Ethel Carnie Holdsworth's New Fairy Tales for the Working Class

Abstract

Between 1911 and 1914, Carnie Holdsworth-factory girl, workingclass poet, journalist, and budding novelist-published four books of original fairy tales.1 Three of them appeared as part of the popular Books for the Bairns series, founded by W T. Stead in 1897, to provide affordable books for workingclass children. fourth book, Lamp Girl and Other Stories, was published separately by Headley Brothers in 1914. Carnie Holdsworth's recently rediscovered writing career is notable for a number of reasons. As H. Gustav Klaus, a scholar who has written extensively on British working-class writing, notes, few British working-class women were publishing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.2 Carnie Holdsworth is believed to be the first British working-class woman to publish a novel as well as the first to sustain a long writing career (from 1907 to the mid-1930s). As Klaus puts it, Ethel Carnie Holdsworth is by all accounts an exceptional figure (3). She herself viewed her work as part of a larger effort to provide a voice for the working class. In 1914 she explained her goal in establishing a writing group for working-class women: What I feel is that literature up till now has been lopsided, dealing with life only from the standpoint of one (Holdsworth, Rebel Pen, 31). Politically involved and ambitious to gain as wide an audience as possible for working-class writing, Carnie Holdsworth wrote in a variety of genres; in addition to her four books of fairy tales, she published three books of poetry, numerous journalistic pieces and short stories, and eleven novels. Although scholarly studies of her other work have been published, nothing has yet appeared on her fairy tales.3Camie Holdsworth was an experimenter with genre, and this experimentation is plain to see in her fairy tales. first three books contain charming short fantasies that use fairy-tale motifs popular in the late nineteenth century, such as toys that talk to one another and children who are transported to a magical world. These tales only occasionally touch on the themes found in her fourth book, Lamp Girl, whose longer, more complex stories communicate a working-class socialist vision.4 Positioned between the late Victorian flowering of fairy tales in such writers as Oscar Wilde and Mary de Morgan and decades in advance of the progressive rewriting of fairy tales in the later twentieth century, Carnie Holdsworth's later tales are working-class feminist revisions of this significant genre. Her stories often focus on princes and princesses, but they also critique her culture's class and gender biases by drawing on her personal knowledge of working-class life and by maintaining a strong Marxist-influenced political perspective. In stories such as Simon and the Magic Goat and The Two Sisters, she attacks laissez-faire capitalism and its focus on competition. final story in Lamp Girl, The Blind Prince, creates a fictional kingdom that is founded on the exploitation of the working class by its rulers. kingdom is transformed only by the prince's recognition of injustice and commitment to a community of workers. Thus, as I argue, Carnie Holdsworth's stories overturn stereotypes of working-class men and women in significant ways and effectively appropriate the fairy-tale genre for anticapitalist and communitarian ideals.Carnie Holdsworth, the daughter of factory workers and union activists, was born in Lancashire in 1886 and began half-time factory work at age 11 while she was still in elementary school. As was typical of working-class girls in Lancashire during this time period, at age 13 she began full-time work-ten hours a day-as a winder in a cotton mill. She worked in the mill for nearly a decade before her first volume of poetry, Rhymes from the Factory by a Factory Girl (1907), was published; this work attracted the attention of a sponsor, the socialist Robert Blatchford, who hired Carnie Holdsworth to write for his periodical Woman Worker. …