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To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Britain
In twentieth-century Britain the literary landscape underwent a fundamental change. Aspiring authors--traditionally drawn from privileged social backgrounds--now included factory workers writing amid chaotic home lives, and married women joining writers' clubs in search of creative outlets. In this brilliantly conceived book, Christopher Hilliard reveals the extraordinary history of "ordinary" voices.
Writing as an organized pursuit emerged in the 1920s, complete with clubs, magazines, guidebooks, and correspondence schools. The magazine The Writer helped coordinate a network of "writers' circles" throughout Britain that offered prospective authors--especially women--outside the educated London elite a forum in which to discuss writing. The legacy of Wordsworth and other English Romantics encouraged the belief that would-be authors should write about what they knew personally--that art flowed from genuine experience and technique was of secondary importance. The 1930s saw a boom in the publication of so-called proletarian writing, working-class men writing "in my own language about my own people," as Birmingham writer Leslie Halward put it. During World War II, soldiers turned to poetry to cope with the trauma of war, and the popular magazine Seven promoted the idea that anyone, regardless of social background, could be a creative writer. Self-expression became a democratic right.
In capturing the creative lives of ordinary people--would-be fiction-writers and poets who until now have left scarcely a mark on written history--Hilliard sensitively reconstructs the literary culture of a democratic age.
Writing as an organized pursuit emerged in the 1920s, complete with clubs, magazines, guidebooks, and correspondence schools. The magazine The Writer helped coordinate a network of "writers' circles" throughout Britain that offered prospective authors--especially women--outside the educated London elite a forum in which to discuss writing. The legacy of Wordsworth and other English Romantics encouraged the belief that would-be authors should write about what they knew personally--that art flowed from genuine experience and technique was of secondary importance. The 1930s saw a boom in the publication of so-called proletarian writing, working-class men writing "in my own language about my own people," as Birmingham writer Leslie Halward put it. During World War II, soldiers turned to poetry to cope with the trauma of war, and the popular magazine Seven promoted the idea that anyone, regardless of social background, could be a creative writer. Self-expression became a democratic right.
In capturing the creative lives of ordinary people--would-be fiction-writers and poets who until now have left scarcely a mark on written history--Hilliard sensitively reconstructs the literary culture of a democratic age.
- GenresHistory
390 pages, Hardcover
First published April 15, 2006
16 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 9, 2023
This book is excellent. It sits somewhere between literary and social history. Hilliard discusses writers’ clubs across the country; modernity and the market for fiction; twist endings; publishers’ search for working class authors in the 1930s; the influence of modernism in popular writing, alongside many other themes. Fascinating!
January 3, 2024
This book discusses working class writing in the Thirties into the Fifties in England.
The non-elites who got their writing published in the Thirties fall into two main groups. Writers Circles and Proletarian Novelists.
1. Following on from the autonomy of the Mutual Associations we see independently organised Writers Circles, spread throughout Britain in the 1920s and staying active into the 1960s. They were focused on, ostensibly, ‘writing to earn money’ and this area of activity also had many commercial correspondence schools that sold advices to aspirant writers. The writers circles included many women but were rarely ‘political’. Christopher Hilliard labels them as suburban ‘middle-class’, confusedly subsuming lower-middle and white collar workers. This group tended to write short stories and articles, although there were exceptions like Flora Thompson whose ‘Lark Rise’ (1939) was an important book in my life. John Braine was also a writers circle person who achieved a best selling novel ‘Room at the Top’ in the late Fifties.
This group were not cynical about the market for their writing. They did not see it as incorporating gatekeeping features that might limit their expression or keep them excluded as a class.(p.10) Failure to get stuff published was seen to be the result of personal inadequacy - the legitimacy of the game (in Bourdieu’s terms) was not questioned. (p.66). The magazine the ‘Writer (c1924 - 1976) which was published by Hutchinsons, acted as a hub for nationwide activity. Counter to what I said above it did encourage those striving to become artists as well as the ‘hobbyists’ whose aim was to make the occasional bit of cash or perhaps at best gain entry to a profession in journalism.
