Why are those at the pinnacle of the publishing industry so obsessed with talking about race and sex and gender but to reticent to bring up class? Gee, I can’t think of any reason uber-educated, wealthy, powerful elites would behave that way. Can you?
The easy solution for a genuinely action-oriented person wanting to ameliorate the problems of someone suffering from undeserved poverty, is for that person to give some of their assets to them i.e. a genuine sacrifice.
With race and gender, the writer will never be presented with a scenario where they will be asked to donate their own personal gender or race.
So to avoid any meaningful discomfort – it’s best to stick to subjects that will only involve sacrifices by others.
And I’m pretty sure that their readers don’t want to be reminded that they could also be making meaningful sacrifices ….
“The easy solution for a genuinely action-oriented person wanting to ameliorate the problems of someone suffering form undeserved poverty, is for that person to give some of their assets to them i.e. a genuine sacrifice”
But how much of your wealth are you obliged to give away? I’m reading a book called, How to be Perfect, and this was exactly the topic of the chapter I read last night. The conclusion, sort of, is “Knowing we don’t have to be completely courageous or utterly kind or perfectly generous makes the arduous project of becoming better people seem less impossible”. So, the golden mean.
This can, and is, a problem, I must admit that I have used the old ecclesiasical concept of the tythe when it comes to charitable giving, I find this to be a simple guide. I realise that many would say why should it be simple? But it’s better than being paralysed by doubt and guilt.
I guess the answer is unique to the individual.
For me, I give just give enough to be able to visualise a useful thing it might be spent on – which seems to do the trick in reducing my perceived guilt.
“But how much of your wealth are you obliged to give away?”
This question is at the heart of nearly every serious Christian’s life.
A wealthy young man came to see Jesus. He claimed to obey all the Jewish laws perfectly (unlikely, but let’s cut him some slack — Jesus did.) He asked what else he must do to get into the Kingdom of Heaven. Jesus answer: “give all your have to the poor and follow me.”
Christian ethicists have been struggling with the answer since the 1st century. Is it a call for everyone to embrace voluntary poverty? Many of the patristic era thought so. Is it a call for communism among the faithful? Some apostles clearly thought so – see Acts. Is the universal part the “follow me” and the rest specific to that one man? Many a Medieval theologian took this tact. Calvin claimed that it was not money but the attachment to it that must be discarded. So much for that camel through the needle’s eye bit. Maybe the point is to be always asking the question and never fully satisfied with the depth of your answer.
I think Helen Keller had the right idea in Story of My Life (paraphrased): “No serious Christian can ever entirely enjoy his Christmas dinner.”
Years ago I asked people to give the money they would have spent on Xmas presents for me, to their favourite charity instead.
Since then I have enjoyed all my Xmas dinners 🙂
John Tumilty
2 years ago
Trainspotting is the only good novel set in a ‘lower-class’ environment that comes to mind. Most others are just visiting the zoo because that’s how novelists see the working classes.
Unless I have missed something in Mr Hensher’s article, is not the problem that only working class writers may write about “their own,” whereas for a middle class writer this is strictly verboten?
Yes I forgot about him, that’s a good call. I think that a lot of novelists can write very good ‘working-class’ characters. But they are not set in working-class environments. They have to describe them rather than show them.
Precisely. One can’t change their race, but they can certainly change their level in a free society, so better for them to focus on that which they can’t change. (But keep that a secret!)
Russell Hamilton
2 years ago
I read quite a few novels and stick resolutely to those set in the well-educated, well-mannered middle, or upper classes. I Just read Tessa Hadley’s new novel, Free Love, – not particularly recommended, but I like being placed in that milieu (sort of like flicking through Country Life magazine). Thinking of class in novels, Niall Williams’ latest novel, This is Happiness, has a wonderful scene of our young, ordinary, hero taking a daughter of the local doctor to the movies. The class distinctions are marked, but then, it’s all bathed in Williams’ heart-warming loveliness.
I also thought of a great book, which actually isn’t a novel but reads as well as one. If anyone hasn’t read Stuart: a life backwards, they should. It has a nice class distinction between the author and his friend, and subject, Stuart. I don’t know how many decades ago I read that book, but Stuart is a character you can never forget.
