The Yankee Yorkshireman

Book excerpt: This study is a textual and contextual appraisal of the writings of Yorkshire-born Hedley Smith (1909-94) whose depiction of the fictional mill village of Briardale, Rhode Island, captures an early twentieth-century labor diaspora peopled with textile workers. Enraged and embittered at the transformatory experience of his own emigration, Smith used fiction to explore Yorkshire immigrants' culture and stubborn refusal to assimilate, their vital sexuality, and their vivid social customs. As Smith's writings reveal, emigration involves grief and anger, often universally concealed and problematic. Adopting a transnational perspective, Mary H. Blewett links Smith's fictional community to empirical data on the substance of working-class lives both in Yorkshire and in New England's worsted textile industries.