There was also parallel commercial phenomena that offered help to novice writers, such as Correspondence Schools. This market reflected a growing social ambition to write reinforced by expanding job opportunities for those with writing skills, and encouraged the literary or creative ambitions of those who had those skills. The Writers and Artists Yearbook, of great help to me in formulating my first publishing contract in 1972, was started in 1897.
In contrast to this continuation of the Writers Circles were:
2. The ‘proletarian novelists’ of the 1930s. These were men that were enabled to publish novels by an elite of progressive literati within a broad anti-fascist alliance known as The Popular Front, that had formed in response to growth of German fascism. Proletarian writing was saught out and published though progressive upper-class editors, the best known of whom is John Lehmann. The writers in this group are typified as having the drive to express themselves as ‘artists’ and to contribute to a renewal of English literature’, achieving notable novels.
Having been through the research I did on middle class mediators of working class culture in the early nineties (Conspiracy of Good Taste) I am more wary of people like Lehmann and his Etonian and Oxbridge mates than this author. They may have facilitated publication for proletarian men but this was at the cost of ‘polishing the rough edges off’ of working class prose and enraging particular content rather than allowing it to develop its own idiomatic working class literary culture, which it might have done if working class editors had been employed. Proving this would entail prolonged research and it was by no means clear cut. It seems that that some experimental or relatively unmediated work was published.
Also we have to be aware of the macho categorisation of proper subject matter. The elite wanted authentic representations of w/c life but perhaps without the aspects of nurturing, feminine or autonomous working class culture that underpins class solidarity. The nature of the literary value of the ‘trash’ romantic and pulp novels compared with the category of ‘male’ social realism is something that needs more detailed evaluation and critique. Hilliard does not assess pulp readerships. (which go back to the yellow cover first paperbacks of the C19th.
An important context of both these things was the increase of cheaper reading matter aimed at a mass audience. Around 500 novels came out per year in 1885. This was followed by a boom that saw 1315 novels published by 1894. Magazines publishing miscellaneous literary content expanded at the same time. An example was The Strand (1891 - 1950) published by George Newnes, which hosted such still well-known writers as Arthur Conan Doyle and P.G.Woodhouse. It modelled a particular style of short story. Louise Heilger’s was a key author in this genre who set herself up as a correspondence school instructor.
This encouraged the short story format which was also more achievable for writers with a day job.
The Commercial versus Art motivation suggested above was dynamic and breaks down early in the Second World War when we find that the biggest circulation literary magazine Seven distributed 100,000 copies a quarter and included writers from both groups, and as the war goes on it makes very direct appeals to ALL its readers to send in writing.
The book is also unclear and even contradictory in its discussion of wartime writing. Was it able to express the traumas of war? There seems to have been understandable pressure for writing to keep the morale of the service men and women up rather than critique war. But he presents uneven evidence on whether such matters were written about.
The complex gradation of approaches, the presence of gatekeeping editors and publishers readers, and the patchwork nature of historical records makes it difficult to prove just what was being written, rather than study what was published. The BBC Radio was organised regionally and used stories and other writing produced from the writers circles but it was a small proportion of the manuscripts sent in.
There is no analysis of class oppression, a key tenet of the class superiority /inferiority nexus comes down to a matter of ‘intelligence’ interpreted within a very intellectual literary framework. But insight into oppression also would allow a different critique of writing that can otherwise be dismissed as romantic trash or pulp.
Much more on my blog:
https://stefan-szczelkun.blogspot.com...
Audiochapbook here
https://play.google.com/store/audiobo...
The non-elites who got their writing published in the Thirties fall into two main groups. Writers Circles and Proletarian Novelists.
1. Following on from the autonomy of the Mutual Associations we see independently organised Writers Circles, spread throughout Britain in the 1920s and staying active into the 1960s. They were focused on, ostensibly, ‘writing to earn money’ and this area of activity also had many commercial correspondence schools that sold advices to aspirant writers. The writers circles included many women but were rarely ‘political’. Christopher Hilliard labels them as suburban ‘middle-class’, confusedly subsuming lower-middle and white collar workers. This group tended to write short stories and articles, although there were exceptions like Flora Thompson whose ‘Lark Rise’ (1939) was an important book in my life. John Braine was also a writers circle person who achieved a best selling novel ‘Room at the Top’ in the late Fifties.