I also read Hillbilly Elegy, by J.D.Vance, which like the earlier Liars’ Club by Mary Karr, were terrific, and popular, memoirs about low class lives. I guess as Philip Hensher writes, biographers/memoirists are protected in a way novelists aren’t, which is a pity, because clearly ‘class’ can be a best-seller.
A novelist who can do class (and everything) well is Kate Atkinson – she does the middle-class beautifully in novels like Life after Life, but in her detective novels she gets further down the class scale!
Last edited 2 years ago by Russell Hamilton
Terence Fitch
2 years ago
British literary fiction is hardly read by the vast majority. Male readership is infinitesmally small. Look at any bookshop. The largely female readership reads in fragmented sub genres like vampire fantasy or urban woke. Only the commentariat and academe really care. If you want to read relevant powerful literary fiction try Eastern European literature in translation. Powerful stuff that isn’t concerned with wokeism since more important events to consider. Reading something like ‘Day of the Oprichnik’ by Vladimir Sorokin will horrify and ‘thrill’ you within a few pages. Reading British fiction alongside this is like eating watery porridge by comparison.
Last edited 2 years ago by Terence Fitch
Caroline Watson
2 years ago
Politicians on the Left are also afraid of social class. After all, if working class people had well paid, secure jobs and owned their own houses, and if their children had the opportunity of social mobility through grammar schools and grants, they would have no one to patronise.
I struggle to think of anyone in my old Grammar School in the 1960s whose parents were manual workers of who lived in Council Houses. The idea of the Grammar school as the infallible route to social mobility for the lower classes is a big fat lie and always was.
AC Harper
2 years ago
You can make an argument that there are only two classes – the Elite and the Not Elite. It suits the Elite to fudge the issue of there only being two classes, and they use the ‘top end’ of the Not Elite to do so. The Clergy, the Professionals, and now the Woke form a bulwark to prevent the Elite borders being breached..
So the Woke, who seem to have taken over the mechanics of the publishing industry, are ‘designed’ not to talk about class. We don’t want any of that meritocracy talk breaking loose, it might lead to some of the Elite losing their social position
The problem is that we have an inherited idea of what working-class actually is and that idea is usually “white working class”. Another of today’s threads on the death of June Brown regards her as the last working-class women in East-enders. Actually there are several but they are not white. It is almost as though black working-class people (and there are a mighty lot of them) facing being classed as Black rather than working-class the latter being applied mainly to white people, and a working class Muslim will more often than not be classed as a muslim not a working class person.
The classifications anyway for class ( A B C1 etc) date back to the 1950s and are way out of date in that a call-centre worker on a Zero-hour contract is probably regarded as lower middle-class and class D(skilled and semi-skilled manual worker) is more than likely to be retired. (in the 2019 General election the Labour Party got the majority of votes for people of working age in all salary percentiles up to £90k, it was the votes of retired people, particularly in the “Red Wall” who swung it for the Tories. Islington is taken as the epitome of middle-classdom as insult (including by the PM who seemed to have forgotten he lived there) but, however class is calculated, it has some of the highest levels of poverty in the country.
So we have a problem, the classic working-class story, and play, from the 60s,( man with thumbs in braces saying to dormat wife “he’s going down t’pit like his father and grandfather) no longer cuts it, and while films like Loache’s “sorry we missed you” are a step in the right direction it will take a while.
Dapple Grey
2 years ago
Just as in East Germany, novelists were able to ‘write between the lines’, as it were, so that the readers understood but the books still passed the censor, I’m sure writers can find plenty of little clues that give away the class of the characters.
Ive just been rereading some Somerset Maugham short stories – how on earth has he not been cancelled? (Or maybe he has – I haven’t tried to buy any of his books recently).
Maugham is an unusual case. Hugely successful, widely read and extremely well-compensated in his day, he’s little more than a cipher in today’s literary world. His unadorned style doesn’t go down well these days and his subject matter is obsolete. Because he’s so rarely read or discussed, he’s hardly worth cancelling anymore.
