Review: Caliban Shrieks

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These days it is supposed to be a lot easier to obtain long out of print books. All you need to do is look on one of the many internet sites which advertise secondhand books for sale, and there you will find what you are looking for. To a large extent this is true, and I have found many titles this way, which I would perhaps never have come across by chance in a bookshop or book fair.

Like everything else though there are always exceptions to the rule.

One of those exceptions is Jack Hilton. This working class socialist writer who produced five books between 1935 and 1950 has, until now, disappeared so completely, that it is virtually impossible to obtain any of his original published titles in any edition.

Those of us interested in the political writing of the 1930s and 1940s therefore owe Jack Chadwick a great debt for his sterling work in bringing Jack Hilton back into print, with the re-publication by Penguin in March 2024 of Hilton’s first book – Caliban Shrieks.

Hilton was one of a number of working class writers including; Jack Common and George Garrett, who were first given an opportunity to appear in print through the left wing literary magazine The Adelphi in the mid 1930s. The Adelphi connection of course brought all of these writers into the orbit of George Orwell, who was a prolific contributor, appearing in 41 issues of the magazine over an 18 year period.

Hilton’s Adelphi contributions led to the publication of Caliban Shrieks in 1935. Orwell reviewed the book, appropriately enough, in the March 1935 issue of Adelphi (the first review that Orwell contributed under his ‘George Orwell’ pen name). Reading that review I found that as usual Orwell had nailed it in his assessment of this most unusual and memorable book.

Caliban Shrieks is a difficult book to categorise precisely. It is, on the surface, an autobiography, dipping into various experiences during the first 30 years or so of Hilton’s life. These experiences of working class life include; impressions from early childhood, military service towards the end of the first world war, life as a tramp, domestic life, unemployment, political activity, and perhaps most graphically of all, prison.

The style sometimes makes it difficult to follow in places, though the pace is always frenetic, and there is a compulsion to read on. Once you complete a section it is quite remarkable how Hilton successfully manages to leave a clear impression of the central truth he is trying to illustrate, relating to conditions in which the working class at that time lived.

In avoiding excess description he takes instead a polemical approach to ram home the messages he wishes to deliver on harsh working conditions, lack of job security, inadequate social protection, fragmented political representation on the left, and poverty.

Hilton comments on increasing unemployment thus:

Each year sees the quality of the unemployed changed by the increase in their quantity. A few street-corner louts are of no account, but three million learning to write their name at the labour exchanges became a problem, each chancellor would say ‘a thundering nuisance’. They chase about like men gone mad, looking for work, in fact they are losing their eyesight due to the searching. It has gone on, for many, two and three years. Each year emphasizes the hopelessness of it all. The rota committees that dish out the few jobs that relief work finds, have now to callously inform the overeager seeker that ‘There is no chance for you; men with three years out must have first preference’

Despite being generally sparing with description there are still some memorable scenes, particularly in the prison section (he was imprisoned for a time in the early thirties for political activity protesting against unemployment).

My favourite scene, though, occurs in the tramping chapter, where Hilton calls at a Parsonage in the hope of a meal, and all he gets is bread and butter after being put to work for two and half hours beating carpets outside in a cold March wind. So much for Christian charity! In some ways, of course, this section reminded me of Down and Out in Paris and London. The comparison to Orwell’s work does not, however, end there.

In the second half of the book there is chapter entitled, ‘They Call Themselves Comrades’ in which he dissects the various groupings on the left including; the Independent Labour Party, the mainstream Labour Party, Communists, Trade Unionists and the Cooperative Movement. In various ways he finds each of these groupings wanting, and sometimes out of touch with the working people they profess to stand up for;

Have you ever met a trade union organizer?…He somehow loses his rank and file crudeness, he becomes a windbag, and one notices a touch of corpulence amidships and a desire for slumber. In the main he seems to have become a cross between a flockless parson and an overfed squire.

Some of this reminded me a little of the second part of The Road to Wigan Pier, which Orwell was yet to write at the time he read and reviewed Caliban Shrieks.

Hilton’s summing up of the Labour Party has echos down the generations:

… its chief wire pullers are becoming more and more middle-class climbers and disgruntled Liberals.

Orwell’s 1935 review noted that the overall effect of Caliban Shrieks was to successfully convey through Hilton’s voice ‘a frame of mind’ of the industrial worker.

Such clarity of voice from a working class viewpoint of that time is a rare thing, and it is only right and proper that we can now hear that voice again, with its resonances for our own time.

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Caliban Shrieks, by Jack Hilton (Penguin, ISBN13: 9781784878757)