Steve Wells's recent post about BBC TV's forthcoming season on the white working classes set me thinking about why they figure so little in the novel. Traditionally, their appearances in the novel have been fleeting and provisional, perhaps because the form is inherently bourgeois, rising with and designed to entertain this social stratum.
Television is different. It has always given the working class a voice. Think of Coronation Street, Brookside, EastEnders. Of course these programmes can easily be read from a Marxist perspective as forms of pacification, but the fact remains that television has embraced the working classes where the novel has not. It is therefore easy to see how TV is seen as "low" culture for the lower classes, by the higher class consumers of literary "high" culture.
And it is specifically the white working class who get overlooked: the white middle-classes are more likely to treat "ethnic" cultures as worthier of their attention. Bollywood, for example, while made for the Indian masses, is considered a higher art in the UK. And, after a slow start, the past couple of decades have seen the novel embrace both post-colonialism and multiculturalism. It's hard not to see in all this a distinct and ongoing prejudice against the white working classes.
The relative absence of this social group is an age-old problem, ingrained into the very fabric of the literary establishment. Not so long ago I sat in the offices of a well-known agent whom I was trying to impress because, while I had a publishing deal, I had no agent. I began to talk her through my work-in-progress, The Carousel, a story that focuses on the lives and deaths of a white working class family in Manchester. "Bit grim", she said. "Yeah, well ..." I replied, before pointing out that it actually contained quite a bit of humour. She brightened. "Could you make it like Shameless?"
Her suggestion exemplifies the way that the white working classes are still viewed collectively as chavs, thugs, racists, or just figures of fun. It is this class that has predominantly lived side by side with each new wave of immigration, but where is the literature to show this? There are a few poems (Carol-Ann Duffy's Mrs. Skinner springs to mind). There are plays: A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney entered new territory and brought us what we now call kitchen sink drama.
But for novels looking closely in this direction the immediate postwar era is much richer: John Braine's Room at the Top, David Storey's This Sporting Life, John Wain's Hurry on Down, and Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night, Sunday Morning. More recently (but only just), are James Kelman's How Late it Was, How Late, and Irvine Welsh's ground-breaking Trainspotting. The latter bucked the trend for working class writing and achieved critical and commercial success, but it was still, allegedly, too much for the Booker judges.
There is also Pat Barker, perhaps the best-known white female writer of working-class origin, but whose first novel took 10 years to find a publisher. There aren't many others. Maybe this is because it is harder for working-class writers? Agnes Owens author of Bad Attitudes, has been known to roll up her sleeves and work as a cleaner during lean times. And attitudes of the London-centric literary marketplace must also figure: novelist Livi Michael was once described as "stubbornly" still living in Manchester.
I look forward to the BBC's season of programmes, and to a time when the white working class is as well represented in the bookshops.
