There are two periods when working-class fiction achieves a cult status and popular mystique in British culture: the time of rising affluence in the 1950s and 1960s (see chapter 3), and the 1930s. If the motives behind the attentions of the later period are primarily socially and culturally based, the imperatives of the interwar years are economic and political. Britain entered the post-First World War era in a far from triumphalist mood. Over a million casualties had been inflicted (there are few English villages which do not have a war memorial inscribed with the names of the dead). As was the case after previous major wars, the British economy was weakened by debt. Demobbed soldiers, even if they displaced wartime women workers, faced the continuing depredations of mass unemployment and economic insecurity. The numbers out of work never fell below a million in the 1920s, and rose to a staggering peak of over three million in the famous ‘Depression’ of the 1930s. The fragile wartime pact between the state and the labour movement collapsed as workers demanded due rewards for having won the war (they could take some heart from the granting of the vote to married women in 1919). The Triple Alliance launched a series of major disputes aimed in part at achieving the long-awaited nationalization of the staple industries. Worker confidence was boosted by the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. The crests of this potentially revolutionary surge of militancy included the railway workers’ successful dispute for the eight-hour working day, the uprising in ‘Red’ Clydeside in 1919, the formation of Councils of Action to coordinate the opposition to Britain's support for the counterrevolutionary White armies in Russia (including the refusal of London dockers to load the munitions ship the Jolly George), and the TUC-sponsored General Strike of 1926. The state responded with the Emergency Powers Act and the mobilization of troops, volunteer workers and repressive legislation – a situation evoking strong echoes of the 1840s, and similarly successful in inflicting a series of defeats on organized labour.

Despite the election of two minority Labour governments in 1924 and 1929–31, the economy slumped further after the Wall Street Crash of 1929.