AUTODIDACT ARTEFACT

 (920 GRT 4/4/26)

Howard Slater 

I know less about literature

than I do about shovelling coal

-          George Garrett

 

It’s a writing pad, like those that every sideboard drawer used to contain. A pad for writing letters. The paper is lined. No margin runs down the left-hand side. It’s not quite A4 nor A5 but somewhere in-between. The paper it contains is quite thin, but not thin enough to stain the underside with ink seepages. However, it’s thin enough to keep any prospective postage costs at a minimum. Each page is detachable and, in fact, every page of this pad has come free from the binding of the upper edge. Each page, slightly curled by the moon hill of a hand, is numbered at its head.  

More or less every single page of this, now, looseleaf notebook, is covered in hand writing. Only one page shows any sign of blank space and it’s deliberately self-designed as a title page. It echoes the first page of any book: a title, an author’s name and, in this case, a quote from Ben Jonson. It’s a homemade book, now a folder, in an edition of one. The title is ‘Worms Hamlet of Elsinore.’ Its author is A. Groundling. There is no date but, taking a cue from the class number used by Liverpool Records Office, I’m guessing that this writing pad was filled-up in the late 1920s. 

After much struggle without a magnifying glass, the Jonson quote, in much smaller script than the title and author’s name, is, after trial-and-error transcribing and web searching, revealed as saying: “If thou canst but spell and join my sense, there is more hope of thee than of a hundred fastidious impertinents.” Following this, in brackets, is ‘New Inn.’ This is the title of an obscure play by Jonson from 1629 set in a pub called The Light Heart and offering a cross-dressing theme as central to its plot. 

An interesting aside here is that I had, initially, misspelled ‘Jonson’ as ‘Johnson’ and mistakenly imputed to A. Groundling a deliberate error which would have made the quote resonant with a kind of irreverent subversion. It would also have distanced me from joining the ranks of the ‘fastidious impertinents’ in that even though I couldn’t spell a well-known name it wouldn’t disbar me from joining in with ‘sense’ and becoming A. Groundling’s ally as, surely, he is implying, through this abstruse quote, that the uneducated are not to be disbarred from intellectual activity.

There’s nothing too odd about the inclusion of the Jonson quote as he was a contemporary of Shakespeare. He made a prose contribution to Shakespeare’s First Folio (the first collected edition of the upstart crow’s writings) entitled ‘To the Great Variety of Readers.’ The opening lines read: “From the most able to him that can but spell: there you are numbered. We had rather you were weighed. Especially, when the fate of all books depends upon your capacities, and not of your heads alone, but of your purses.”[1] Here Jonson is perhaps pointing to literature as an aspect of ‘political economy’; a matter of access to knowledge by means of wealth.  

That this is neither far-fetched nor lost on A. Groundling can be furthered by reference to Benedict Anderson’s contention that the production of books, as infinitely reproducible and opening up new markets with the rise of national vernaculars taking the place of a monoglot Latin, was “one of the earliest forms of capitalist enterprise.”[2] So who could afford to purchase the First Folio? Who could afford Hamlet when it was first published in 1603? Not the hoi polloi, the stinkards, who paid a penny to stand in the pit of The Globe, and who, after a line from Hamlet, became known as groundlings. That George Garrett used this as one of his pseudonyms (he was also known as Matt Low)[3] shows an allegiance to those who, not being able to read and write, nonetheless attended the theatre and made it as much an oral culture as the literary one it was to become.  

Another pseudonym, another clue. A matlow is a sailor and so was Garrett. This sailor made trips to Buenos Aires which saw him ‘on the tramp’ in South America and to New York where he joined the IWW, was close to the Workers Dramatic League and wrote plays (Flowers and Candles.)  After his return to Liverpool, he became a footnote in English Literature; not so much for his own short stories and theatre activism, but for being one of those ‘subaltern cosmopolitans’ that escorted George Orwell around Northern towns in preparation for The Road to Wigan Pier. Garrett descried the book as “one long sneer” and cautioned that its appearing as a Left Book “gives it an added danger.”[4]  

Returning to these numbered sheets one thing immediately stands out. More than the use of green ink it is Garrett’s extraordinary small handwriting which immediately grabs you and, in fact, is at first disappointing to see as it means that, without their being microfiched, the pages are presenting themselves as unreadable. This is not because each line of these ruled sheets dictates such a small script but because Garrett uses half of the available space of each line and writes from one edge of the page to the other with minimal indentation.  

