had broken ‘which could never be pieced again’ (p. 14, referring to the work Carnie Holdsworth herself had done as a child piecener in a cotton mill). Although the setting is mostly rural the perspective is largely urban, which may derive from a sense of audience as well as a Marxist view of history (that is, that historical change would be propelled by the urban proletariat). The aristocratic old gentleman Sir Michell Tyburn is described as ‘sympathetic so long as his interests and traditions were not involved. Those interests, at least, were not based on exploiting sewing-shop girls and anaemic mill-hands’. He is also ‘the fading symbol of an age that was passing, or soon to pass’ (p. 30).

There is a fairly longstanding tendency to lump all novelettes that include love stories together and then to treat them with dismissive condescension. In his study of popular reading and publishing, Joseph McAleer moves from Orwell’s discussion of boys’ novelette fictions to a generalised criticism of the escapism of similar publications for women, remarking that ‘The ubiquitous happy ending added to the lack of realism’ (McAleer, p. 5). He cites in his own sweeping criticism of women’s novelettes Kathleen Box, one of the leading proponents of ‘Mass Observation’ in the 1930s, who assumed working-class people were influenced by the books they obtained from ‘public libraries, twopenny libraries, and grubby little sweet shops’ (p. 7). While McAleer does look at women’s papers and what he terms ‘romance papers’ published by DC Thomson, his focus is on twopenny papers rather than the slightly more expensive novelettes and more on titles and short summaries than full contents. His survey omits the Ivy Stories novelettes, published by Leng which was by then a branch of DC Thomson.

While All On Her Own might easily be classified as a romantic novelette since it follows to some degree the conventional pattern of dislike turning to love but interrupted by obstacles, the romantic plot is only one of many elements of Ivy Stories novelettes which tend to focus on many more characters than the conventional couple-to-be. Happy endings are not a given. The previous fortnight’s novelette, The Hidden Wife by Anne Middleton (Ivy Stories, no. 177) is a reworking of the popular Maria Marten story whose many fictionalised versions in the early twentieth century tend to present Maria as an innocent working-class girl seduced and then murdered by the local squire. Rather than viewing All On Her Own as romance, it is more helpful to consider how Carnie Holdsworth employs familiar melodramatic tropes. These enable her to pack the tale with incident so that each short chapter offers excitement and suspense for the reader who is short of time – or perhaps reading in secret while standing by a factory machine. Melodramatic tropes include bodily weakness interrupting paid work (in this case a career as a singer and actress), a home lost when fire causes financial reverse, and death caused by the selfless act of caring for a dangerously ill child. While these may seem excessive and unrealistic to comfortable middle-class readers, for Carnie Holdsworth’s working-class audience – and perhaps for many readers today – the risk that illness or disability may damage or end the ability to earn, the danger of a sudden catastrophic loss of home and security or even the threat posed by contagious disease remained potent and fearful elements of everyday life. Writing from and for a working-class audience can mean drawing on a strong awareness of such material circumstances as well as writing in forms which speak to those circumstances and with which readers are most familiar.

The problems in writing about romance from a working-class perspective were familiar to working-class readers long before Walter Greenwood’s anti-romantic Love on the Dole (1933) showed both working-class people’s capacity for romance and the impossibility of achieving, in the circumstances of the time, a realistic happy ending. In her 1909 poem ‘Love and Poverty’ (first published as ‘A Proletarian’s Song’, Collected Poems, p. 101), Carnie Holdsworth wrote of the need to renounce all thoughts of romance until an imagined future when ‘Poverty is not a crime’. This is perhaps why Estelle, the heroine of All On Her Own, is a Cockney foundling brought up by an elderly actor, and therefore in some ways outside the class system. This allows for comments and debates about class, wealth and privilege which are often spoken by Estelle or mediated through her perspective. While as a character she arrives as an outsider in the northern rural landscape, her conversations and observations suggest as much acquaintance with poverty and exploitation in northern mill-towns as with extremes of wealth in London. The novel is written for immediate consumption rather than enduring literary status, so it includes contemporary debates such as discussion of the Settled Land Act of 1925 (All On Her Own, p. 30) and the contested practice of tithing, with Estelle and the author frequently observing oppression and injustice and always speaking up for radical change. Thus the novel speaks from and to the circumstances of working-class readers, plainly putting a point of view with which the reader is at liberty to disagree. As the dramatist John McGrath wrote of the difference between working-class audiences and middle-class audiences, working-class audiences ‘have minds of their own and they like to hear what your mind is’ (p. 54).

Carnie Holdsworth’s own political perspective is made plain by authorial comments on the small acts of kindness most likely to appeal to all working-class readers. For instance, the help a thin, poor Yorkshirewoman offers in cleaning the house is seen as an example of ‘the good, universal earth, which grows charity and love and mutual aid’ (All On Her Own, p. 39). This presumably deliberate reference to the Russian anarchist Kropotkin and his seminal work Mutual Aid (1902) can be linked with Carnie Holdsworth’s 1924 declaration that she belongs to ‘the folk – from the most undeveloped and illiterate, so confused that they are the bedrock of even reaction, to Whitman and Morris, and Marx, Kropotkin and Bakunin’ (Freedom, October 1924, p. 54). The generous and instinctive mutual aid practised by a woman whose life is a struggle forms a telling contrast with the young Bess Hind, who clings to tales of wealthy ancestors and fears that her brother’s loss of land might deprive her of her class position and force her to live among the ‘uncultured masses’ (All On Her Own, p. 12).

It is not easy to reconsider what reading may have meant to working-class readers in the past – or even what it may mean now. Working-class readers are too often seen as the passive recipients of literacy, unlikely to have literary taste and incapable of intelligent judgements on what the role of literature should be. In reality, working-class readers have always possessed perception, imagination as well as the ability to form opinions of their own and contest the views of others. Ethel Carnie Holdsworth through her various writings offers some suggestion of what reading may have meant to working-class women in the past – and the critiques with which it might challenge contemporary assumptions and judgements about what constitutes ‘good’ literature.