He has probably been cancelled in the same way as J K Rowling has been cancelled, that is to say his books are freely available in bookshops and online.
Dustshoe Richinrut
2 years ago
Writers of old used to slum it working manual or lowly jobs. Conrad, Orwell, Steinbeck, Jack London. even Miguel de Cervantes was a mere soldier and also for a time a slave of some Sultan in North Africa.
When sitting down for their packed lunch, amongst fellow workers, these long-gone writers probably looked around …. and observed. If they had had a newspaper, it was easy to peer over the top at anything of note that passed before them. People today looking down into their smartphone are not in a position to notice anything. The point is, through much observation, much can be gleaned and appreciated. Therefore interesting things about the lowly working classes can be noted and divulged to the world through, say, a work of fiction.
Charlie Chaplin, a real rags-to-riches story if ever there was one, I imagine as a child and a very young man, saw everything on London’s streets. (Perhaps Battersea Park was familiar to him). Another comedian, Oliver Hardy, as a child, in the small lobby of his mother’s shabby hotel in Madison, Georgia, in the Deep South, was said to have observed the mannerisms and speech of various characters who stayed of a night en route to elsewhere. All these masses of observations were incorporated into comedic routines much later. Today’s Oliver Hardy-in-the-making would probably be playing video games all day long.
Familiarity might not actually breed contempt. It might actually lead to a greater understanding, greater sympathy, and even greater entertainment. Who wants to live in a hoity-toity society of no laughs? Of nothing pleasing? That’s not us! The working class today might claim that the movers and shakers of society have it in for them by not having anything to do with them.
Was Bruce Springsteen working class?
He sang about the working class, did he not?
Nicky Samengo-Turner
2 years ago
The example that always makes me laugh with derision are the thriller tomes by alleged ” ex SAS/ special forces”, in which all the Officers are stupid interbred nitwits, and the heroes are tough working class genii… yeh.. sure…
Dana Eyre
2 years ago
Why is it that dealing with “class” must be about “them” – the underclass, the rabble, the unwashed, the chavs – and their striving to be “better”, to be “transformed”? Of course Hensher doesn’t explicitly articulate this, but he isn’t calling for a UK version of Wolfe’s class Bonfire of the Vanities. https://bookshop.org/books/the-bonfire-of-the-vanities-9781433288418/9780312427573
Yet the UK – full of Russian oligarch money, Canary Wharf bankers, EDL extremists, Brexit grifters and political buffoons to numerous to count, immigration controversies, a London rich as Croesus and poverty belts in the Midlands and the North that are Dickensian – screams for such a novel.
Hensher’s right. The UK needs a novel that deals with class. But it doesn’t need Horatio Alger “pluck and luck” stories of the underclass striving to match their betters. It needs angry insights into a system that London and the current government deny.
Claire D
2 years ago
I have’nt read it yet but ‘Common People: An Anthology of Working Class Writers’ edited by Kit de Waal, whose book ‘The Trick to Time’ I have read (heartrending), looks good.
Barry Hines’s ‘A Kestral for a Knave’ was great, a long time ago though.
I think quite a lot of working men read Crime fiction, and Martina Cole is a hugely successful crime writer born working class, not my cup of tea but good for her.
Add on : Nobody should feel so frightened that they avoid certain subjects to survive as writers, that’s for a totalitarian state, pretty much where we are though it seems.
Easy for me to say, but I think you must write what you want to write and self publish if necessary. Writers need to stand up for each other and never apologise.
Last edited 2 years ago by Claire D
János Klein
2 years ago
” Clothes make the (wo)man.”
That’s one of the precious things I only learned properly after I moved away from the UK, where I’d always assumed that class is mostly judged by the way you address strangers (the accent) ; one’s dress, and also, one’s postal address. Education is optional.
It’s true that class is awkward to talk about, but I do remember not only Dickens but H.G. Wells with his Kipps or Mr Polly who ‘betrayed’ their class before realising where they really belonged. Here on the Internet we can be classless, ageless or timeless as long as we entertain ourselves and others.
” Clothes make the (wo)man.”
