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Working Class Writing Theory and Practice 1St Ed Edition Ben Clarke All Chapter
Working Class Writing Theory and Practice 1St Ed Edition Ben Clarke All Chapter
Working-Class Writing
Theory and Practice
Editors
Ben Clarke Nick Hubble
University of North Carolina Department of Arts and Humanities
at Greensboro Brunel University London
Greensboro, NC, USA Uxbridge, UK
Cover illustration: Sculpture of Andy Capp by Jane Robbins, used here with her kind
permission. Alan King/Alamy Stock Photo
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all our contributors for their expertise, patience
and generosity when responding to our queries and guidance as this
book has gradually taken shape. We have enjoyed excellent support
throughout from the editorial team at Palgrave, especially Ben Doyle and
Camille Davies, who have been instrumental in bringing this book to
fruition.
Pamela Fox’s chapter first appeared as the introduction to the 2016
reissue of Ethel Carnie Holdsworth’s Helen of Four Gates; a volume in
the ongoing Ethel Carnie Holdsworth Series, edited by Nicola Wilson,
and published by Kennedy & Boyd. We are grateful to Stuart Johnson of
Kennedy & Boyd for permission to reprint this piece.
We would also like to thank the sculptor Jane Robbins for permis-
sion to use an image of her Andy Capp sculpture, which is situated in
Hartlepool, on the cover of this book.
v
Contents
1 Introduction 1
Ben Clarke and Nick Hubble
Part I Theories
vii
viii Contents
Part II Practices
Index 289
Notes on Contributors
xi
xii Notes on Contributors
Introduction
On 13th July 2016, Theresa May gave her first speech as Conservative
leader and British Prime Minister outside 10 Downing Street. Her pre-
decessor, David Cameron, had resigned less than a month earlier after
losing a referendum on Britain’s European Union membership that
had exposed deep divisions within the country, and she sought to rein-
force her image as a one-nation Conservative by speaking directly to
people previously excluded from the political process. These included
working-class voters who had been marginalized or ignored by the
Conservatives, who were, as May herself had recognized more than a
decade earlier, “too narrow” in their “sympathies” (White and Perkins).
Her speech promised a new relation between government and the gov-
erned founded on an extension of these sympathies to include the poor
and precarious:
B. Clarke (*)
University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC, USA
e-mail: b_clarke@uncg.edu
N. Hubble
Department of Arts and Humanities, Brunel University London,
Uxbridge, UK
e-mail: Nick.Hubble@brunel.ac.uk
If you’re from an ordinary working class family, life is much harder than
many people in Westminster realise. You have a job but you don’t always
have job security. You have your own home but you worry about paying
the mortgage. You can just about manage, but you worry about the cost
of living and getting your kids into a good school. If you’re one of those
families, if you’re just managing, I want to address you directly. I know
you’re working around the clock, I know you’re doing your best and I
know that sometimes life can be a struggle. The Government I lead will be
driven, not by the interests of the privileged few, but by yours. We will do
everything we can to give you more control over your lives.
Even in her relatively brief remarks, May repeatedly returned to the claim
that her government would “prioritize not the wealthy, but you,” that
it would “work for every one of us” (May). She not only addressed a
working-class audience (“you”) but identified with it, including herself
in a national “us,” implicitly constructed in opposition to an ill-defined
but powerful “them.” She maintained this approach at the Conservative
Party conference later in the year, in a speech Charlie Cooper described
for Politico as making a “bold appeal to working-class voters disillusioned
by rising inequality,” in which she promised to shift “the balance of
Britain decisively in favour of ordinary working-class people” (“Theresa
May”). The idea of “blue-collar Conservatism” promoted by David
Cameron, with its emphasis on “hard-working” families who wanted
the “dignity of a job, the pride of a paycheque, a home of their own,”
(Mason and Watt) became a defining feature of May’s early tenure, a
response not only to the immediate conditions of Brexit but to longer-
term economic and political changes.
In practice, May’s government has not supported “ordinary
working-class people” against the “privileged few”; her commitment was
always rhetorical not material. Her speech is significant, not as a statement
of intent, but because it demonstrates both the increased prominence of
the working classes in political discourse since the Great Recession began
in 2008 and its limited impact on political practice. Despite the promise
to give the working class “more control” over their lives their concerns
and perspectives have not shaped policy and have largely been represented
by powerful forces and figures who claim to speak on their behalf. The
process is not confined to Britain; there are parallels between May’s prom-
ise to articulate the concerns of “ordinary” people and Donald Trump’s
insistence in his inaugural address that he represented the interests of
the “forgotten men and women of our country” (“Inaugural Address”).
