Dorothy Whipple - The Blackburn Novels

 

​​​​

​​

Dorothy Whipple - The Blackburn Novels | Dorothy Whipple's Literary Timeline

Dr Cynthia Johnston, Saturday June 7th, 2025, Blackburn Central Library, (c) Suzana Matoh

The Blackburn Novels

In this essay, I would like to discuss a group of novels by Dorothy Whipple that have a version of Blackburn at their imaginative heart. There are four novels that fall into this category. Whipple's first novel, Young Anne, published by Jonathan Cape in 1927, her second, High Wages published by John Murray in 1930, Green Banks, her third novel in 1932 and Whipple's penultimate novel, Because of the Lockwood's published in 1949: all John Murray publications. While none of these novels, or in fact any of Whipple's novels, were written before Dorothy Whipple and her husband Henry moved from Blackburn to Nottingham with Henry's appointment as Director of Education there in 1924, these four novels have at their centre a closely knit industrial town in the North. In Young Anne, the town takes the name of Bowford; in High Wages it's Tidsley, in Greenbanks it's Elton, and in Because of the Lockwoods, we're in Aldworth. Interestingly, while Bowford and Aldworth are fictional names for Lancashire towns, Elton is of course, a suburb of Bury, and the name Tidsley is very close to Tyldesley although the dominant industry in Tyldesley was coal not cotton. Whipple uses Nottingham as the setting for her fourth novel, They Knew Mr Knight, in 1934 and Newstead Abbey, Byron's former home, just outside of Nottingham for her fifth, The Priory, in 1939. They Were Sisters, published in 1943 has three distinct settings: a small village, a market town and a city and the last, Someone at a Distance published in 1953, is set just outside of London. In looking at the four Blackburn novels, I would like to examine the sense of place which strongly resonates in each, and this I suggest is particular to these novels. Although They Knew Mr Knight is set in Trentham, a town very like Nottingham, and the corrupt millionaire at the centre of the novel is drawn from a real Nottingham villain, Ernest Hooley, whose financial swindles had landed him three prison sentences, the novel could have been set in a number of midlands industrial cities. The Priory again could have been written about any country house of the period that had fallen from its former glory and whose inhabitants have to adjust themselves to a modern world they are unprepared for.  They Were Sisters uses three different settings for the three sisters: Lucy's country village, Charlotte's market town and Vera's metropolis which could be anywhere, and the same can be said of Someone at a Distance set just outside of London. While location is important in each of these novels, they are not what we might call place-based, as the four Blackburn novels are. Dorothy Whipple's friend, the well- known author, critic and broadcaster, Hugh Walpole, argued that the sense of place is one of the strongest inclinations that entrance a reader. In Walpole's essay entitled Reading, published in 1927, he argues that:

One of the strangest aspects of the reading passion, … is one's susceptibility to instincts, to mood and most of all to places.[1]

Walpole admits that he isn't drawn to what he calls tales of The East, ie The Arabian Nights or perhaps the Rubaiyat of Omar Khyyam. Walpole tells us he has a friend:

…to whom anything about  London from Pepys to James Bone is a sort of emetic, although he himself loves London dearly. I have another to whom anything concerning Ireland, whether it be Yeats' theories, George Moore's intimacies, James Steven's adorable tales and poems is equally dreary and impossible, and I know a lady, a true lover of literature, for whom Jane Austen is so completely  the perfect novelist that any story that has to do with anything more violent than a tea party is unreal and melodramatic, yes even though it is Anna Karenina,  or Cousin Bette.[2]

Even though J B Priestley pronounced Dorothy Whipple to be 'the Jane Austen of the twentieth century', I don't think Walpole's 'lady ' would find herself entirely comfortable in the towns evoked in the four Whipple novels that we discuss here. With these novels, there is no mistaking where we are. We're here in an imagined Blackburn of the early twentieth century.

To begin our discussion of these place-based novels, I will first position the Blackburn novels in a wider literary context, then I will discuss the importance of place, of the town itself, in each of these four books. Lastly, I'll suggest how the Blackburn novels sit now in relation to Blackburn today.