That’s one of the precious things I only learned properly after I moved away from the UK, where I’d always assumed that class is mostly judged by the way you address strangers (the accent) ; one’s dress, and also, one’s postal address. Education is optional.
It’s true that class is awkward to talk about, but I do remember not only Dickens but H.G. Wells with his Kipps or Mr Polly who ‘betrayed’ their class before realising where they really belonged. Here on the Internet we can be classless, ageless or timeless as long as we entertain ourselves and others.
“the UK, where I’d always assumed that class is mostly judged by the way you address strangers (the accent) ; one’s dress, and also, one’s postal address.”
In fact brute physical characteristics are the largest factor in assigning class (which the classic ‘class’ sketch by Cleese, Barker and Corbett from the ‘Frost Report’ of 1967 or so demonstrates very accurately).
All classes, at least of white people in the UK, are downstream from ancient inward migrations of differing kinds of people. So as the sketch shows differences in height are correlated with resulting classes to a very large degree (hence the superior insult of ‘little man’, equating to ‘thick’ and uneducated, hurled around in politics e.g. against Leavers), and the reason for this historically was the variation in components of the diet, better-off people eating more meat according to their varying incomes and so on. And diets high in meat produce taller people (hence when the US occupied Japan after WW2, Japanese people, for centuries about 5.5 feet tall (like both Nietzsche and Napoleon) on average suddenly gained access to diets high in meat from e.g. ‘burgers’ (the previous staples being fish and rice) and within a short time there were 6-foot tall Japanese people striding about.
Over time ‘improvement’ of working-class diets (if indeed that’s what more frequent meat-eating in larger quantities is) has led to height differences between the classes being smoothed out in our day (and working and middle-class children of both sexes now reguarly reach or even exceed 6 feet).
My grandfather, a working-class motor mechanic, was 5 foot 2 inches, my father, a deskbound shipping clerk, was 5 foot 6 inches, and myself (born 1953) and my brother, both highly-educated in a way unavailable to our ancestors, both reached or exceeded 5 foot 11 and half inches. Between my grandfather, reared in stark poverty, and myself lies a history of higher incomes and improved and more varied diets, which tracked higher incomes over time. And that is a perfect Frost Report style example of the resultant height distribution of classes. To an extent food still remains a classic ‘class’ signifier in the UK (see e.g. any magazine restaurant review for examples) but as the classes have clustered now around the same kinds of height, the distinctions have to become more narrow and exclusive, to re-introduce the gaps.
Last edited 2 years ago by Arnold Grutt
Richard Parker
2 years ago
I recall Martin Amis introducing an Alsatian dog called “Giro” into one of his novels (I think it was in “The Information”).
This is a cultural reference which simply won’t stick in publishing land. The chattering classes who run the publishing houses wouldn’t understand the joke (I suspect most of them would assume that “Giro” is pronounced “jeer-oh” and references cycling).
Say what you will of wee Martin, he did understand class, and whilst he could certainly be snide about it, I never found him patronising. He did at least understand what many now fail to do: that class has always figured in English society and probably always will.
The current crop of elites evidently think that by ignoring (canceling) an issue, it ceases to exist. Stalinist airbrushing, of course, but catnip to a certain type. Still, I suppose it’s important to ignore elephants in the room, when you’re afraid that acknowledging them might just get you trampled.
Drahcir Nevarc
2 years ago
The opening paragraph of my novel Helix Folt, the Conservative, is very class-ridden indeed:- A mere quarter hour suffices to carry our Everyman by rail from the honey-coloured stone and mellifluous manners and all-round gorgeousness of Royal Bath to the dingy, malodorous Gomorrah that is Bristol. Charm, gentility, and Times New Roman flee past the coach window and are, with the intermission of an amount of apathetic pasturage, none too stealthily usurped by the coarse, the brutish, and the vulgar. Scenes of dereliction abound, vistas upon squalor impose. This degenerative tendency, as Everyman finds himself obliged to note, promotes itself even among his fellow passengers, those scented and polished Jekylls of Bath Spa, who by degrees have metamorphosed into slouching, spitting, loutish Hydes.