1 INTRODUCTION 3
nation and the values it embodies and has an effect on the distribution
of material as well as symbolic resources. There is consequently some-
thing at stake in such acts of interpretation. Changing the ways in which
the working classes are represented and understood has the potential
to alter the political culture and actions of notionally democratic states
whose legitimacy depends upon their claim to represent the will of the
“people.” This means not only recognizing the agency of working class
people, their ability to speak about their own interests, but the diversity
of experiences and identities potentially encompassed by the category
“working class” itself. Accepting that the “forgotten men and women”
of America include Hispanic agricultural workers in California as well as
white coal miners in Virginia would lead to a radically different under-
standing of the United States to that which currently shapes government
policy, though it is not a matter of simply substituting one for the other.
The object of a new critical and political practice cannot be choosing
between existing narratives of oppression, a process that inevitably results
in what Sally Munt calls the “fragmentation of sympathetic discourse,”
(7) but must involve an extension of existing categories that recognizes
the material and experiential connections between seemingly disparate
people and phenomena. Despite their differences, undocumented clean-
ers and unemployed former steel workers are victims of the same system,
which forces them into competition with one another.
Struggles over definitions necessarily occur in a variety of cultural
spaces, and, within universities, across a range of disciplines. This vol-
ume contends that the production, reading, and analysis of literature is
central to this process, that it can make a distinct, valuable contribution
to the understanding not only of working-class histories but the cate-
gory “working class” itself, and that a greater critical attention to class,
and the working class in particular, would extend both the methods
and object of literary studies. While important work has been done in
this area, many of the key texts, such as Jeremy Hawthorn’s collection
The British Working-Class Novel in the Twentieth Century (1984), Andy
Croft’s Red Letter Days: British Fiction in the 1930s (1990), Pamela Fox’s
Class Fictions: Shame and Resistance in the British Working-Class Novel,
1890–1945 (1994), and Ian Haywood’s Working-Class Fiction: From
Chartism to Trainspotting (1997), are now more than twenty years old.
The marginalization of working-class studies not only exposes the con-
servatism of many literature departments but changes in the priorities of
many on the left. Critical attention began to shift away from questions
1 INTRODUCTION 5
and social theory with a radically engaged stance can shed new light on
the tradition of working-class writing in Britain, the chapter seeks to
develop the kind of theoretical framework for the study of working-class
writing that has so enriched the analysis of postcolonial and feminist texts
since the middle of the twentieth century.
Cassandra Falke’s chapter, “Meaning It: Everyday Hermeneutics and
the Language of Class in Literary Scholarship,” is concerned with finding
a language for studying working-class authors and experiences. Noting
how historical accounts of British literary criticism often insist on an
opposition between empathy and theory, and the consequent accusation
of Williams and Hoggart for “romanticization” and “nostalgic organi-
cism,” Falke asks where contemporary critics look for the particular kind
of writing needed to discuss working-class authorship? She goes on to
explore the ways in which working-class scholars have contributed to
the rhetoric of literary criticism; paying particular attention to how such
authors strive to write in a way that will resonate with readers whose lan-
guage is grounded more in embodied than in textual experience. Rather
than emphasize the obstacles remaining, Falke focuses on what has been
accomplished so far by scholars who rebelled against a language that
would alienate them from their working-class upbringing and the strate-
gies they have employed.