To begin with, we are taking a liberty of course, in identifying a real place in a work of fiction.  It was certainly not Dorothy Whipple's intention to present to her readers a work of non-fiction, or reportage of the life of the town where she was born and raised. These are novels after all, but we are not the first to see some representation of reality in the books. On the publication of Whipple's first novel, Young Anne in 1927, the Northern Weekly Telegraph, the local Blackburn paper, reported that:

Mrs Whipple's book has set tongues a-wagging, many spitefully and bitterly, in a way that Blackburn has not experienced for a long time. Everyone one meets, who takes any interest at all in literary matters, is out to buy, beg, borrow or steal the book. If not these things, they are only too keen to pass on what A says about it, or what B opines, who C figures X is, who D is certain is Y, who E is cocksure is Z and what F and the rest of the alphabet think about the authoress, the Medical Officer, and a few others for whom boiling oil were far too kindly a fate. The little worthless coterie that Blackburn, like many other local communities in the world nourishes in its bosom- the lip-sticking, jazzing, gossiping, dress-flaunting, snobbery-tainted imitators of Hollywood and West End 'high life' based on those leaders of civilisation pictured weekly so nobly in The Modeste and The Prattler– have been touched to the quick, their jerry-built contraptions shattered as by an earth quake. They are a-saying things accordingly. [3]

However, Whipple doesn't seem to have anticipated that Blackburnians would recognise themselves or their town in the book, or if they did that the fiction would have disguised things well enough to escape detection. Despite the remarks in this Blackburn review, Whipple choses Blackburn again for her next novel High Wages, which is very firmly set in the town with a clearly recognisable heroine to local readers. This was Mable Stephenson, the proprietor of a fashionable and successful dress shop in the middle of town, and Whipple even comments in a letter to her mother on how she modelled the book on this person. This time however, her publisher John Murray does a thorough pre-publication check to avoid defamation suits, and in fact they do receive letters after publication which threaten to bring action although nothing ever comes of this.

 But for us as 21^st century readers of these four Blackburn novels, recognition of characters of the town is not possible beyond those whose lives and careers that survive in the archives. However, although much has changed architecturally, crucially with the sweeping away of the old market at the centre of town, the place where so much happens in these books, much does survive from the worlds of Bowford, Tidsley, Elton  and Aldworth. The train station, the statue of Queen Victoria, the Town Hall, the public baths now proud home to the Exchange Coffee Company, former banks and houses, some of which were designed by Dorothy Whipple's very successful architect father, Walter, are still standing. But what is not present is the intense industrial atmosphere of Blackburn at the turn of the century. The shift from manual labour to machine-based production was fuelled by the burning of fossil fuels, primarily coal. Thick smog , sometimes yellow, the precipitation of 'smuts' , small flakes of soot that fall to coat washing out on the line, or to cover the grass in summer or the snow in winter, was perhaps the most obvious sign of the pollution created by the burning of fossil fuels, not just in the mills, but in the many new homes built to accommodate, however inadequately, those who migrated to the towns to find work in the mills. Judy Eldergill, Dorothy Whipple's niece and literary heir, told me how she remembered her mother, Hilda, who was Dorothy Whipple's sister-in-law married to Dorothy's younger brother, Gordon, who was also an architect, assiduously wiping down the washing line daily. Many Blackburnians remember these remember these protocols.  The pollution of the rivers in the industrial towns from sewage as well as from effluent from the factories also contributed to the intensely polluted environment. But for many years, these degradations of the natural world were viewed as signs of progress. Jane Carter, the heroine of High Wages, is not bothered by the industrial landscape she observes on the train from Tidsley to Manchester. Here is Jane's perspective:

Trains passed in the opposite direction taking back the cotton princes to Tidsley, Elton, Burrows and further to Southport, Blackpool, St Anne's. She could see the occupants of the first-class carriages playing cards, or fallen into unlovely sleep. They did well to avert their eyes from the landscape they had made. They had made it; but they could not, like God, look and see that it was good. Monstrous slag heaps, like ranges in a burnt-out hell; stretches of waste land rubbed bare to the gritty earth, parallel rows of back-to-back dwellings, great blocks of mill buildings, the chimneys belching smoke as thick and black as eternal night itself, upstanding skeletons of wheels and pulleys. Mills and mines; mines and mills all the way to Manchester, and the brick, the stone, the grass, the very air deadened down to a general drab by the insidious filter of soot. But Jane, Lancashire born and bred, did not find it depressing. It was no feeble, trickling ugliness, but a strong salient hideousness that was almost exhilarating in her present mood.[4]

