Kiddar's Luck

Jack Common

ISBN 10: 1852241276 / ISBN 13: 9781852241278

Published by Bloodaxe Books Ltd, Newcastle Upon Tyne, 1990

About this Item

First novel by the Newcastle born writer, a commercial failure in his lifetime but later hailed as a neglected masterpiece. 145pp. Minor creasing to lower corner and slight foxing to top edges, otherwise very good copy with no inscriptions. Size: 8vo - over 7¾ - 9¾" tall.

Seller Inventory # 013276

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Kiddar's Luck
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd, Newcastle Upon Tyne
• Publication Date: 1990
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1852241276
• ISBN 13: 9781852241278
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: First Thus.
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket
• Book Type: Book
• Seller catalogs:
  • Fiction

About this title

Synopsis

'He was indeed the nearest anybody ever got to Charlie Chaplin in print...the sentences skid and dance and hop on one leg or take a custard pie right on the chin or duck and weave and leave you gasping behind. But he is more for the wry smile than the belly laugh'.

This was how Sid Chaplin described Jack Common, author of two of the best working-class novels of the 20th century, and 'the best prose writer to come from the North-East of England'. Kiddar's Luck, his first novel, was a commercial flop when it first appeared. It has since been called a 'neglected masterpiece', remarkable for its 'linguistic mastery and insights into the lives of working people, free of illusions and false heroics' (Richard Kelly in The Independent).

Jack Common was born in 1903 in Heaton, Newcastle, and grew up in the terraced streets backing onto the railway yards where his father worked.The boy Willie Kiddar in Common's account of a Newcastle childhood is a thinly veiled self-portrait, and Kiddar's Luck tells the story of his first 14 years, from conception on a Sunday afternoon to leaving school during the First World War. At 25 he moved to London, and worked as assistant editor on The Adelphi during the 30s, when George Orwell was his friend and literary mentor, later praising his essay collection The Freedom of the Streets (1938) as 'the authentic voice of the ordinary working man, the man who might infuse a new decency into the control of affairs if only he could get there, but who never seems to get much further than the trenches, the sweatshop and the jail'. V.S. Pritchett called it the most influential book of his life.

Kiddar's Luck was first published in 1951 (and its sequel, The Ampersand, in 1954). After the commercial failure of his two novels, Jack Common lived in poverty for much of the rest of his life, and died in 1968.

About the Author

Jack Common was born in 1903 in Heaton, Newcastle, and grew up in the terraced streets backing onto the railway yards where his father worked. The boy Willy Kiddar in Common's account of Newcastle childhood is a thinly veiled self-portrait, and Kiddar's Luck tells the story of his first 14 years, from conception on a Sunday afternoon to leaving school during the First World War.

At 25 he moved to London, and worked as assistant editor on The Adelphi during the thirties, when George Orwell was his friend and literary mentor, later praising his essay collection The Freedom of the Streets (1938) as 'the authentic voice of the ordinary working man, the man who might infuse a new decency into the control of affairs if only he could get there, but who in practice never seems to get much further than the trenches, the sweatshop and the jail'. V.S. Pritchett called it the most influential book in his life. The sculptor Lawrence Bradshaw used Common's brow as a model for his bust of Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery, saying that he found there a similar patience and understanding. Jack Common also inspired, prefaced and edited the compilation Seven Shifts (1938), in which seven working men told of their experience.

In 1951 Turnstile Press published Common's best-known book, the autobiographical Kiddar's Luck, in which he vividly describes his childhood on the streets of Edwardian Tyneside, as seen through the lens of his adult socialism. In The Ampersand (1954) Common took the story further, but his publishers went into liquidation two years later. Neither book had been a commercial success and Common had not completed the trilogy with his long-promised Riches and Rare, a novel set in Newcastle at the time of the General Strike. In his later years he did a variety of jobs, at one time working as a labourer by day and writing film scripts by night; he also worked as a caretaker at a stately home, but was often out of work and lived from hand to mouth. He died in Newport Pagnell in 1968.