In Chapter 5, “Kings in Disguise and ‘Pure Ellen Kellond’: Literary
Social Passing in the Early Twentieth Century,” Luke Seaber provides a
different perspective on working-class writing by focusing on the phe-
nomenon of “social passing” in which an upper- or middle-class writer
passes themself off as working-class. After outlining some of the issues
involved in such social passing, particularly in relation to the genre of
incognito social investigation, he moves on to a fascinating compari-
son between the uses of working-class or lower-middle-class voices in
T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses. In arguing that
the effect of such texts is to draw attention to the difference between
the (privileged) writing voice and the voices represented, Seaber suggests
that perhaps modernism was more conservative than the writing of a
generation before in its refusal to let working-class voices speak for them-
selves. In the remainder of the chapter, he goes on to consider the extent
to which the generation following the modernists, the writers of the
1930s, crossed over to the working class, with particular reference to the
example of W. H. Auden. In conclusion, Seaber wonders whether literary
social passing is more concerned with the needs of a literary intelligentsia
1 INTRODUCTION 9
shared a dialogic relationship with British working classes during the late
colonial period. Focusing on Mulk Raj Anand’s 1936 novel Coolie, she
examines how the colonial, racial and imperial relationship between the
Empire and its colony influenced the nature and scope of working-class
literature. In analyzing how, despite being assigned the nomenclature
of the “native-informant,” Anand’s choice of writing about the subcon-
tinental working-class in English emancipated his work from its regional
boundaries and attained a true international character, Bandopadhyay sit-
uates Coolie as an example of inter World War working-class literature, and
considers how his fictional representation of the colonial working-class
adds to our understanding of the British working-class tradition.
Jason Finch’s chapter, “London Jewish … and Working-Class? Social
Mobility and Boundary-Crossing in Simon Blumenfeld and Alexander
Baron,” sets out to fill in the gaps that are left when “working-class writ-
ing” is understood as paradigmatically concerned with the lives of indus-
trial workers and their families, in the Midlands, the North of England,
South Wales or central Scotland, where the oppositions between capi-
tal and labour were locally the starkest. Arguing that London itself has
a rich, complicated and nuanced place in the story of twentieth-century
British class relations, he suggests that London Jewish writers tell, in
a way that with few exceptions non-Jewish London writers before the
1960s do not, the story of the London working classes. Moreover, Finch
demonstrates how London Jewish writers challenge “working class” as a
category in the way that they chronicle the “up-and-out” move in which,
in class-stratified Britain, working-class people often aspire not to be
working-class. In this manner, he introduces a particular complexity to
discussions of the working class, which is that members of the working
class can make money as capitalists and successful capitalists can perceive
themselves as working-class. As Finch notes, this tendency has powerful
resonances in the era of a government attempting to redefine the work-
ing class as the people who work, as opposed to those who survive on
benefits.
In Chapter 12, “The Deindustrial Novel: Twenty-First-Century
British Fiction and the Working Class,” Phil O’Brien draws on Raymond
Williams’s argument that work and the industrial landscape are key
formative influences and applies it to twenty-first century fictional rep-
resentations of once industrial working-class communities, which have
undergone profound social and economic change due to neoliber-
alism, deindustrialisation, and unemployment. He analyses Anthony
12 B. CLARKE AND N. HUBBLE
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Benjamin, Walter. 1992. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction. Illuminations, London, 1955.
Cooper, Charlie. 2016. Theresa May: Working-Class Champion. Politico, 5 October.
https://www.politico.eu/article/theresa-may-working-class-champion/.
Decker, Cathleen. 2017. Trump’s War Against Elites and Expertise. L.A. Times,
27 July. http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-elites-20170725-
story.html.
14 B. CLARKE AND N. HUBBLE
Hobsbawm, Eric. 1978. The Forward March of Labour Halted. Marxism Today,
September: 279–286.
Hoggart, Richard. 1970. Literature and Society. In Speaking to Each Other:
Volume Two: About Literature, 19–39. Oxford University Press.
Marx, Karl. 1994. On Feuerbach. In Marx: Early Political Writings, ed. Joseph
O’Malley, 116–118. Cambridge University Press.
Mason, Rowena, and Nicholas Watt. 2015. David Cameron Lays Out
Plans for ‘Blue-Collar Conservatism’ as Cabinet Meets. The Guardian,
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May. Gov.uk, 13 July. https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/
statement-from-the-new-prime-minister-theresa-may.
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Subject to Change, ed. Sally Munt, 1–15. Cassell.
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oct/08/uk.conservatives2002.
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Working Class’s Dysfunction. National Review, 28 March. http://www.
nationalreview.com/article/432876/donald-trump-white-working-class-dys-
function-real-opportunity-needed-not-trump.