But the Manchester that Jane encounters when she disembarks from the train is something else again in comparison to Tidsley, although Jane sees that Manchester 'maintained the family likeness to Tidsley, Burrows, Elton and other Lancashire towns'[5]; she finds that its colour, black, was much deeper:

That church now, was it the cathedral?- was the blackest building she had seen or ever would see. The pavements were covered with a thin, sticky mist of soot; she noticed that she lifted it up on the soles of her shoes, leaving a defined print behind. [6]

But regardless of this, on her way back to Tidsley after her first excursion into Manchester, Jane is exhilarated. 'As the train sped through the night, the mills were palaces of light with myriad blazing windows, the rivers of fire ran down the slag heaps; it was wonderful.'[7]

This sense of pride of place and thrill in the industrial landscape natural to someone who had been born and bred there is a perspective that we have lost in our modern recognition of the ecological Armageddon precipitated by the industries of coal and cotton. The literary legacy of the Romantic movement which rose in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century in reaction against the societal and ecological effects of the industrial revolution is very much in tune with how we view the desiccation of the natural world by polluting factors today. While Blake's satanic mills have disappeared, his poem written in 1804, survives as part of our national identity. What are termed 'social problem novels' largely written between the two Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867, depict the human cost as well as the environmental catastrophe precipitated by industrialisation. Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1854-55), Disraeli's trilogy Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845) and Tancred (1847), Dickens' Hard Times (1854), and George Eliot's Felix Holt, the Radical (1866) were middle class views of the social and environmental issues which emerged from the industrial revolution. Working class artists sometimes took a different view, as Jamie Holman has argued with respect to James Sharples' lifework, The Forge, which hangs in the Blackburn Museum, where industry and art are presented as a possible codependent enterprise.  Perhaps closer to Whipple's imaginative world, where the environmental impact of the mills, mines and potteries is acknowledged, but not lamented, are the works of fellow northerners Arnold Bennett and J. B. Priestley where amongst hardship are also opportunities for innovation and class mobility.

The towns in Whipple's Blackburn novels have at their centre the cobbled streets with closely built houses with slate roofs that glisten in the rain, the churches have bells that chime the hours. The middle-class doctors, lawyers and architects have bigger and better houses located just out of the centre of town but grandest of all were the mill owners whose large houses were built outside of town, often around the edges of a great park, with an Italian garden and a hothouse. It does sound very reminiscent of Blackburn's Corporation Park.

The business of the plots of the novels takes place in these houses and in shops. There are scenes set in banks, bakeries, dress shops, flats above shops, grand houses, middle class houses and the marketplace, in cottages and back gardens and in public parks, in schoolrooms and bedrooms but never in the deafening environment of the mills. It does feel a lacuna in the depiction of life in the town, but it was perhaps a life that Whipple knew very little about, which existed as a world from which she was excluded, although her older brother Walter was a Managing Director of one of the largest mills in Blackburn; the Egyptian Cotton Mills.  Whipple could send her heroines to deal with corrupt lawyers, opportunistic and greedy employers and snobbish matrons but she never sends them into the matrix of the town; the mills that provide the employment for the community with brutal working conditions, long hours and very low wages.

