In this terrific book Rosen stands in a popular tradition of art that begins and ends in the complaint and rebellion of the common people against the powers that lord it over them. It’s a proletarian tradition looking to images of the just society and one that links up with revolutionary sermons, nursery rhymes, ballads, popular songs and broadsheets from the past with energies detectable in the likes of Yeats and Kipling. Rosen knows his Levellers, like John Lilburne writing in ‘Vox Plebis’ from the revolutionary times of the 1640’s: ‘ For as God created every man free in Adam: so by nature are all alike freemen born.’
Richard Marshall reviews Workers Tales edited by Michael Rosen.