Jack Hilton - A story of men and women lost, wandering – and angrily dreaming of a better, fairer England, Hilton’s autobiographical novel is a bold modernist retelling of the myth of how we find ourselves disenfranchised from the world and sold into a slavery of our making

 

Jack Hilton, Caliban Shrieks. 1935

Caliban Shrieks’ narrator went from a childhood of poverty, yet joy and freedom, to the punishing grind of factory life and the idiocy of being sent blindly into war. He was turned out of the army a vagrant - seeing England from city to city, county to county - before being thrust back into an uncertain cycle of working life as it unfolded in the post-war years.

A story of men and women lost, wandering – and angrily dreaming of a better, fairer England, Hilton’s autobiographical novel is a bold modernist retelling of the myth of how we find ourselves disenfranchised from the world and sold into a slavery of our making.

Lost to time, only to be rediscovered again in the Salford's Working Class Movement Library in 2022, Caliban Shrieks is a working-class masterpiece of British literature, and continues to speak as brash and impassioned as it did on its first rave publication in 1935.

This is the autobiography of an unemployed Lancashire working-man now aged thirty-five. In portraying his own life and his reflections upon it he has described a case which is more broadly typical than those who only know the unemployed as statistics will easily realise. Mr. Hilton, of course, is exceptional in that he has broken through the formidable barriers between experience and the recording of that experience on paper (and they are formidable indeed to those whose schooldays end at fourteen). But all over Great Britain, in the devastated industrial regions, there are men of the same brave and generous temper, who express it in the like rich and vigorous speech. Men who know that it is Man's mismanagement and not Nature's law that has thrust the role of Caliban upon them. They are disillusioned, but seldom cynical, industry cannot use them. But society needs them. And they know - better than most - what the real needs of Society are. They are worth listening to.

Born and bred in the Midlands, Mr. Hilton seemed destined to be a cotton operative for life. But the war and its aftermath have made him what he describes in the book. You will find men like him in any industrial town, except that he cultivated his love of language and literature (and especially Shakespeare) with an unsophisticated relish which is equally rare among the masses as among the expensively educated few.

'Witty and unusual' - George Orwell

'Magnificent' - W H Auden

A breathless and dizzying modernist howl of a novel. - Andrew McMillan, Guardian

Equal parts autobiography, political screed and artful rant… [Caliban Shrieks] contains an energy that drives the reader on. - Observer

A powerful, uncompromising account of working class life… [which] deserves reading and rereading. - Socialist Worke