Whipple's first novel, Young Anne, written perhaps almost entirely in Nottingham, begins with the travails of the novel's eponymous heroine, 'Young Anne' Pritchard. Anne's experiences of home and her school days map almost exactly onto a memoir that Whipple published in 1935 called The Other Day for the publisher Michael Joseph, someone whom her editor at John Murray, Lord Gorrell, called, 'a cad'. Whipple was talked into writing this book by Michael Joseph himself for his new publishing venture, which neatly avoided the terms of her contract with Murray, as this book was 'non-fiction', ie a memoir. It is very interesting that not one reviewer picked up on the fact that this book repeated, as well as deepened and expanded the experiences that the character Anne has in that first novel. The terror of the dripping tap at night, the tragedy of the silver bough, a Christmas present which young Anne/Dorothy prepares for her siblings which is neither understood nor appreciated by them, the shadows of the street lamps which appeared as 'a frieze of dwarf things hurrying around Anne's room',[8] the episode of the denuding of berries from her mother's new plant, and the unwanted marginalia which appears in her father's most treasured old book are all in Young Anne as well as The Other Day. It makes a curious exercise to contemplate the writing process for the memoir. Whipple represents the experiences of her fictional character in Young Anne, but for her memoir, she reveals them as her own. Whipple once wrote somewhat crossly in a letter to the dialect poet, Joan Pomfret of Preston, in reply to Joan's letter concerning the sources of Whipple's inspiration. Pomfret asked if Whipple used her own experiences. To this she replies that no, she did not, she had never for example, worked in a shop. She used her imagination, and I am sure this is true, but it does seem to be also that Whipple may protest a little bit too much.

The description of the house of the Pritchard family in Bowford could however, belong to any cottontown of the time:

The Pritchard's house was square and flat. It had no jut of door or window, and was like a face with no features. The garden was square and flat too. Some sooty grass grew there, and a few rhododendrons bushes rattled their stiff leaves. The air of cotton-spinning Bowford did not encourage flowers. Outside the low privet hedges, people were always hurrying to and for, setting up a restlessness about the house. As early as five o'clock in the morning, Anne woke to hear the mill folks clatter by in their clogs. [9]

In addition to the sense of restlessness and hurry which seems to pervade the house and the town in general, there is also a sense of imposed order, both natural and social in this new industrialised society. This order is something which is oppressive to many of the characters in the novels, from Anne's disquiet with its early morning urgency, and her later disquiet with the social restrictions based on monetary worth which separate her from her first love, George Yates. As well as social restrictions, Whipple's female protagonists testify to the sexist boundaries imposed by early nineteenth century society; there is the exclusionary world of male buyers and owners in Jane Carter's commercial sphere, as well as the social restrictions which are made all too clear when she and her employers attend the local charity ball, much to the displeasure of the socially dominant set. Rachel Harding's' bitter disappointment in Greenbanks when her father decides that a place at Oxford University is not quite the thing for his daughter whom he hopes will make an advantageous marriage in Elton, as well as the social expulsion of Kate Barlow who has a child out of wedlock. In these novels we see a new social order which is very conservative in its values. While it rewards monetary success, it insists on conformity particularly with regard to social mores, and those emerging as the leading lights of this society are very keen to keep their places, as well as to keep everyone else in theirs. In Because of the Lockwoods, the snobbery of the Lockwood family is almost as damning as the dishonesty of the family's patriarch. The savagery of the social judgment brought against Thea both in France and in Aldworth, is another example of the exposure of the hypocrisy and cruelty of bourgeoise social judgment.

The restraining social structures seem to manifest themselves everywhere, and I think that this passage from Because of the Lockwoods is a brilliant rendering of the sense of restriction which is in place in the town which applies to human interactions as well as the natural world:

It was, even in manufacturing Aldsworth, a lovely day. Sunlight lay over the streets and houses, the sky was softly blue above the slate roofs. Sparrows chirped and scrimmaged in the privet hedges; the front gardens were very neat. The scraps of lawn had little flower beds in fancy shapes, as if they had been cut out with a pastry cutter, in diamonds, rounds, triangles, trefoils. There was no end to the fanciness, the effort to make a difference in the shape of the flower beds, but there was no profusion of flowers, the smoke would not allow it. Anyone from the country would have pitied the gardens, but their owners found pride and solace in them, greeting the seasons with three or four snowdrops under the sooty laurels, with secret march of lilies of the valley among the privet sticks, and now as Thea saw when she turned into the Wells Road, with laburnum flinging its golden light from almost every garden. [10]

The neatness, the pastry cutter shapes and the relentless striving to nurture something beautiful despite the ever-descending grime from the mills is admired, but there seems a dissatisfaction with the conventional design of the gardens themselves. The iron clad restrictions of nature seem just as applicable to the lives of the inhabitants of Aldworth as to the gardens themselves.