Why are those at the pinnacle of the publishing industry so obsessed with talking about race and sex and gender but to reticent to bring up class? Gee, I can’t think of any reason uber-educated, wealthy, powerful elites would behave that way. Can you?
Very good point.
The easy solution for a genuinely action-oriented person wanting to ameliorate the problems of someone suffering from undeserved poverty, is for that person to give some of their assets to them i.e. a genuine sacrifice.
With race and gender, the writer will never be presented with a scenario where they will be asked to donate their own personal gender or race.
So to avoid any meaningful discomfort – it’s best to stick to subjects that will only involve sacrifices by others.
And I’m pretty sure that their readers don’t want to be reminded that they could also be making meaningful sacrifices ….
“The easy solution for a genuinely action-oriented person wanting to ameliorate the problems of someone suffering form undeserved poverty, is for that person to give some of their assets to them i.e. a genuine sacrifice”
But how much of your wealth are you obliged to give away? I’m reading a book called, How to be Perfect, and this was exactly the topic of the chapter I read last night. The conclusion, sort of, is “Knowing we don’t have to be completely courageous or utterly kind or perfectly generous makes the arduous project of becoming better people seem less impossible”. So, the golden mean.
This can, and is, a problem, I must admit that I have used the old ecclesiasical concept of the tythe when it comes to charitable giving, I find this to be a simple guide. I realise that many would say why should it be simple? But it’s better than being paralysed by doubt and guilt.
I guess the answer is unique to the individual.
For me, I give just give enough to be able to visualise a useful thing it might be spent on – which seems to do the trick in reducing my perceived guilt.
“But how much of your wealth are you obliged to give away?”
This question is at the heart of nearly every serious Christian’s life.
A wealthy young man came to see Jesus. He claimed to obey all the Jewish laws perfectly (unlikely, but let’s cut him some slack — Jesus did.) He asked what else he must do to get into the Kingdom of Heaven. Jesus answer: “give all your have to the poor and follow me.”
Christian ethicists have been struggling with the answer since the 1st century. Is it a call for everyone to embrace voluntary poverty? Many of the patristic era thought so. Is it a call for communism among the faithful? Some apostles clearly thought so – see Acts. Is the universal part the “follow me” and the rest specific to that one man? Many a Medieval theologian took this tact. Calvin claimed that it was not money but the attachment to it that must be discarded. So much for that camel through the needle’s eye bit. Maybe the point is to be always asking the question and never fully satisfied with the depth of your answer.
I think Helen Keller had the right idea in Story of My Life (paraphrased): “No serious Christian can ever entirely enjoy his Christmas dinner.”
Years ago I asked people to give the money they would have spent on Xmas presents for me, to their favourite charity instead.
Since then I have enjoyed all my Xmas dinners 🙂
Trainspotting is the only good novel set in a ‘lower-class’ environment that comes to mind. Most others are just visiting the zoo because that’s how novelists see the working classes.
This popped into my head too when I was reading the article. Irving Welsh’s stuff generally is very much about class.
“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” has been a classic for about 100 years now.
Unless I have missed something in Mr Hensher’s article, is not the problem that only working class writers may write about “their own,” whereas for a middle class writer this is strictly verboten?
For sure I can’t think of anything recent; but Alan Sillitoe’s works seem genuine, if you will.
Yes I forgot about him, that’s a good call. I think that a lot of novelists can write very good ‘working-class’ characters. But they are not set in working-class environments. They have to describe them rather than show them.
There’s quite a few good novels written by “working class” women though.
The idea of social advancement is anathema to those who seek a neo-feudal progressive utopia.
Precisely. One can’t change their race, but they can certainly change their level in a free society, so better for them to focus on that which they can’t change. (But keep that a secret!)
I read quite a few novels and stick resolutely to those set in the well-educated, well-mannered middle, or upper classes. I Just read Tessa Hadley’s new novel, Free Love, – not particularly recommended, but I like being placed in that milieu (sort of like flicking through Country Life magazine). Thinking of class in novels, Niall Williams’ latest novel, This is Happiness, has a wonderful scene of our young, ordinary, hero taking a daughter of the local doctor to the movies. The class distinctions are marked, but then, it’s all bathed in Williams’ heart-warming loveliness.