This group were not cynical about the market for their writing. They did not see it as incorporating gatekeeping features that might limit their expression or keep them excluded as a class.(p.10) Failure to get stuff published was seen to be the result of personal inadequacy - the legitimacy of the game (in Bourdieu’s terms) was not questioned. (p.66). The magazine the ‘Writer (c1924 - 1976) which was published by Hutchinsons, acted as a hub for nationwide activity. Counter to what I said above it did encourage those striving to become artists as well as the ‘hobbyists’ whose aim was to make the occasional bit of cash or perhaps at best gain entry to a profession in journalism.
“The term journalism did not have the exclusively non-fictional connotations that it now has until as late as the 1950s.” p.28
There was also parallel commercial phenomena that offered help to novice writers, such as Correspondence Schools. This market reflected a growing social ambition to write reinforced by expanding job opportunities for those with writing skills, and encouraged the literary or creative ambitions of those who had those skills. The Writers and Artists Yearbook, of great help to me in formulating my first publishing contract in 1972, was started in 1897.
In contrast to this continuation of the Writers Circles were:
2. The ‘proletarian novelists’ of the 1930s. These were men that were enabled to publish novels by an elite of progressive literati within a broad anti-fascist alliance known as The Popular Front, that had formed in response to growth of German fascism. Proletarian writing was saught out and published though progressive upper-class editors, the best known of whom is John Lehmann. The writers in this group are typified as having the drive to express themselves as ‘artists’ and to contribute to a renewal of English literature’, achieving notable novels.
Having been through the research I did on middle class mediators of working class culture in the early nineties (Conspiracy of Good Taste) I am more wary of people like Lehmann and his Etonian and Oxbridge mates than this author. They may have facilitated publication for proletarian men but this was at the cost of ‘polishing the rough edges off’ of working class prose and enraging particular content rather than allowing it to develop its own idiomatic working class literary culture, which it might have done if working class editors had been employed. Proving this would entail prolonged research and it was by no means clear cut. It seems that that some experimental or relatively unmediated work was published.
Also we have to be aware of the macho categorisation of proper subject matter. The elite wanted authentic representations of w/c life but perhaps without the aspects of nurturing, feminine or autonomous working class culture that underpins class solidarity. The nature of the literary value of the ‘trash’ romantic and pulp novels compared with the category of ‘male’ social realism is something that needs more detailed evaluation and critique. Hilliard does not assess pulp readerships. (which go back to the yellow cover first paperbacks of the C19th.
An important context of both these things was the increase of cheaper reading matter aimed at a mass audience. Around 500 novels came out per year in 1885. This was followed by a boom that saw 1315 novels published by 1894. Magazines publishing miscellaneous literary content expanded at the same time. An example was The Strand (1891 - 1950) published by George Newnes, which hosted such still well-known writers as Arthur Conan Doyle and P.G.Woodhouse. It modelled a particular style of short story. Louise Heilger’s was a key author in this genre who set herself up as a correspondence school instructor.
“Magazines aimed at the working class carried a lot of fiction.” p.17
This encouraged the short story format which was also more achievable for writers with a day job.
The Commercial versus Art motivation suggested above was dynamic and breaks down early in the Second World War when we find that the biggest circulation literary magazine Seven distributed 100,000 copies a quarter and included writers from both groups, and as the war goes on it makes very direct appeals to ALL its readers to send in writing.
The book is also unclear and even contradictory in its discussion of wartime writing. Was it able to express the traumas of war? There seems to have been understandable pressure for writing to keep the morale of the service men and women up rather than critique war. But he presents uneven evidence on whether such matters were written about.
The complex gradation of approaches, the presence of gatekeeping editors and publishers readers, and the patchwork nature of historical records makes it difficult to prove just what was being written, rather than study what was published. The BBC Radio was organised regionally and used stories and other writing produced from the writers circles but it was a small proportion of the manuscripts sent in.
There is no analysis of class oppression, a key tenet of the class superiority /inferiority nexus comes down to a matter of ‘intelligence’ interpreted within a very intellectual literary framework. But insight into oppression also would allow a different critique of writing that can otherwise be dismissed as romantic trash or pulp.
Much more on my blog:
https://stefan-szczelkun.blogspot.com...
Audiochapbook here
https://play.google.com/store/audiobo...
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews