Some notes on Larry Meath in Love on the Dole.

3-2-2 134

Narkey tries to scare Larry from seeing Sally:

‘Referrin’… referrin’..in rising tones: ‘Ach. The bloody edge you put on makes me sick…Who the ‘ell d’ y’ think y’are?’

The working class Narkey is drawing attention to the fact that Larry does not speak like the other characters; has he, by educating himself, alienated himself from the very class to which he pays allegiance?

-139

Sally, too, sees him as other- ‘ attired in brightness as a man inspired.’ She feels inferior: ’What had she to give? Who was she? Sal Hardcastle, an insignificant weaver at Marlowe’s cotton mills.’ Larry, by contrast, is clearly seen here as an intellectual.

-140

Larry sees 45/- a week as poverty , ‘ a life of doing without the things that make life worthwhile.’

She finds him incomprehensible: ‘what did he mean by that? And by all his other incomprenhensible talk which he uttered when addressing crowds at street corners?’

Perhaps her own (in this context less than politically correct) aspirations lead her to the paradoxical though, ‘She wished him an ordinary type whilst preserving his extraordinary qualities.’

-142

She begins to understand her situation through a process of analytical thought which we assume is generally foreign to her, but blocks this as the conclusions are too depressing and fatalistic: “‘ I want Larry….’she defied herself.”

(NB pp 142-3 reveal the truth of existence for women of this class, as Larry sees it.)

3-3 152

Contrast Larry’s realism with Harry’s naivete – ‘It’s wanting decent things and knowing they’ll never be yours that hurts…’ What is hope for Harry and Helen when they gaze in shop windows at luxury goods is despair for Larry, who realistically realises that ordinary people will never be able to afford them.

3-5-1 164

Mrs Bull on Larry: ‘Tain’t no use talkin’ socialism to folks..’

Note also Mrs Nattle’s comments on MPs on p165; she sees them as on the other side, with jobs and –presumably – power.

3-5-2 168

Look at Ned’s exploitative reasons for marrying Kate! ‘He could send her to work…she would be perfectly subservient.’ Is Greenwood allying the oppression of women to his theme of the oppression of the working class? Is he (no doubt counter-textually) suggesting that the capitalist system reflects human nature? Or is he simply placing the policeman – protector of the property and capital of the privileged classes – as an unpleasant contrast to his idealistic hero, Larry? (The sort of unreliable member of the working class, perhaps, who becomes a class traitor as opposed to the loyal intellectual who almost – but not quite – becomes a martyr for his beliefs).

3-7-182

Larry literally is up against a wall of incomprehension as he attempts to explain the role of money as commodities – despite the lecture, the young man reiterates at the end, ‘Y’ can’t do withour capik[le, ie, capital].’ Ted Munter, who is to betray Meath to the Marlow bosses, has already observed, ‘Y’d do the same if y’ was in their place,’ once again raising the question as to whether this sort of conviction reflects human nature or is the result of its subtle indoctrination by a corrupt and exploitative system.

3-8

Larry gets the sack. In apparent disillusion with a working class which appears to him as its own worst enemy, he muses on the election of the National Government and laments, ‘ It’s driving me barmy to live amongst such idiotic folk.’ We wonder whether the idiocy is because of lack of intelligence (a natural order of things), a lack of education ( a result of capitalism) or simply a response to the fact that they had voted on the opposite side to him.

There are implicit questions here about the ability of the oppressed to lift themselves out of their oppression without effective leadership; Hard Times dismisses the leader figure as a mirror image of the capitalist oppressor, whilst Dole presents him as largely alienated, ineffectual and ultimately irrelevant. In which case, whence social and economic advancement?

3-9 193

Sally actually blames the councillors representing labour: ‘Why don’t them Labour councillors as’re allus makin’ a mug out o’ y’ find a job for y’? They’re all right.. don’t care a damn for us.’

Again, we see anyone who moves from the ranks of the powerless to the empowered – however limited and constrained that power may be – regarded as part of the system creating the hardship at worst and as irrelevant to the needs of ordinary workers at best.

3-10 198

Larry reminds the crowd at the demonstration of their democratic share in the process which has brought about mass unemployment; he

‘..reminded the crowd that the cause of their protest was of their own making; recallled the scares and the people’s response to it at the general election.’

-199-200

Larry’s assumption of authority and ordering of the ranks of the protestors show that he is responsible and respects order. This is, presumably, Greenwood showing that radicalism need not be associated with the anarchy of a mob, the fearful post-French revolution perception which implicitly underlies Dickens’s harsh intolerance of the unions in Hard Times.

Ironically then, we may conclude that, although Larry is presented sympathetically while Slackbridge is not, in both novels the union leaders are shown as inappropriate or ineffective answers to the hardships of the working class. Moreover, both novels endorse the status quo in the sense that the issues are resolved at the level of personal decisions and morality rather than at the level of changes to the economic organisation of society. Perhaps the change of heart experienced by Gradgrind is the change of heart that the readers of Greenwood’s novel may undergo as they become aware, through its social realism, of society’s injustices. Amelioration, therefore, derives from paternalistic concern from above and in neither novel from revolutionary or radical action from below. In this sense both Hard Times and Love on the Dole are essentially socially conservative in viewpoint.