The Yankee Yorkshireman: Migration Lived and Imagined (review)

The Yankee Yorkshireman is largely the story of a single, early-twentieth-century English immigrant who moved from England to Rhode Island. Self-described as "an involuntary exile," Hedley Smith, who was outwardly "cheerful," concealed within himself a "rage" he eventually learned to express in fiction (p. 1). Much of Mary Blewett's book is devoted to a discussion of immigration theories and how these theories help illuminate the struggles of immigrants as they seek to integrate into the new culture while not losing completely the identity they brought with them from home. Emigration is a balancing act, and there is a lot of wreckage, emotional and spiritual. A general belief of historians is that immigrants who came from England to the United States, since they spoke English and were to some degree familiar with American mores, experienced a transition that was considerably less rocky than that which immigrants from culturally and linguistically different nations underwent on these shores. Blewett takes some umbrage with this notion. Her position, if I have it right, is that the process of moving to a new land can be a shattering experience to any immigrant—more often than not it is—and this is exclusive of language and other cultural similarities that may cushion the blow. In Hedley Smith, she has found her man, the perfect representative of what she is talking about: the holdout.

The forces that drove the Smith family to emigrate to the United States are familiar to migration and labor historians: handwork in textile mills, Yorkshire in this case, was rendered obsolete by the introduction of steam-powered looms. This mechanization then brought more workers into factories; at the same time, it enabled factory owners to hire women rather than men. Mechanization also helped keep down wages. These pressures—new machinery, changes in the workforce, the struggle over a living wage, competition among workers—are common to studies that examine the reasons behind worker migration. Blewett's study here offers nothing new in this regard. The story takes wing, however, when she begins to bore in on Smith, the real subject here.

Smith arrives in Johnston, Rhode Island; he is fourteen, and right away he gets off on the wrong foot. He is smart and comparatively well-educated, even by today's standards. Expecting to register for "an advanced curriculum of Greek, Latin, and mathematics," he is instead told by school officials that "since fourteen was the typical age that children in mill-worker families entered the mills," they would simply refuse to provide further formal education (p. 49). Smith is crushed, and furious. Yet because he is so articulate, he is able to get a job with the New England District of the National Jewelers Board of Trade in Providence; he stays at this job for ten years (p. 99). After that job ends, Smith spends the rest of his life in and out of work. While he is willing to do almost anything, nothing much comes his way. Smith becomes friends with many of the English-born emigrants living in and around North Providence, mill workers most of them. These friendships bring a bit of joy into his life; they also provide source material. He gets married—to the wrong woman. He begins writing fiction.

Smith wrote his stories in longhand, whenever he could find time. Although he submitted work to agents in New York, he met with little success. Some of his writing was privately published; most of it was never published at all. Smith's writing describes "a lost social and cultural Yorkshire," which he "hoped to capture and celebrate" in New England (p. 127). As Blewett points out, Smith, at his best, strengthens "regional fiction" by adding to it "the dimensions of transatlantic history and memory." But he is at heart a regional writer of ethnic narratives. Blewett's claims for him may be too large. He is not Lawrence or Hardy. And while Smith certainly did...