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From International Socialism, No.70, Mid-June 1974, p.32.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The Classic Slum
Robert Roberts
Penguin, 50p.
THE CLASSIC SLUM is about Salford life at the turn of the century. It is an eye-opener, the historical equivalent of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. Few historians could have written it, but then ‘few historians are the sons of labourers’. It is obsessed with the minute divisions within our oppressed class, especially with the ‘undermass’, where ‘position in our Edwardian community was judged not only by what one possessed but also what one pawned’. The title is a phrase Engels used about Salford.
This book, like its author, Robert Roberts, was born in the slums.
‘The corner shop, my first home, was a perfect spot for your intelligence to eavesdrop on life ... here was market place and village well combined. Only a fool could have failed to learn from it.’
From the corner shop Roberts sees the class struggle not ‘as a war against the employers but as a perpetual series of engagements in the battle of life itself.’ Undoubtedly he would like it otherwise. The book is not about the growth of trade unionism and the natural leaders, the people he describes as ‘the cream of working-class society’. Instead, the book is obsessed with the everyday everything. How women artificially interfered with the will of God, especially with the small piece of oiled sponge with tapes hopefully attached. We are told
‘Only the chargehand (from a militant religious sect) spoke of love life in a happier vein. He claimed that HIS partner, at the peak of sexual congress (and on sectarian instruction) was wont to cry “Rapture! Rapture! Praise the Lord!” Upon which he returned the standard exclamation. But the noise, he said, disturbed the neighbours, who beat on the bedroom wall with a boot.’
Because the obsession with squalor is not romantic, Robert Roberts is often able to touch upon moments and feeling far more touching than the slush we so often read. He understands and undermines someone like D.H. Lawrence just as he understands how the man of the house refuses to do housework in case it undermines his virility. Some men have to help in conditions of complete secrecy. They were battling again the ever invading dirt. ‘There were housewives who finally lost interest in anything save dirt removing.’
The range of descriptions is endless. Fish and chip shops first appeared at the turn of the century ... with the use of ice in the trawlers.
‘Man seems to have adulterated his food ever since he began to sell it.’
We then have several pages of vivid description.
[‘Dance halls closed on Friday evenings for lack of girls.’] [1]
‘The gramophone, however, was one of the few objects valued which had not previously established itself among the bourgeoisie.’
Central to Roberts’ argument is how, in spite of everything, ‘the undermass remained stable’, how they had neither the wit nor the will to revolt and ‘how it took the worst war in history to disenchant them’. Roberts, it is true, can only see the working-class battles as down beyond the end of his alley. Yet his few glimpses, especially of the hot summer of 1911, are better than most textbooks.
1. In the published version this sentence appeared in the middle of the paragraph before last. However, it does not make sense there, so we have moved it to this position where it makes more sense.
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Last updated on 7.2.2008