Update on our work in progress: This Slavery

For the last couple of years, we’ve been working hard on a new book for you. This Slavery is a graphic adaptation of a novel by Lancashire millworker and best selling novelist Ethel Carnie Holdsworth. We’ll be submitting the artwork this spring, and working on edits all summer. so the book can be printed and in your hands this autumn.

The story is set in industrial Lancashire, amid the cotton boom, in a similar time period to our last two books, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and No Surrender. This Slavery follows the fates of two sisters through a turbulent time for the whole town over the course of 18 action packed chapters. The slavery of the title refers to the choiceless inevitability of both waged labour and marriage that working class women find themselves subject to. Scarlett is currently drawing the final chapter, which involves some huge crowd scenes and a lot of drama.

As with our previous books, Sophie has adapted the original novel into a script for narrative art, staying faithful to the original whilst making some tweaks to make the most of the medium to tell this important story in the most accessible way possible. We’ve worked together to translate the script into a storyboard that runs to 350+ pages. Scarlett has worked her way through drawing, colouring and lettering those pages with her usual attention to historical detail and warmth of character. The book will be published by SelfMadeHero in autumn 2025, and we’re working with our lovely and encouraging editor David Hine for the third time. As soon as it’s available to preorder, or there’s a front cover to see, we’ll let you know. We’re also planning some radical events to celebrate the book and Ethel Carnie Holdsworth around the time of publication.

This Slavery is a fiery and angry story that cuts through the intersection between industrialised labour and women’s rights within that system. Although it depicts a very specific element of the industrial revolution – the Lancashire cotton boom of the early 20th century – it has sharp and disturbing relevance to our modern lives. The deregulated gig economy and warehouse workplaces of today are populated by unpaid carers trying to make ends meet. By presenting human beings as something other than economic units and baring some truths about the transactional nature of work, sex and family life, This Slavery holds a mirror to our current economic system. The central themes – about women’s individual ‘freedom’ to choose between the slavery of the factory or the home, and how both underpin the shareholder profits of capitalism – feel just as revolutionary and under-examined today. Ethel constructed radical character dynamics too, presenting police and domestic servants as class-traitors to be mocked, while portraying ‘fallen women’ as redeemable figures of honour, power and respect. By folding all of this into the popular mill-girl fiction of her era, Ethel subverted the genre to offer something new for readers who were her economic peers. This proved unpopular with the Blackburn establishment press, who objected to the book’s unflinching portrayal of harsh living conditions, but also with the left-wing press and political reviewers who considered the book ‘a wasted opportunity’ for its focus on an individual romance. But she wasn’t writing it for them, was she?

In the centenary year of its first publication, our graphic novel adaptation of This Slavery will become part of a growing revival of Ethel Carnie Holdsworth’s literary reputation. We are grateful to SelfMadeHero, the Arts Council and the Pendle Radicals for the support we have already received, as well as encouragement from Ethel’s living relatives. If you’d like to help keep our noses to the drawing-board, here are some things you can do:

• buy our books! either from real-life high-street bookshops or from our website

• talk about our books! in real life, on social media, or on review sites so more people can discover they exist

• give each other lovely gifts! share the joy of resistance with mugs, posters and tea towels from our collection

We are working to create accessible opportunities for political education as well as entertaining and aesthetically pleasing books, so if you know someone who might enjoy pictures telling a few thousand words about structural economics, civil rights and human resistance, you know what to do. Follow us on Instagram, TikTok or Bluesky to watch the unfolding creation of this graphic novel, from concept to publication; or subscribe to our free Substack to stay in the loop.