PART I
Theories
CHAPTER 2
Working-Class
Writing and Experimentation
Ben Clarke
B. Clarke (*)
University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC, USA
e-mail: b_clarke@uncg.edu
The artist “turns from the private lives of his characters to their social
surroundings and their public opinions,” (“The Artist and Politics” 230)
neglecting in the process both the psychological complexities that had
occupied their immediate predecessors and the methods they had devel-
oped to explore them. When they did use innovative formal strategies,
these were borrowed from writers “like Mr. Yeats and Mr. Eliot” rather
than the result of their own engagement with their subject; they “took
over from the elder poets a technique which, after many years of experi-
ment, these poets used skilfully, and used it clumsily and often inappro-
priately” (“Leaning Tower” 172). Their attempts to extend the subjects
literature considered and the audiences it addressed were undermined by
a formal conservatism that contrasted with the conspicuous innovations
of the older generation of writers, by their failure to develop techniques
of representation and analysis appropriate to their project.
20 B. CLARKE
Horizon was intended to reassert the idea that “writing is an art, that it
is an end in itself as well as a means to an end,” and to “reeducate the
peppery palates of our detractors to an appreciation of delicate poetry
and fine prose” (February 1940, 70). In this account, committed texts
are distinguished by a crudity of method that stems from an instrumental
understanding of writing. Their emphasis on the working class is cen-
tral to the problem. In a later editorial, published a few months before
Horizon closed, Connolly argued that Marxist theories maintained that
the “only salvation for the artist lies in his representation of the problem
of the working class”. The inadequacy of the claim was demonstrated by
its failure to produce significant work; the texts “which we should take
as a model… don’t exist”. Even working-class artists themselves rejected
these injunctions, and “whenever they have a chance to exhibit their art
and not what they are told ought to be their art, it appears more ‘deca-
dent’ than bourgeois art because its neurotic qualities are not enriched
by competent technique” (Connolly 1949: 305–306). The statements
encapsulate a number of influential arguments about the nineteen-
thirties and working-class writing, from the idea that commitment
involved artists relinquishing their freedom and submitting to political
prescriptions to the notion that working-class artists were distinguished
by their technical failings.
As Connolly’s arguments suggest, writing about the working class is
central to both the dominant image of the nineteen-thirties and its crit-
ical marginalization. The idea that it was a misguided concern with the
working class that led to a neglect of aesthetic problems and the kind of
formal experimentation practised by canonical modernists has been used
to dismiss left-wing texts in general and those produced by working-class
writers in particular. Hynes states bluntly that “[v]irtually no writing of
literary importance came out of the working class” (206) in the decade.
In exploring and challenging his claim, this chapter not only argues that
working-class writing is more innovative than has often been acknowl-
edged but insists on the need for a renewed critical engagement with the
concept of formal experimentation. It briefly considers some of the radi-
cal implications of modernist technique, before examining the argument
that working-class authors rejected formal innovation and uncritically fol-
lowed the conventions of documentary writing and nineteenth-century
realist fiction. It then analyses a number of contrasting working-class
texts, considering James Barke’s combination of modernist technique
and didacticism in Major Operation (1936) and the innovative qualities
22 B. CLARKE
that would reflect “reality as it is, in all its complexity, in all its contrari-
ety, and not only capitalist reality, but also that other, new reality—the
reality of socialism” (157). He saw a new kind of realism as the best
way to achieve this, and rejected modernist experimentation, comparing
Joyce’s work to a “heap of dung, crawling with worms, photographed
by a cinema apparatus through a microscope,” (153) and insisting that
literature should build upon “a consciousness of the fate of humanity”
rather than focusing on “the irrational … the unconscious and the sub-
conscious” (158). Socialist realism was, in theory, new, a break from
bourgeois literary tradition, but it was built upon nineteenth-century lit-
erary models and Radek insisted that “if I were to write novels, I would
learn how to write them from Tolstoy and Balzac” (182).
Despite this, the image of working-class writers retreating from formal
experimentation into the certainties of realism is deceptive. Nineteenth-
century fiction did inform many authors but there were other contem-
porary influences, one of the most important of which, as Andy Croft
argues, was the modernist D. H. Lawrence, whose work suggested the
possibility of “native, national working-class literary tradition to which
they could see themselves belonging” (Red Letter Days 67). Many work-
ing-class writers read widely, including journals such as John Lehmann’s
New Writing and John Middleton Murray’s Adelphi, both of which pro-
vided important forums for their work, and some came into direct contact
with literary figures from more privileged backgrounds. Jack Common,
for example, worked for the Adelphi, was a friend of George Orwell’s, and
corresponded with E. M. Forster, who told him that “[i]f I was a little
younger you might influence me” (Letter to Jack Common). Though
many working-class writers employed documentary techniques, they did
not see themselves as bound by them or regard the form itself as static.
