It was a Dickensian beginning, William Woodruff’s, to say the least. He was born on a heap of cotton in the mill where his parents worked and his grandfather died. Then, with a market crash in 1920, England’s mills themselves died.

His proud family sank into a poverty so profound that his grandmother starved to death, having refused welfare. His unemployed father sewed mailbags in a tiny kitchen, the same work prisoners did in the local jail.

And Woodruff, who later became an eminent historian, was haunted until his death, on Tuesday, by the journey he took at 6 with his mother to the seaside resort of Blackpool. During the day, his mother would tell him to sit on a bench. From there he watched men, far better dressed than any he had known, enter the hotel. Some came out with his mother.

“You’re a grand lad,” some said, tossing him a coin or two. Billy Boy, as he was known, wondered why. And why did his mother often jolt awake crying?

Almost eight decades later, Woodruff revisited these memories, or “ghosts,” as he called them. He was by then a successful economic historian in the United States, but his late-in-life telling of the old tales in two best-selling books made him a celebrity in Britain and a link to a vanished working-class England.

Woodruff died at 92 in Gainesville, Fla., where he had taught at the University of Florida for 30 years. His scholarship included more than a dozen books and many articles, ranging from a history of the British rubber industry to “a concise history” of the world.

Then came a success that stunned him.

In 1993, Ryburn, a small British press, quietly published “Billy Boy: The Story of a Lancashire Weaver’s Son.” In 2000, Eland, another British press, published it, changing the title to “The Road to Nab End: A Lancashire Childhood.” (Billy Boy, it turned out, is a brand of German condom.)

The paperback version was published by Abacus in 2002. After BBC radio made it its bedtime book in January 2003, it became a No. 1 best-seller in Britain, selling more than 250,000 copies. The second volume, “Billy Boy II: Down the Road,” was published in Japan in 1997, and by Abacus in 2003 as “Beyond Nab End.”

The books drew little notice in the United States but have been translated into 17 languages. “They took upon them a life of their own,” Woodruff said in an interview with The Times of London in 2003. “What’s the reason? I have no idea. It isn’t good literature.”

Most British critics disagreed, with The Times of London calling the books “a national treasure.” Many compared them favorably to Frank McCourt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Angela’s Ashes.”