Love on the Dole

Love on the Dole is a novel by Walter Greenwood, about working class poverty in 1930s Northern England. It has been made into both a play and a film. Walter Greenwood's novel (1933) 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 ... more

Love on the Dole is a novel by Walter Greenwood, about working class poverty in 1930s Northern England. It has been made into both a play and a film. Walter Greenwood's novel (1933) 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 novel follows the Hardcastle family as they are pulled apart by mass unemployment. The sixteen-year-old Harry Hardcastle starts the novel working in a pawn shop, but is attracted to the glamour of working in the engineering factory Marlowes. After five years working there as an apprentice, he is laid off in the midst of the Great Depression, and is thereon unable to find work. He becomes romantically involved with a girl on his street, Helen, whom he gets pregnant... less