Despite the centrality of the life of the town to Whipple's Blackburn novels, there is another part of the geographic landscape of the novels that is just as important to her writing as the town and that is the countryside just beyond the boundaries of the urban setting. Characters in each of the Blackburn novels use the green space outside of the town as a place to think differently, sometimes to take action to change the course of their lives but always as a place of escape and contemplation, and of freedom.  It is here in the countryside just beyond the towns' edges, that characters in these novels find solace, adventure, love and sometimes themselves.

This sense of adventure and escape in the countryside appears early on in this series of books. In Young Anne, the now 18-year-old protagonist, Anne Pritchard, is low on inspiration for a story she is composing for the local paper. She is tempted by the smell of the fresh spring air of 'buds and grass'. Anne sets off with a small basket filled with tomato sandwiches and rock buns:

She climbed up between the houses and dropped down the hill on the other side. By the time she had climbed down another hill she had left the town as completely as if it had never been.[11]

This adventure is life-changing one for Anne, as she comes upon George Yates, whom she has known intermittently throughout her childhood. During this chance encounter the freedom of the countryside dissolves the social boundaries of the town where George Yates' family are not of the right social class to socialise with the Pritchards.  Here:

The games of the lambs, the thud, thud of the colt's heels as he races by himself in the field, the mad song of the birds, the gurgling of the brooks running, running to the river, the light high gambols of the puffed clouds- all were contagious of joy. [12]

 As they head back towards the town, Anne and George decide to meet again for even though as  George says 'Your people won't like it, because, as I said, I'm down at heels and not in your set and all that. But after all, we're not kids (George is 22), and we've had a good day and well… I've loved it'. [13] The freedom that they have found up on 'the tops'  has profound effects on both of their lives.

In High Wages, Whipple's second novel set in Tidsley, Jane Carter, her co-worker and flatmate Maggie Pye, and Maggie's love interest, Wilfred Thompson, an avid reader who works at the Free Library in Tidsley, escape from town not on foot but by the tram. They get much further than Anne and George do on foot.  They meet under the market clock, and set off on the tramcar:

They were borne for two miles or more between rows of houses all alike, almost all showing an aspidistra in a glazed pot in the parlour window. Some were so fond of the aspidistra that they had to have one in the bedroom to sleep with it. [14]

But soon the sameness of the town begins to fade away and it is replaced by a much wilder landscape:

By and by the houses began to thin. Pieces of waste ground appeared; then a few trees. They alighted at the terminus and set off at a good pace up the stony road to the fells. The air was like cold water. Jane drew in great breaths; her pale checks began to glow, her eyes to shine. She didn't want to chatter now in the face of these moors, black and wild, crossed by low ruined walls. [15]

It is here on the moors, that Wilfrid falls for Jane, and Jane falls for the books soon to be supplied by Wilfrid from the Free Library.

In this scene from Because of the Lockwoods, one young man decides to try to influence the life of the brother of the girl he loves. The brother, Martin, has been brutally turned away by the father of the girl he loves. Martin is wallowing in his misery. Oliver Reade decides to make a suggestion that will change Martin's life, and he needs just the right opportunity to propose it. Martin and Oliver take a nighttime walk, with Martin feeling very reluctant to do so and resentful of Oliver's intrusion on his contemplative misery.:

Martin walked for some time in savage silence, but the night was fine, Aldworth might be ugly, but the air was good. It came straight from the sea. The main road was almost empty. The streetlights shone into the budding trees making them miraculous in beauty. In spite of himself, unaware that Oliver was speeding up the pace, Martin walked more briskly.

The two tall young men left the last lamp behind and entered the soft country dark. The ring of the pavement gave way to the scrunch of stony lanes. Over the fields and woods, the stars were bright. [16]

In the novels, the characters bridge the hills surrounding the town, and the strictures of the town seem to lift; solutions offer themselves and sometimes boundaries between characters themselves dissolve.

