A Ragged Schooling

Growing up in the classic slum

By (author) Robert Roberts

Publication date:

05 June 1997

Length of book:

224 pages

Publisher

Manchester University Press

Dimensions:

198x129mm

ISBN-13: 9781901341010

With great humour and vitality, Robert Roberts evokes his Edwardian childhood in the vivid portrait of a vanished community. Breathing the smoke from the factory chimneys, the children of Salford struggled daily to survive the grinding poverty that surrounded them. Sharing lively games along the railways lines and canal banks, their lives were rich in experience and comradeship.

1. In their small corner
2. To business!
3. Home and hearth
4. Janie
5. A fearful joy
6. The food of love
7. Fire and food
8. Low class and no class
9. Sins of the flesh
10. Christians
11. Fears
12. Ventures
13. Travelling men
14. Superstition
15. ‘Lovely war’
16. Skool
17. Song of apprentices
18. Class of strugglers
19. To the egress

'One of the best and most sensitive of English working-class autobiographies'
The Guardian

' A marvelous piece of work ... this vivid portrait of a vanished community ... bubbles with comic vitality
Spectator

'The autobiography of an exceptional man ... a memoir of quite extraordinary richness'
The Observer