Fame Is the Spur (novel)

The title comes from John Milton's poem "Lycidas": "Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise / (That last infirmity of noble mind) / To scorn delights, and live laborious days".

[1] The central character, Hamer Shawcross, starts as a studious boy in an aspirational working-class family in Ancoats, Manchester; he becomes a socialist activist and soon a career politician, who eventually is absorbed by the upper classes he had begun by combating.

In fact the story is rather subtler than this summary sounds, despite the fact that the author's sympathies obviously lie with Shawcross's friends and associates who remain faithful to the cause; however, many of the middle class and aristocratic characters are portrayed fairly sympathetically, and one character whose career parallels that of Shawcross in his rise from poverty to eminence is a market-boy who becomes a major capitalist.

The treatment of the militant women's suffrage movement is especially detailed—there are graphic descriptions of imprisonment and forcible feeding of hunger strikers.

A 1947 film, Fame Is the Spur, starring Michael Redgrave and scripted by Nigel Balchin ignores the subtleties to give a straightforward tale of a revolutionary's drift into self-satisfied conservatism as the years go on.