Greenbanks is most certainly a Blackburn novel, but here the place that is most powerful in terms of influence is of course the house, Greenbanks itself. The house is old-fashioned inside and out. When we first encounter the house, it is covered in snow on Christmas Day, we are told:

Snow lay on the lawn to the left, presided over by an old stone eagle who looked as if he had escaped from a church and ought to have a Bible on his back; snow lay on the lawn to the right, where a discoloured Flora bent gracefully but unaccountably over a piece of lead piping that had once been her arm. Snow muffled the old house; low and built of stone, and of no particular style or period….[17]

It is the life of the family inside Greenbanks on this Christmas Day that gives the novel its intense focus. But the house itself and the lives of its inhabitants are shown to be part of the town, part of the world, part of this life as the world turns. Whipple shows us this at the end of the novel as she zooms out. The house bookends the novel itself. Here is the concluding passage:

At Greenbanks the house remained still for some time. Louisa woke early as always. Often between sleeping and waking, she was conscious of Charles as if he were actually in the room. A precious reassurance came to her in these hours, a sense of God. Louisa, in the early morning, made her meditations.

In the little room adjoining, Rachel slept with traces of tears on her cheeks and a smile on her lips. The lobes of her ears showed rosy as if from John's kisses in the garden. And by and By Bella's alarm clock went off in her attic and brought her to the dormer window in the old roof to look out. 'Another nice day', she said.

For some yes, for others no. But in that it differed from no other day that had gone before or would come after.[18]

In this discussion about the Blackburn novels, I have suggested an 'eco-critical' analysis of the importance of the changing environmental and societal impact of the industrial revolution; I have proposed a psycho-geographic impact of place in the books;  how the place itself affects the actions and emotions of the characters. This all seems valid and crucial to these four Blackburn novels, and this is also key to how impactful these novels are to us today through their place-based structure.

 In his afterword to the Persephone edition of Greenbanks, the literary critic Charles Lock makes the interesting observation that to those readers that had lived through the times and places she described, that Whipple's novels 'may well have seemed merely and tediously realistic; but to us they give us access to a world that though well lost is pleasing to revisit.' [19] This is perhaps a part of the explanation of the loss of Whipple's readership in the 1950s. After the Second World War, perhaps what readers desired was not as Jock Murray supposed, 'adventure and escapism'. The turn from Whipple may be more nuanced. Her descriptions, her evocation of place are so accurate, and so emotive that perhaps for many a revisitation of those places was painful; it was too close; too recently vanished to be comfortable to revisit. But for us as twenty-first century readers of Whipple who recognise the town as through a glass darkly, there is certainly a sense of wonder in seeing the past so vividly brought to life, at watching past lives unfold within the lived environment of Blackburn today. These novels give us a sense of intimacy with the past, as well as a sense of continuity and also, we hope with the conclusion the ACE funded-project for Blackburn with Darwen Central Library,  an appreciation of an exceptionally gifted writer and a sense of pride in that she is one of Blackburn's own.

Cynthia Johnston

Blackburn, 12^th September, 2025

​Footnotes

[1] Hugh Walpole, Reading: An Essay (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1927), p. 10

[2] Ibid

[3] Clipping from The Northern Daily Telegraph, 1927 in Dorothy Whipple's personal scrapbook held by Blackburn with Darwen Central Library.

[4] From High Wages by Dorothy Whipple; first published by John Murray, 1930; republished by Persephone Books, 2009. See page 86 from this edition.

[5] Ibid, p. 87.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid, p. 89.

[8] Young Anne by Dorothy Whipple, first published by Jonathan Cape in 1927, republished by Persephone Books in 2018, p. 11.

[9] Ibid, p. 10

[10] Because of the Lockwoods by Dorothy Whipple, published by John Murray, 1949. This quote from the second edition, published in 1952, p. 224.

[11] Young Anne by Dorothy Whipple, first published by Jonathan Cape in 1927, republished by Persephone Books in 2018, pp. 77-78.

[12] Ibid, p. 79.

[13] Ibid, p. 81.

[14] From High Wages by Dorothy Whipple; first published by John Murray, 1930; republished by Persephone Books, 2009. See page 34 from this edition.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Because of the Lockwoods by Dorothy Whipple, published by John Murray, 1949. This quote from the second edition, published in 1952, p. 295.

[17] Greenbanks by Dorothy Whipple, first published by John Murray in 1932, republished by Persephone Books in 2011; quotation from this edition, p. 1

[18] Ibid, p. 374.

[19] Ibid, p. 380.

​​​
​