I also thought of a great book, which actually isn’t a novel but reads as well as one. If anyone hasn’t read Stuart: a life backwards, they should. It has a nice class distinction between the author and his friend, and subject, Stuart. I don’t know how many decades ago I read that book, but Stuart is a character you can never forget.
I also read Hillbilly Elegy, by J.D.Vance, which like the earlier Liars’ Club by Mary Karr, were terrific, and popular, memoirs about low class lives. I guess as Philip Hensher writes, biographers/memoirists are protected in a way novelists aren’t, which is a pity, because clearly ‘class’ can be a best-seller.
A novelist who can do class (and everything) well is Kate Atkinson – she does the middle-class beautifully in novels like Life after Life, but in her detective novels she gets further down the class scale!
British literary fiction is hardly read by the vast majority. Male readership is infinitesmally small. Look at any bookshop. The largely female readership reads in fragmented sub genres like vampire fantasy or urban woke. Only the commentariat and academe really care. If you want to read relevant powerful literary fiction try Eastern European literature in translation. Powerful stuff that isn’t concerned with wokeism since more important events to consider. Reading something like ‘Day of the Oprichnik’ by Vladimir Sorokin will horrify and ‘thrill’ you within a few pages. Reading British fiction alongside this is like eating watery porridge by comparison.
Politicians on the Left are also afraid of social class. After all, if working class people had well paid, secure jobs and owned their own houses, and if their children had the opportunity of social mobility through grammar schools and grants, they would have no one to patronise.
I struggle to think of anyone in my old Grammar School in the 1960s whose parents were manual workers of who lived in Council Houses. The idea of the Grammar school as the infallible route to social mobility for the lower classes is a big fat lie and always was.
You can make an argument that there are only two classes – the Elite and the Not Elite. It suits the Elite to fudge the issue of there only being two classes, and they use the ‘top end’ of the Not Elite to do so. The Clergy, the Professionals, and now the Woke form a bulwark to prevent the Elite borders being breached..
So the Woke, who seem to have taken over the mechanics of the publishing industry, are ‘designed’ not to talk about class. We don’t want any of that meritocracy talk breaking loose, it might lead to some of the Elite losing their social position
I think a translation here might be helpful.
The problem is that we have an inherited idea of what working-class actually is and that idea is usually “white working class”. Another of today’s threads on the death of June Brown regards her as the last working-class women in East-enders. Actually there are several but they are not white. It is almost as though black working-class people (and there are a mighty lot of them) facing being classed as Black rather than working-class the latter being applied mainly to white people, and a working class Muslim will more often than not be classed as a muslim not a working class person.
The classifications anyway for class ( A B C1 etc) date back to the 1950s and are way out of date in that a call-centre worker on a Zero-hour contract is probably regarded as lower middle-class and class D(skilled and semi-skilled manual worker) is more than likely to be retired. (in the 2019 General election the Labour Party got the majority of votes for people of working age in all salary percentiles up to £90k, it was the votes of retired people, particularly in the “Red Wall” who swung it for the Tories. Islington is taken as the epitome of middle-classdom as insult (including by the PM who seemed to have forgotten he lived there) but, however class is calculated, it has some of the highest levels of poverty in the country.
So we have a problem, the classic working-class story, and play, from the 60s,( man with thumbs in braces saying to dormat wife “he’s going down t’pit like his father and grandfather) no longer cuts it, and while films like Loache’s “sorry we missed you” are a step in the right direction it will take a while.
Just as in East Germany, novelists were able to ‘write between the lines’, as it were, so that the readers understood but the books still passed the censor, I’m sure writers can find plenty of little clues that give away the class of the characters.
Ive just been rereading some Somerset Maugham short stories – how on earth has he not been cancelled? (Or maybe he has – I haven’t tried to buy any of his books recently).