Some worked in a variety of genres, including James Hanley, who wrote
Grey Children (1937), a study of poverty in South Wales, but also the
subversive, disturbing novella Boy (1931), which was initially banned for
obscenity, and the conspicuously experimental No Directions (1943). Few
writers followed the principles of Socialist Realism, which Peter Marks
argues was little discussed outside Left Review and failed “to influence
thirties British literature in any significant way” (34).
The 1934 Soviet Writers’ Congress is significant, not because it pro-
vided a widely used template for left-wing and working-class writing but
because it demonstrates that even explicitly Communist writers were
actively concerned with questions of literary form during the decade. In
26 B. CLARKE
The Novel and the People, Ralph Fox argued that it “is completely for-
eign to the spirit of Marxism to neglect the formal side of art,” (134)
and Radek’s speech to the congress was founded on his conviction that
“the proletarian writer, fighting his way forward, has to labour hard over
problems of form” (146). As Janet Montefiore argues, socialist realism
has come to be used as “an ideological whipping-boy by people who
don’t bother to read Marxist novels, because they already know that
these must be either boring naturalistic slices of proletarian life, or else
even more boring glorification of grain silos in Kiev,” (142) but far from
leading to the abandonment of technical problems it shows the intense
debate over such issues. The nineteen-thirties are characterized, not by
submission to a single formal orthodoxy imposed from Moscow but on
the contrary by widespread experimentation driven by what Kohlmann
calls “deep-seated anxieties regarding literature’s political articulacy” (3).
This was particularly true for working-class writers, who confronted a lit-
erary tradition that was, as Raymond Williams argues, “shaped primar-
ily… by another and dominant class” (219) and offered limited models
for the representation of their ideas and experiences. Extending its scope
and exposing its assumptions and limitations demanded changes in form
as well as content, and working-class writers of the period are often tech-
nically innovative, though in ways that do not always fit the terms estab-
lished by theories of modernism. The range of strategies they employ is
best illustrated through the kind of close attention to specific texts gen-
erally excluded from conventional literary histories, which, when they
consider working-class writing at all, tend to view it, like the people it
describes, as an undifferentiated mass.
One author who does make use of techniques normally associated
with writers such as Woolf and Joyce is James Barke, whose novel Major
Operation is, Hilliard argues, perhaps “the most ambitious” of the direct
“engagements with modernism” (160) by a working-class authors in the
nineteen-thirties. The novel employs a variety of conspicuously innova-
tive formal strategies, particularly to represent the chaos and diversity
of the modern city, though its marked attention to class divisions and
concern with impoverished areas distinguishes it from many more famil-
iar modernist texts. The image of Glasgow, where “slum girls… flash-
ily dressed” made “for Hope Street and Sauchiehall Street to find clients
among the lecherous and hot-blooded section of the middle class,” (72)
contrasts with the more respectable London of Mrs. Dalloway, although
as the repeated references to Joyce in Major Operation suggest there
2 WORKING-CLASS WRITING AND EXPERIMENTATION 27
He looked up and down the road. All around. A tram came rushing down
on him. The bell clanged. A savagery in its very tone. (Hanley 247)
Offend the rota [sic.] club and the bethel, miss the building society, get
off that stodgy office stool, have a good row with your wife’s family, get
blotto with the booze, have that angel puritan next door collapsing with a
stroke and above all things break his windows. Get out of your smug com-
placency, get action by reaction to your respectable servitude. (41)
Like his attack on the “fat stay-at-home tin gods” (27) who exploited
returning soldiers after the First World War, the challenge depends partly
upon an implicit model of masculinity, contrasting the restrained and
repressed “stiff collared puritans” (38) who dominate the existing order
to the liberated actions and desires of what he elsewhere calls “natural
men” (“The Plasterer’s Life” 22).
Hilton’s attacks focus on the middle classes, whom he often reduces
to stereotypes in a pointed inversion of the way dominant discourses
represent the poor, but his frustrations extend to others who maintain
a restrictive, unjust system. Castigating the “old men” who “complain
about our irresponsibility, our drift, our aimlessness” (Caliban Shrieks
155) but made “the world rich and most people poor,” he insists on the
complicity of those who “got up at three and went to your work day
in day out, since you were nine years of age” because “[l]ife was that
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