![Pinterest](https://pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?url=https://uknews.evprotec.com/forgotten-jack-hilton-book-to-be-republished-after-bartenders-discovery/&media=https://uknews.evprotec.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/130321096_jack_portrait-with-cs-2.1.jpg&description=Image source, Jack Chadwick Image caption, A skeleton reaching for a loaf of bread on the book cover caught Jack Chadwick's attention A 1930s novel that was acclaimed by George Orwell and WH Auden before being forgotten for decades is to be republished after a Manchester bartender rediscovered it and solved a mystery about the author's last wishes. Jack Chadwick chanced upon an old copy of Jack Hilton's semi-autobiographical Caliban Shrieks in 2021. Academics had previously failed to find who inherited the rights to the book after Hilton died in 1983. But Chadwick succeeded by appealing for information in pubs near the writer's last home. He put up posters asking "Do you remember Jack Hilton?", which eventually led him to track down the widow of a friend, who was unaware she had inherited the author's estate. Chadwick then launched a campaign to get the book back into print, and it has now been signed by Vintage, an imprint of Penguin, the UK's largest publishing house. "To use an appropriately northern expression, I'm chuffed to bits," Chadwick, 29, told BBC News. "It feels like a victory not just for Jack, who struggled so much in his own time to get the recognition he deserved, but also for working-class people in the here and now, facing the same class ceilings." Hilton was a plasterer from Rochdale who based the vivid and groundbreaking book on his own experiences growing up in slums, living in workhouses after World War One, and suffering unemployment and hardship after the Great Depression at the end of the 1920s. Auden hailed his "magnificent Moby Dick rhetoric", while Orwell said Hilton's voice was "exceedingly rare and correspondingly important" and declared he had a "considerable literary gift". Orwell even asked to come and stay with Hilton in Rochdale to write his own account of English working-class life. Hilton didn't have room, but suggested a friend in Wigan instead. That led Orwell to write his landmark The Road To Wigan Pier, which was published t){kind=link}
A 1930s novel that was acclaimed by George Orwell and WH Auden before being forgotten for decades is to be republished after a Manchester bartender rediscovered it and solved a mystery about the author’s last wishes.
Jack Chadwick chanced upon an old copy of Jack Hilton’s semi-autobiographical Caliban Shrieks in 2021.
Academics had previously failed to find who inherited the rights to the book after Hilton died in 1983. But Chadwick succeeded by appealing for information in pubs near the writer’s last home.
He put up posters asking “Do you remember Jack Hilton?”, which eventually led him to track down the widow of a friend, who was unaware she had inherited the author’s estate.
Chadwick then launched a campaign to get the book back into print, and it has now been signed by Vintage, an imprint of Penguin, the UK’s largest publishing house.