Personalizes the decline of the Industrial Revolution in England
Disadvantages:
NOne
Recommend to potential buyers:
yes
Full review
A 20th Century non-fiction version of a 19th Century Dickens novel. Seen through the eyes of the author, Woodruff, beginning at his birth and early years as a son of poor weavers in the mill town of Blackburn Lancashire during the First World War and ending as he leaves poverty and depression at 16 to try his luck in the big city, London.
It is also the story of a family struggling through the failure of capitalism as the Industrial Revolution wanes and dreams of a good life for the working class at that time turn into desparation.
Woodruff revisits his past with riviting prose and brings the post First World War conditions of NorthernEngland vividly to life.
An amazing book and a great find for this reader.
"Billy" Woodruff's family story reminds me of Frank McCourt"s "Angela's Ashes". Desparately poor family struggling to secure a subsistance, too proud for charity. The difference, however, is that Woodruff's father is not a drunk but a World War I, English Veteran, unemployed weaver, remote and gaining his only pleasure from puttering around in his garden.
The author, William, introduces us to the the smells, tastes sights and sounds of his younger self, "Billy", a boy with high spirits finding love, hope and pleasure where he can even in the midst of starvation and disappointment.
The family relocates several times, once to improve their situation and once to return to another poverty stricken neighborhood one rung below the conditions from which they had previously escaped.
We see through Billy's eyes the harrowing impact on a working class family of the cruel side of capitalism in the first three decades of Twentieth Century England. Billy gives us an insight into the attraction that Socialism and Marxism provided to a minority of the working class while shining a light on why such utopian ideals had little effect on the traditionalist and religious majority.
The book ends in the mid-thirties as Billy leaves Blackburn, his family and beloved dog Bess to go seek his fortune in the big city, London.
Thus ends the first of the two books of this series,
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Yorkshireman sketch. The son of a weaver he was born on a pallet of straw at the back of the mill and two days later his mother was back at work. Life was extrememly tough ...
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