Maugham is an unusual case. Hugely successful, widely read and extremely well-compensated in his day, he’s little more than a cipher in today’s literary world. His unadorned style doesn’t go down well these days and his subject matter is obsolete. Because he’s so rarely read or discussed, he’s hardly worth cancelling anymore.
That’s true.
Nancy Mitford is still read today – or at least, her books are in print. What about Evelyn Waugh? Is he still popular?
He has probably been cancelled in the same way as J K Rowling has been cancelled, that is to say his books are freely available in bookshops and online.
Writers of old used to slum it working manual or lowly jobs. Conrad, Orwell, Steinbeck, Jack London. even Miguel de Cervantes was a mere soldier and also for a time a slave of some Sultan in North Africa.
When sitting down for their packed lunch, amongst fellow workers, these long-gone writers probably looked around …. and observed. If they had had a newspaper, it was easy to peer over the top at anything of note that passed before them. People today looking down into their smartphone are not in a position to notice anything. The point is, through much observation, much can be gleaned and appreciated. Therefore interesting things about the lowly working classes can be noted and divulged to the world through, say, a work of fiction.
Charlie Chaplin, a real rags-to-riches story if ever there was one, I imagine as a child and a very young man, saw everything on London’s streets. (Perhaps Battersea Park was familiar to him). Another comedian, Oliver Hardy, as a child, in the small lobby of his mother’s shabby hotel in Madison, Georgia, in the Deep South, was said to have observed the mannerisms and speech of various characters who stayed of a night en route to elsewhere. All these masses of observations were incorporated into comedic routines much later. Today’s Oliver Hardy-in-the-making would probably be playing video games all day long.
Familiarity might not actually breed contempt. It might actually lead to a greater understanding, greater sympathy, and even greater entertainment. Who wants to live in a hoity-toity society of no laughs? Of nothing pleasing? That’s not us! The working class today might claim that the movers and shakers of society have it in for them by not having anything to do with them.
Was Bruce Springsteen working class?
He sang about the working class, did he not?
The example that always makes me laugh with derision are the thriller tomes by alleged ” ex SAS/ special forces”, in which all the Officers are stupid interbred nitwits, and the heroes are tough working class genii… yeh.. sure…
Why is it that dealing with “class” must be about “them” – the underclass, the rabble, the unwashed, the chavs – and their striving to be “better”, to be “transformed”? Of course Hensher doesn’t explicitly articulate this, but he isn’t calling for a UK version of Wolfe’s class Bonfire of the Vanities. https://bookshop.org/books/the-bonfire-of-the-vanities-9781433288418/9780312427573
Yet the UK – full of Russian oligarch money, Canary Wharf bankers, EDL extremists, Brexit grifters and political buffoons to numerous to count, immigration controversies, a London rich as Croesus and poverty belts in the Midlands and the North that are Dickensian – screams for such a novel.
Hensher’s right. The UK needs a novel that deals with class. But it doesn’t need Horatio Alger “pluck and luck” stories of the underclass striving to match their betters. It needs angry insights into a system that London and the current government deny.
I have’nt read it yet but ‘Common People: An Anthology of Working Class Writers’ edited by Kit de Waal, whose book ‘The Trick to Time’ I have read (heartrending), looks good.
Barry Hines’s ‘A Kestral for a Knave’ was great, a long time ago though.
I think quite a lot of working men read Crime fiction, and Martina Cole is a hugely successful crime writer born working class, not my cup of tea but good for her.
Add on : Nobody should feel so frightened that they avoid certain subjects to survive as writers, that’s for a totalitarian state, pretty much where we are though it seems.
Easy for me to say, but I think you must write what you want to write and self publish if necessary. Writers need to stand up for each other and never apologise.
” Clothes make the (wo)man.”
That’s one of the precious things I only learned properly after I moved away from the UK, where I’d always assumed that class is mostly judged by the way you address strangers (the accent) ; one’s dress, and also, one’s postal address. Education is optional.
It’s true that class is awkward to talk about, but I do remember not only Dickens but H.G. Wells with his Kipps or Mr Polly who ‘betrayed’ their class before realising where they really belonged. Here on the Internet we can be classless, ageless or timeless as long as we entertain ourselves and others.
