ABSTRACT
Catherine Cookson’s novels have been largely dismissed by historians, most notably Robert Colls writing shortly after her death, as stereotyped accounts of working-class life in the industrial North East of England (Colls 1998). Although we should heed Colls’s warnings and caution against projecting Cookson’s undoubtedly harsh life in the North East as a short-hand for working-class experience on the banks of the Tyne, it is important to consider how Cookson drew upon her Irish background in her fictional work and whether historians might be able to use her novels as a source for the experience of the Irish in the North East of England (MacPherson 2008). This chapter explores the representations of Irish identity in Cookson’s early work, most notably her first two novels to be published, Kate Hannigan (1950) and The Fifteen Streets (1952) (Jones 279-81).2 Both novels are set in the streets of Tyne Dock and East Jarrow on South Tyneside where Cookson grew up at the beginning of the twentieth century. Using census data, newspaper reports, and other contemporary sources, this essay seeks to place Cookson’s work within the social context that informed much of its content.
