“The Tale is Soon Told”: Working-Class Storytelling in Sylvia Pankhurst’s “Thrift” and May Westoby’s “The Injustice of the King”

Abstract

From 1880 onwards British Socialists produced a substantial body of short fiction using working-class oral literary traditions to frame their narratives. Women remain underrepresented in scholarship on this aspect of literary studies in part because much of what they wrote has been lost to history or remains hidden. Retrieving Sylvia Pankhurst’s “Thrift” (The Woman’s Dreadnought, June 1914) and May Westoby’s “The Injustice of the King” (Justice, November 1910) from the archives, and republishing them for a contemporary audience, contributes to restorative projects by scholars seeking to broaden the scope of writing on Socialist women’s creative activism by expanding the existing body of available work to include unpublished or neglected fiction, plays and poetry. These short stories, originally published in British newspapers, are examples of Pankhurst and Westoby’s ability to appeal to a socially situated readership of working men and women by simulating oral literatures, and more specifically, forms typical of the parable, fairy tale, moral tale, and working-class life writing. These stories exemplify how Socialist writers brought non-fiction and fiction into dialogue to simplify complex ideas, humanize the cold constraints of politics, draw connections between the social and the political, and pay tribute to British working-class culture and traditions.