Leafing through each page, one comes to be struck by the handwriting’s consistent neatness. The script seems almost typeset in its uniformity and there are only rare signs of crossings-out and insertions. Comparing the handwriting to that in a – perhaps deferential – letter of Garrett’s to John Lehmann (“thanks for the offer of consideration...”), the handwriting is legible even in a quarter-size book reproduction.[5] It appears almost double in size to the script that comprises these notes and, in comparison to their patient lettering, almost rushed. 

So, these notes come across like a kind of code, a hieroglyphic script. We can almost feel the trace of avid concentration rising up from the pages, a motivic insistence meeting our gaze half-way; an unconscious message emanating from their undecipherability that attains a kind of solidity. We recall how Garrett had written that to be a writer was, in his working-class milieu, to be seen as a freak. As a friend remarked of the archived pages: “You couldn’t read that over his shoulder.” So, is Garrett’s handwriting a form of self-deprecation, an invisibility tactic? Is it linked to his choice of pseudonyms?[6] 

In more material terms this miniature hand writing may have been caused by the cost of the writing pad: not a sheet should go unused, not a line can be wasted. Perhaps a bottle of green ink was cheaper than a black one for Garrett is not using a biro here but what must be a fountain pen (luxury items once given as birthday presents.) It all comes across as frugal and when one arrives at the conclusion that these notes are a literal scene-by-scene rendition of the entire play, a kind of mimetic technics, then, it seems like Garrett does not own a copy of the play but is consulting a library copy. 

If this is so, then, did Garrett make consecutive visits to the library (this very library?) or were these notes taken down in one sitting? Even though the handwriting is unerring throughout the 58 pages I find it hard to believe that they were all written at the same time. Written? Garrett’s handwriting is more like calligraphy which itself implies a sort of devotion to honing his handwriting into an artisanal skill. Was this the result of educational drilling or the outcome of a writer without access to a typewriter? 

It is worth bearing in mind that cheap editions of Shakespeare had been available for quite some time. It is, therefore more than plausible that Garrett could have owned a pocket-copy of Hamlet and, bearing in mind how he describes the cramped living conditions of his young family, that he made these notes in the quiet of a library.[7] Here, a level of focus bordering on immersive identification in the play would have been possible. Hence the power of this autodidact artefact that is so mediumistic that it takes on the dimensions of a mystic writing pad. 

I’d thought that these notes would themselves be a critical essay on Hamlet as I was intrigued that, in his correspondence with John Lehmann, Garrett had mentioned another essay he had written on The Tempest. ‘That Four-Flusher Prospero,’ which Garrett was keen to have published, seems to offer a view of this play from a working-class and anti-racist perspective: “It was only on reading a recent book on SHAKESPEARE that I had to get down something which will I hope explode all those conceptions of the ‘gentle’ Prospero.”[8] If we take this together with Garret’s essay on Conrad’s The Nigger of ‘The Narcissus’, we are stumbling across something doubly rare: a working-class literary criticism. 

            So, Garrett is far from being “capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise” as Shakespeare has Hamlet snobbishly say of the groundlings. And we could add that Shakespeare’s inclusion of clowning, buffoonery and bawdyisms was once offered by 70s English teachers to be a sop to the hoi polloi in the pit, who, were, it is inferred, deemed incapable of gleaning anything from Shakespeare’s wordplay and soliloquys. Garret’s adoption of this pseudonym, then, is more than just a sign of his allegiance to the poor and becomes an un-muting, a demonstrative answering back.  

As an autodidact, Garrett is somehow not subdued by the weight of a tradition that once made writers like Shakespeare and Conrad infallible and untouchable (This may be a reason why, in his letter to Lehmann, he writes the playwright’s name in block capitals.) Like many, his formal education ceased before the age of 14 and so is it in escaping from a taught tradition – one that instils subservience, looks for meanings to be condensed into synopses, and makes ‘understanding’ a mythic destination – that he garnered the confidence to go against educational unilaterality and write works of criticism?  

There is also a now forgotten tradition of working-class self-education very much aligned to the Workers Movement that goes further back than the Chartist movement. Fellow Liverpudlian writer and seaman, James Hanley wrote: “On Thursday evenings I went to my ILP meeting. At least here there were one or two men whose interests were in books and music […] I was literature secretary at the time, and in addition to the usual cut-and-dried pamphlets, gradually introduced books into the branch, and at the quarterly meetings always had a fairly decent stall on show. And what is more, we found people eager to buy them.”[9] Denied an ‘education’ folk like Garrett, Hanley and Jack Hilton, sought out other means of learning that, straying away from party propaganda, gravitated towards literature. 

