Tim Lott is right to mourn the passing of the working-class novelist from mainstream literature (Opinion, 7 February), but I would argue that we’re still out there. In many ways the rise of self-publishing can be likened to the music scene of the late 70s punk era, when upstart record labels briefly challenged the world domination of the big boys. No longer do we have to endure endless rejection letters from established publishers and agents; we can simply reply “sod you then, I’ll do it myself”.
We do have to overcome our inferiority complexes, though. Last year the nice people at High Wycombe library invited me to present at their local authors week, where I shared a platform with no less than Charles Dickens’s great-great-great-granddaughter, Terry Pratchett’s agent and the cricket correspondent from the Telegraph. Other participants boasted PhDs and MAs in this, that and the other, while I turned up with my comprehensive education, four O-levels and a novel called That Bloody Book.
But how is “working class” defined these days? My parents were certainly working class; from a poor area of London, before moving to an overspill town in the home counties. I was raised as working class and my books feature “ordinary people” in extraordinary situations. One of the main reasons for the dearth of regular Joes and Janes in contemporary literature is a lack of representation in the press (and sadly, I include the Guardian in this generalisation). Until that changes we will have to plough our own furrow.
Tony Flower
Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire
• Tim Lott rightly decries the supremacy of English fiction’s chattering classes. But his example of a working-class author’s breakthrough with a novel about “the machinations of the ruling class” misses an important point. Wolf Hall’s protagonist is a self-made, working-class man succeeding, despite the obvious antipathy towards him by the aristocracy and professionals in Henry’s court. And last week’s television episode also reminded us how the Tudor upper classes sneered at the equally self-made mercantile Boleyn family.
Sue Lloyd
Bristol
• While Tim Lott offers the end of grammar schools as a possible factor for the decline in working-class authors, serious historical analysis of this so-called golden age shows that grammar schools did little to relieve “cultural impoverishment” for the vast majority of working-class children. Statistically, very few of the manual working class gained a place in a grammar school and many of those who did often felt alienated, ended up in the lower streams and left early. Moreover, HMI reports from the postwar period paint a bleak picture of the quality of teaching and learning in these institutions.
Patrick Candon
North Shields
• I share Suzanne Moore’s concern about the lack of working-class and ethnic-minority actors represented at the Baftas (The Baftas: all white on the night, 9 February). But in order to produce the likes of independently educated Eddie Redmayne and Benedict Cumberbatch, state schools need to up their game. The first requirement is a school that values drama, organises regular productions and takes its pupils frequently to the theatre. The second is a vigorous programme unashamedly dedicated to identifying and nurturing children with serious acting potential and encouraging them to apply to the best drama schools. Tokenism is not the answer. Only by producing articulate and confident drama students will state schools be able to redress the Bafta imbalance.
Stan Labovitch
Windsor, Berkshire
• It is not just actors who gain from privileged backgrounds. A disproportionate number of top TV and radio reporters and presenters also come from those educated at public schools. For instance, Andrew Marr, Julian Worricker, and Dan Snow. Plus Jon Snow, public school, failed at university but with a father as a bishop and a grandfather a knighted general in the first world war. As Suzanne Moore explains re Bafta winners, it is not that they lack talent, but where are the working class? Not many with cockney accents. Instead of entering occupations associated with privilege, they could have gone into those where it counts for little. How about social work, community work in deprived areas and teaching in state schools?
Bob Holman
Glasgow
• Suzanne Moore conflates two separate issues. The implication of her lament that Timothy Spall was not nominated and her demand that “this event and the institution that organises it has to get with the programme” ignores the fact that Bafta nominees are chosen democratically by members of the academy. If Timothy Spall’s performance as Turner does not make the cut among the voters, or there is a dearth of films portraying working-class life, there is little the academy can do about that. Where she hits the nail on the head is in her comments on the financial vulnerability of choosing the arts as a career. And in the implication of her comments about Stephen Fry, whose time is up.
Charles Milne
Madley, Herefordshire
