Exploring the literary impact of 1926 General Strike
Two Victoria
University of Wellington academics are offering a new take on the General
Strike of 1926 in the United Kingdom by exploring the diverse response writers
have had to this event from the 1930s to the present.
In their book
Writing the 1926 General Strike, Dr Charles Ferrall and Dr Dougal
McNeill, both from Victoria’s English Programme, show how the Strike not only
drew writers into political action but also inspired literature that served to
shape twentieth-century British views of class, culture and politics.
The book
shows how novels then in progress, such as Virginia Woolf's To the
Lighthouse and D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, were
affected by the Strike. “Woolf’s house was a centre of literary and political
activity through the Strike, and she recorded her daily experiences in her
diaries,” says Dr Ferrall. “Evidence suggests that the writing of crucial parts
of To the Lighthouse was shaped by this context.”
Dr Ferrall
and Dr McNeill also champion under-read and neglected works inspired by the
Strike, including novels from the sailor-turned-writer James Hanley, the
campaigning MP Ellen Wilkinson, and the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid.
In addition,
their book examines the long-lasting effects of the Strike. “It had a profound
impact on Welsh culture, and novelists and poets were remembering and narrating
its story for generations to come,” says Dr McNeill. “From Upstairs Downstairs
and Days of Hope in popular culture, to romances and thrillers in the
twenty-first-century, to modernist Scottish poetry, the Strike appears in
unexpected places across the writing of the nations of Britain.”
The ‘Nine
Days’ in 1926, as the General Strike was called, involved millions of workers
striking in support of coal miners in their dispute with the coal owners. It
drew in all parts of British society, with students from Oxford and Cambridge
‘volunteering’ and acting as strike-breakers, writers and intellectuals feeling
forced to choose sides, and the BBC establishing itself as a major player in political
life. The consequences of the miners’ defeat would have long-lasting
consequences in pit villages across the island, and stories of the General
Strike were passed on as folklore in the British trade union movement through
the twentieth century.
Writing
the 1926 General Strike
will be launched by Professor Harry Ricketts tomorrow, on the anniversary of
unionist Ernie Abbott’s death at Trades Hall in Wellington.
About the
authors
Dr Charles
Ferrall is a senior lecturer in the English Programme at Victoria University of
Wellington. Amongst the books he has published are Modernist Writing and
Reactionary Politics and Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850-1950,
co-authored with Anna Jackson. Dr Dougal McNeill is a lecturer in the English
Programme at Victoria University of Wellington. He is the author of Forecasts
of the Past: Globalisation, History, Realism, Utopia and has edited special
issues of the International Journal of Scottish Literature and the Journal
of New Zealand Literature.
What: Launch of Writing the 1936 General
Strike
When: Friday 27 March, 4.30-6pm
Where: Trades Hall, 126 Vivian Street,
Wellington
To RVSP email
dougal.mcneill@vuw.ac.nz
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