Such a lack of formal education, of which, it could be said, narrows down the longer it is continued within institutions, can transmute into an informal and open-ended sense of learning that is accompanied by a sense of defiance that levels down the ‘classics’ to a less than sovereign status. If the goal is something other than becoming ‘learned’ and having ‘intelligence’ serve you as a certificated possession, if the goal is to ‘see through’ with the intuition that there is no final word, that is ‘never said and done,’ then, the lack of formal education is tantamount to a freeing-up that, alongside a counter-context for that learning, can bring on a confidence to take on authority.  

Garrett shows what may lie at the basis of this albeit fragile confidence when, in his critique of Conrad, he offers the following: “The true artist is supposed to portray life whole, but it is almost impossible for an artist or anyone else to see life whole. Seeing is determined by an awareness of intense experiences, but does not always exclude personal prejudices. And personal prejudices must not pass as the whole truth.”[10] As with our trying to glean something about Garrett from these archived pages there is the sense that by ‘personal prejudices’ he may mean the unconscious of the canonical text, which, passing for ‘objective truth,’ he felt it necessary to seek-out and reveal.  

Having not yet read any of Garrett’s literary criticism may cast these words themselves as a ‘personal prejudice’, but, as a speculation based on an aura, they are not posing as the ‘whole truth.’ If these archived pages were, as hoped-for, the “unpublished examination of Hamlet on the same lines as Prospero,”[11] that would at least have given a flavour of what Garret had to say, what aspects of the play he chose to focus upon. Would they coincide with my own take: Hamlet as an exposé of the subterfuge of power-plays made transparent and countered by enigmatic poetic ripostes?   

In the meantime, the notion of Garrett as working-class literary critic has to rely on the title of these notes which, presumably, would be the title of the prospective essay. So, to the title: ‘Worms Hamlet of Elsinore.’ It reads almost as a nonsense. Is it a compacted phrase culled from the play? An isolated fragment of a longer speech? Is it Garrett’s summation of the entire play? Later, another friend offered that, read alongside the use of the pseudonym A. Groundling, the title is suggestive of Garrett’s ‘worm’s eye view’ of the play. Could it refer to Hamlet as a character who is made to squirm by carrying the guilt of others? 

Moving on from this I’m guessing that the phrase that figures as the title does not appear from the mouth of any character in the play. However, this friend roughly recalls the moment when the word ‘worms’ is metaphorically used in the play. This is honed down to be Act 4 Scene 3: the immediate aftermath of Hamlet’s ‘accidental’ murder of Polonius: the duplicitous Machiavellian who, versed in the cliché’s of court flattery and politricks, seeks only the “higher rate.”[12]

That Hamlet shows no remorse for this murder, but instead uses it as the springboard towards cryptic comments on the calumnies of power, shows that Garrett, siding with Hamlet despite all those caveats that he is ‘criminally insane,’ is drawn to the upending of hierarchy that the murder represents. That Polonius is, says Hamlet in addressing his “uncle-father,” being feasted on by worms is not only a hinted-at confession, but, as Shakespeare moves the pun on, it also morphs into a means of rebellious insult (“the fat king and the lean beggar”) and a critique of the State (“a convocation of politic worms.”) 

Yet, of course, the worm can be a parasite: a tapeworm feeding from a person’s nutrients, the minor entrepreneur feeding from those unpaid portions of labour. That Garrett, it is said, went everywhere with his Little Red Song book, adds another thread. A stanza of his ‘Marching On!’ reads: “Too long we’ve starved in silence grim/ And watched the parasite/ Waste in luxury the wealth/Produced by Labour’s might.”[13] That this song was distributed as a penny-handbill at a 1921 demonstration perhaps stands counterpoised to the grandeur of Hamlet, but, Garrett, as working-class literary critic, occupied the labile space between the two.  

That Garret could not sustain his works of criticism is hardly a surprise. He probably drew no distinction between this and writing short stories, songs, poems and plays. Categorical separation comes later, when you’re courted and seduced by the publishing industry and become subject to marketing (Hanley was required to write his autobiography to this end.) As for Shakespeare, Garret wasn’t alone in being drawn towards him. Plays like Hamlet were not force-fed on curriculums and maybe there was an attraction to its not being the King’s English, to its being a form of poetic dialect? 

Maybe all this idealistic conjecture, this atemporal solidarity, can be partly confirmed, probably refuted but surely furthered by returning to Liverpool Records Office and requesting the 128 items of 920 GRT 3/3/14: Worms Hamlet of Elsinore. 

Howard Slater

September 2025. 

Thank to Tim Kelly, Mick Gaskell and Alan Dent.