GRAHAM HAD LONG HARBOURED ambitions to become a writer, but in 1887, he had written to a friend, ‘I am at last forced back on Justice again, as no paper will take anything from me. Fancy the Yellow Book refusing a thing of mine on the grounds that it was immoral. Cretins, liars, etc.’ However, after ‘Bloody Sunday’, things changed dramatically. His article ‘Has the Liberal Party a Future?’ had displayed passion and style, but in a busy political year, in which he continued his campaigns against the government, and the police, and his attempts to bring the conditions of Britain’s poor to the attention of his parliamentary colleagues, Graham was slow to take up his pen again. It was the working conditions of the nail and chainmakers of Cradley Heath in the Black Country, particularly for the women workers, that spurred him to write in their defence, and in early December 1888, he contributed an introduction to a pamphlet entitled ‘The Nail & Chainmakers’. Here, for the first time, while still polemical, was an eloquent and absorbing piece of descriptive prose, foreshadowing the ‘sketch’ style that would be the hallmark of his later literary output, and a new career as a social commentator. Its often short, stabbing sentences painted a vivid and disturbing picture of Dickensian squalor and degradation, ‘Mud, dirt, desolation, unpaved street, filthy courts, narrow reeking alleys, thin unkempt women, listless men with open shirts showing their hairy chests. Mud, dirt; dirt and more mud.’ This was a festering sore of exploitation and profiteering, recognised, but ignored. The essay was an indictment of the use of sweated labour, and failures at every level of capitalist society and the social system. But readers might also recognise strong similarities in content and style with passages in Engels’s The Condition of the Working-Class in England (1845).

An almost contemporaneous piece was Graham’s introduction to, and adumbration of, a booklet entitled A Labour Programme, by Mahon, in which Mahon set out his theories, and potentially incendiary proposals for the reorganisation of society. However, what marked out Graham’s commentary was its restrained style in comparison to his ‘Plea For the Chainmakers’.