” Clothes make the (wo)man.”
That’s one of the precious things I only learned properly after I moved away from the UK, where I’d always assumed that class is mostly judged by the way you address strangers (the accent) ; one’s dress, and also, one’s postal address. Education is optional.
It’s true that class is awkward to talk about, but I do remember not only Dickens but H.G. Wells with his Kipps or Mr Polly who ‘betrayed’ their class before realising where they really belonged. Here on the Internet we can be classless, ageless or timeless as long as we entertain ourselves and others.
PS. Do people still use the word “classy” ?
“the UK, where I’d always assumed that class is mostly judged by the way you address strangers (the accent) ; one’s dress, and also, one’s postal address.”
In fact brute physical characteristics are the largest factor in assigning class (which the classic ‘class’ sketch by Cleese, Barker and Corbett from the ‘Frost Report’ of 1967 or so demonstrates very accurately).
All classes, at least of white people in the UK, are downstream from ancient inward migrations of differing kinds of people. So as the sketch shows differences in height are correlated with resulting classes to a very large degree (hence the superior insult of ‘little man’, equating to ‘thick’ and uneducated, hurled around in politics e.g. against Leavers), and the reason for this historically was the variation in components of the diet, better-off people eating more meat according to their varying incomes and so on. And diets high in meat produce taller people (hence when the US occupied Japan after WW2, Japanese people, for centuries about 5.5 feet tall (like both Nietzsche and Napoleon) on average suddenly gained access to diets high in meat from e.g. ‘burgers’ (the previous staples being fish and rice) and within a short time there were 6-foot tall Japanese people striding about.
Over time ‘improvement’ of working-class diets (if indeed that’s what more frequent meat-eating in larger quantities is) has led to height differences between the classes being smoothed out in our day (and working and middle-class children of both sexes now reguarly reach or even exceed 6 feet).
My grandfather, a working-class motor mechanic, was 5 foot 2 inches, my father, a deskbound shipping clerk, was 5 foot 6 inches, and myself (born 1953) and my brother, both highly-educated in a way unavailable to our ancestors, both reached or exceeded 5 foot 11 and half inches. Between my grandfather, reared in stark poverty, and myself lies a history of higher incomes and improved and more varied diets, which tracked higher incomes over time. And that is a perfect Frost Report style example of the resultant height distribution of classes. To an extent food still remains a classic ‘class’ signifier in the UK (see e.g. any magazine restaurant review for examples) but as the classes have clustered now around the same kinds of height, the distinctions have to become more narrow and exclusive, to re-introduce the gaps.
I recall Martin Amis introducing an Alsatian dog called “Giro” into one of his novels (I think it was in “The Information”).
This is a cultural reference which simply won’t stick in publishing land. The chattering classes who run the publishing houses wouldn’t understand the joke (I suspect most of them would assume that “Giro” is pronounced “jeer-oh” and references cycling).
Say what you will of wee Martin, he did understand class, and whilst he could certainly be snide about it, I never found him patronising. He did at least understand what many now fail to do: that class has always figured in English society and probably always will.
The current crop of elites evidently think that by ignoring (canceling) an issue, it ceases to exist. Stalinist airbrushing, of course, but catnip to a certain type. Still, I suppose it’s important to ignore elephants in the room, when you’re afraid that acknowledging them might just get you trampled.
The opening paragraph of my novel Helix Folt, the Conservative, is very class-ridden indeed:-
A mere quarter hour suffices to carry our Everyman by rail from the honey-coloured stone and mellifluous manners and all-round gorgeousness of Royal Bath to the dingy, malodorous Gomorrah that is Bristol. Charm, gentility, and Times New Roman flee past the coach window and are, with the intermission of an amount of apathetic pasturage, none too stealthily usurped by the coarse, the brutish, and the vulgar. Scenes of dereliction abound, vistas upon squalor impose. This degenerative tendency, as Everyman finds himself obliged to note, promotes itself even among his fellow passengers, those scented and polished Jekylls of Bath Spa, who by degrees have metamorphosed into slouching, spitting, loutish Hydes.
Don’t give up the day job