Love on the Dole Book

In Hanky Park near Salford Harry and Sally Hardcastle grow up in a society preoccupied with grinding poverty exploited by bookies and pawnbroker bullied by petty officials and living in constant fear of the dole queue and the Means Test. 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 there are other more powerful rivals for her affection. The definitive deception of a northern town in the midst of the thirties' depression. Walter Greenwood's "Love on the Dole" was the first novel to be set against a background of mass unemployment and was instantly recognised as a classic when it was first published in 1933. Raw violent and powerful it was a cry of outrage that stirred the national conscience in the same way as the Jarrow march.