When the Lights Came On: Cinema, Class, and the Stories We Cling To, a guest post by RJ Verity

Welcome to author RJ Verity, who's here today with a post about the role of the cinema in early 20th-century society: the background to her debut historical novel.

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When the Lights Came On: Cinema, Class,
and the Stories We Cling To

by RJ Verity

For many working-class families in the early 20th century, the cinema wasn’t just an escape. It was the first place they saw lives larger than their own reflected back at them—the flicker of possibility projected onto a fragile strip of celluloid.

In Britain, by the 1920s nearly every industrial city and mining town had its own picture house. A visit to the cinema was a ritual, a highlight of the week. The historian A. J. P. Taylor once described interwar cinema-going as “the essential social habit of the age,” and it’s easy to see why. The bioscope halls and “electric palaces” that sprang up across the country became not just entertainment venues, but communal spaces where hopes, fears, and identities could be rehearsed in the dark.

Across the Atlantic, Americans were making similar weekly pilgrimages. In the 1900s and 1910s, nickelodeons—five-cent picture houses packed with immigrant and working-class audiences—sprang up in cities and coal towns alike. By the 1920s, they gave way to the great “movie palaces,” which promised marble foyers, chandeliers, and velvet seats. Yet crucially, ticket prices stayed low enough for miners, millworkers, and shop assistants to keep attending. Palaces blurred class lines: for a dime or two, ordinary people could step into surroundings as sumptuous as any opera house. The geography differed, but the impulse was the same—to sit together in the dark and dream.

Writers have long recognised this dual role of cinema—as both escape and mirror. Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid (1921) gave audiences the bittersweet spectacle of resilience born out of poverty. Greta Garbo’s first talkie, Anna Christie (1930), was advertised with the tagline “Garbo talks!”—a reminder that cinema was forever reinventing itself, just as its audiences dreamed of doing.

Literary fiction, too, has mined the emotional charge of movie-going. Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show (1966), set in a fading Texas town, captures the poignancy of a cinema on the brink of closure, its light dimming along with the community’s prospects. Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions (2002) meditates on the mystery of a vanished silent film star and the haunting power of moving images to outlive their makers. Julian Barnes, in The Noise of Time (2016), turns to music and totalitarianism rather than film, yet wrestles with the same question: how art survives when lives are precarious.

Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole (1933) and A. J. Cronin’s The Stars Look Down (1935) were later adapted for the screen, bringing industrial hardship and working-class lives directly into cinemas. These adaptations remind us that film was never only about fantasy—it was also about recognition.

Children in front of movie theatre, Alpine, Texas (public domain)

Virginia Woolf, in her 1926 essay The Cinema, caught something of this strange alchemy. “We are beholding a world which has gone beneath the waves,” she wrote, marvelling at how moving pictures created visions both intimate and uncanny. Woolf sensed that cinema could show truths not easily told in words: how communities fracture and endure, how individuals imagine themselves anew.

That imaginative leap is what fascinates me as a novelist. My debut historical novel, Poole of Light (September 2025), begins in 1913 with a boy from a colliery town who comes across his first picture house. For Jem, the cinema is revelation: a doorway into stories that feel both impossibly distant and tantalisingly close. Across the decades that follow—through world wars, new technologies, and his own battles with identity—the cinema offers him not just escape, but a way of piecing together who he might become.

"Where the boys spend their money" (photo of St. Louis, Missouri; public domain)

 
I don’t think Jem’s story is unique to fiction. For countless people in Britain and America, the weekly trip to the pictures was about more than amusement. It was a way of locating oneself in a rapidly changing world. Sitting in the dark, you might imagine being someone else; you might imagine your town, your family, your class differently. The silver screen shimmered with reinvention.

That’s why early cinema continues to draw me back as both writer and reader. It’s not only nostalgia for the glamour of Chaplin or Garbo, but the recognition that behind the laughter and tears sat working people from every walk of life, grasping for meaning. Stories were sustenance. And the cinema, in its golden age, was where light itself became a form of survival.

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Short Bio

RJ Verity is the author of Poole of Light, her debut historical novel set against the rise of cinema in early 20th-century England, and the first in The Poole Legacy series. Her writing explores memory, class, and the stories that shape us.

Poole of Light launches across all Amazon marketplaces on 16 September 2025, with the eBook available now for pre-order: https://mybook.to/poole-of-light

Discover more at https://www.rjverity.com.