Blog Posts

Over the last few years while searching for Love on the Dole material, I chanced upon what seemed to me a surprising number of comic (or would-be comic?) texts about unemployment and the dole. This seemed so odd (in that I couldn't see that the dole was likely to be in any way a humorous… Continue reading New Article: Doleful Humour: Laughing Off Unemployment Between the Wars?

This is surely the most unflattering headline Greenwood ever appeared under - and the sub-headline was not much better: 'Unemployed Man Writes Book'. However, the article gets better as it goes on, and Greenwood was allowed to tell his own story as an unemployed man who had become a writer in his own words. It… Continue reading New Article: Walter Greenwood’s First Press Interview: ‘Idle Days Turned to Money’! (Manchester Evening News, 1933)

No one has ever paid much attention to the musical content of the original play/s of Love on the Dole, but they certainly had several songs which were used in many hundreds of live performances, though they did not survive into radio adaptations or the film. This is the first time the songs and their… Continue reading New Article – Two Songs (and a Hymn) in the Play of Love on the Dole: Act I and Act III, scene 2 (1934/1935)

In 1932 Greenwood received a letter from the publisher George Putnam saying that though they had read his manuscript [of what was to become titled Love on the Dole], they could not take it because they already had a similar unemployment novel in their lists - a translation of the German novelist Hans Fallada's Little… Continue reading New Article – the Novel Putnam Published Instead of Love on the Dole: Hans Fallada’s Little Man What Now (1933)