Love on the Dole Gender Book Review

Love on the Dole Gender Review

            “Love on the Dole” by Walter Greenwood, published in 1933,  turned out an enormous influential novel in the view of British public in relation to unemployment and social deprivation that encouraged an inquiry by the Parliament which became the cause of reforms. This novel is a piece of fiction, but this type of fiction portrays a close look of people’s life and Greenwood himself.  It presented that the people he brought up with and later on he studied from coroners of street. In this regard he always keeps a diary to note down the facts and realities in order to use at later stage.

            The book pursues the family of Hardcastle as they are forced not together by mass joblessness. Harry Hardcastle, 16-year-old, begins the book when he is working on a store of pawn, but Harry is so much interested in working in the engineering factory that is called Marlowes. By working in that company as a trainee after 5 years he is suspended in the difficult time of Great Recession, and is thereby incapable to discover job. Meanwhile in the unemployed period he falls into love with a girl of his street whose name is Helen. He invites her to his home and he gets Helen pregnant and this pregnancy pushes him to marry with that girl. And it is the fact now Harry is not only a jobless but also dole is taken from Harry by the Means Test. At the same time Harry’s elder sister whose name is Sally Hardcastle engaged into love with Larry Meath who is a socialist and they both undergoes the unwelcome concentration of Sam Grundy who is an illegal bookmaker. His sister feels incapable to struggle with socialist intellectualism of Meath, identifying not only the financial but also the rational scarcity of the domestic lower-class society. (Constantine, 1999)

The book’s climax concentrates on a genuine march, in which the NUWM protested in October 1931 on Salford Town Hall. Itself the march faced with aggressive police challenge; in the novel, as a consequence Larry Meath dies because of blows to the head from a police officer’s stick. After the death of Larry Meath, Sally sadly surrenders to the Sam Grundy’s concentrations that enable both her brother and father eventually to find job. (Speakman, 1986)

The book received so much response from authors, reporters, and politicians, who were all stimulated by its consideration of poverty, but significantly, by its explanation of a lower class society trying to cope with that poverty with cleverness and self-esteem. Finally, the dole was extracted even if the means test demonstrated that other participants of the family contribute enough to help them. It means that often the daughters would wind up helping whole families; in fact her saving was not sufficient to live on (Constantine, 1999). Regardless of the widespread poverty and the realization of gloom and doom there is abundance of humor between the characters as well, that is identified in the tale and stop it from being totally miserable and other things don’t finished too badly for the Hardcastle home in the end.    

References

Speakman, Ray. (1986). Introduction to Love on the Dole by Walter Greenwood. London:

Heinemann Educational Books.

Constantine, Stephen. (1999). "Love on the Dole and Its Reception in the 1930s," in Literature

and History. Manchester: Wiley.