The New Yorker:

How a Manchester native rescued “Caliban Shrieks,” Jack Hilton’s working-class opus.

By Simon Parkin

In 2021, Jack Chadwick, a twenty-seven-year-old barman and part-time go-go dancer, was browsing the shelves of the Working Class Movement Library, outside Manchester, when he spied an arresting book cover. The hand-drawn illustration showed a skeleton kneeling in supplication, its arms outstretched. Chadwick knew of neither the book, “Caliban Shrieks,” nor its writer, Jack Hilton. But he became absorbed in the text. At closing time, after several hours of concentrated reading, he closed the book and asked the librarian what she could tell him about the author. Very little, she said—only that, after a brief literary career, Hilton had disappeared.

A Google search provided Chadwick with fragments of backstory. Hilton was born at the turn of the twentieth century in Oldham, just outside Manchester, into fatal poverty. Seven of his siblings died before the age of two; only three others survived to adulthood. At twelve, he began working in a local cotton mill. Then, having lied about his age, he enlisted and fought in the ravening trenches of northern France. Hilton survived the war, returned to England, and, after a period of homelessness, joined a workers’-rights movement in Rochdale. His rallying speeches soon landed him in prison. When a court order banned him from further agitating, he took to writing.

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