Hello Jag, your point 1 this is a reasonable and helpful suggestion. I have had to pick myself up off the floor. point 2 I had to ask 'did this sort of thinking really occur on Mudcat?' Speaking as a massive fan of Charles Dickens myself (though not sure about him on trade unionism) this was one aspect of Pardon that appealed to me. Though of course Dickens had massive appeal before Pardon's time with newly literate readerships in his own times. So thank you for both points.

I am quite happy for 'people' to 'suspect' that I have an agenda. Not sure I like the language but I can live with it. But I do have some sort of 'thesis' and this brings me back to the house Pardon lived in and the language (I am thinking some people here will be able to tune in to this sort of analysis) he was presented in.

Time after time I read he live in a farm labourers's cottage. His maternal grandparents had lived there, the Cook Gee family (dating from a 19th c marriage between a Cook and a Gee). Yet when I listen to the BL stuff I hear Billy explain that it had been a 'smallholding'. In other words, lived in by smaller scale tenants.

I have ancestors similar, some blacksmiths into the bargain. Up to mid 19th century. To me it was obvious that it had been a farmhouse of sorts as opposed to a labourer's cottage. You only have to look at the film of it And again, obviously it was not a farm labourer's cottage in the days when Pardon lived there, as he was a carpenter. Pardon was a skilled worker, not a labourer. Yet his house is demoted from 'had been the farmhouse on a smallholding' to 'labourer's cottage' in accounts of his background.

To me it is reasonable to suggest that such semiotic choices in presentation play into the theoretical and political leanings of the people who discovered and marketed him.

I have sent for a history of Knapton, getting tangential but then I always like to get things in context.

On the 'card carrying communist' comment discussed before. On reflection, this isn't so far off the mark. Now once again my language (these are quick notes) may not be the most tactful, but Topic Records was in some sense what you might roughly call and I say might a communist party front originally, linked with other CP projects. Now if I am wrong here, happy to be corrected. I am sure I hae read that this is the case. Not trying to criticise anybody here, just thinking in historical terms.

Thank you