Sprecher
Beschreibung
On 8 May 1931, author James Hanley (1897-1985) wrote a begging letter to publishers Chatto & Windus. ‘I am in the position of being a person who is getting married next Thursday and who has no money’ he explained. ‘I cannot ask Pinker for anything because he has already helped my people who are very poor indeed. […] It is Pinker who is practically keeping my parents out of the bloody workhouse. That’s how poor we are and how poor I am’ (C&W archives).
This reference to J. B. Pinker & Son’s financial support (the UK side of the agency now run by Pinker’s younger son, Ralph, after his father’s death) was in keeping with the firm’s reputation and heritage. Coming from a working-class background himself, J. B. Pinker’s (1863-1922) unexpected wealth and rise in social status as an adult – via marriage – encouraged him to support many unknown, precarious writers to navigate the ‘Gentleman’s Industry’. Unlike the elder, established A. P. Watt, Pinker made a name for himself in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century by taking up ‘the unknown man, the youngster struggling for reputation and bread and butter,’ investing time, care, and tenacity in the unknown writer to help ‘build his reputation’ (Bookseller, April 1898).
Drawing on Manuscript Entry Books in the Archive of British Printing and Publishing at the University of Reading, this paper considers Pinker’s long-term investment in such clients, exploring his support for now little-known writers from working-class backgrounds such as Welsh miner Joseph Keating (1871-1934), as well as better-known, economically precarious writers including D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, and James Joyce.
This work comes out of a chapter on agents I am writing for my new book, Books for the People: A history of the outsiders who made modern publishing (Reaktion). It is part of a larger, long-term project I would like to develop to uncover the agents and publishers ‘behind-the-scenes’ who helped make working-class literature possible.
Speaker Bio
Nicola Wilson is Professor at the University of Reading and Co-Director of the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing. Her most recent book is a study of the Book Society (1929-68) – Recommended!: The influencers who changed how we read (2025). She was lead editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Women in Publishing, 1900-2020 (2024) and is a co-founder of the international digital humanities project the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP). She has written on publishers' archives, libraries, literary censorship, and the history of reading, and is a specialist on working-class writing. Since 2010 she has been working to republish the writing of Lancashire mill-woman, Ethel Carnie Holdsworth. Her current book is a trade history provisionally titled, Books for the people: A history of the outsiders who made modern publishing.