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EDITED BY BEN CLARKE AND NICK HUBBLE
Working-Class Writing
Ben Clarke · Nick Hubble
Editors
Working-Class Writing
Theory and Practice
Editors
Ben Clarke Nick Hubble
University of North Carolina Department of Arts and Humanities
at Greensboro Brunel University London
Greensboro, NC, USA Uxbridge, UK
ISBN 978-3-319-96309-9 ISBN 978-3-319-96310-5 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96310-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018949036
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied,
with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
maps and institutional affiliations.
Cover illustration: Sculpture of Andy Capp by Jane Robbins, used here with her kind
permission. Alan King/Alamy Stock Photo
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all our contributors for their expertise, patience
and generosity when responding to our queries and guidance as this
book has gradually taken shape. We have enjoyed excellent support
throughout from the editorial team at Palgrave, especially Ben Doyle and
Camille Davies, who have been instrumental in bringing this book to
fruition.
Pamela Fox’s chapter first appeared as the introduction to the 2016
reissue of Ethel Carnie Holdsworth’s Helen of Four Gates; a volume in
the ongoing Ethel Carnie Holdsworth Series, edited by Nicola Wilson,
and published by Kennedy & Boyd. We are grateful to Stuart Johnson of
Kennedy & Boyd for permission to reprint this piece.
We would also like to thank the sculptor Jane Robbins for permis-
sion to use an image of her Andy Capp sculpture, which is situated in
Hartlepool, on the cover of this book.
v
Contents
1 Introduction 1
Ben Clarke and Nick Hubble
Part I Theories
2 Working-Class Writing and Experimentation 17

Ben Clarke
3 Interwoven Histories: Working Class Literature

and Theory 41
Jack Windle
4 Meaning It: Everyday Hermeneutics and the Language

of Class in Literary Scholarship 61
Cassandra Falke
5 Kings in Disguise and ‘Pure Ellen Kellond’: Literary

Social Passing in the Early Twentieth Century 81
Luke Seaber
vii
viii Contents
6 Democratic Art or Working-Class Literature? Virginia

Woolf, the Women’s Cooperative Guild and Literary
Value in the ‘Introductory Letter’ 99
Natasha Periyan
7 The Bakhtin Circle in Caribbean London: Race, Class

and Narrative Strategy 121
Matti Ron
8 “Look at the State of This Place!”: The Impact of

Domestic Space on Post-war Class Consciousness 143
Simon Lee
Part II Practices
9 Ethel Carnie Holdsworth’s Helen of Four Gates:

Recasting Melodrama in Novel and Cinematic Form 167
Pamela Fox
10 Representation of the Working Classes of the British

Colonies and/as the Subalterns in Mulk Raj Anand’s
Coolie 187
Sabujkoli Bandopadhyay
11 London Jewish … and Working-Class? Social Mobility

and Boundary-Crossing in Simon Blumenfeld
and Alexander Baron 207
Jason Finch
12 The Deindustrial Novel: Twenty-First-Century

British Fiction and the Working Class 229
Phil O’Brien
Contents ix
13 Working-Class Heritage Revisited in Alan Warner’s

The Deadman’s Pedal 247
Peter Clandfield
14 Respectability, Nostalgia and Shame in Contemporary

English Working-Class Fiction 269
Nick Hubble
Index 289
Notes on Contributors
Sabujkoli (Sabu) Bandopadhyay works at the University of Regina,

Canada. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the
University of Alberta in 2016. The majority of her current research and
writing focus on the representations and the problems of representations
of the subaltern in relation to working-class historiography (in the con-
texts of colonialism, modernity and globalization). On a grand scale, she
is interested in studying how the literary sphere has responded to social
and political movements in the various pockets of Asia, Africa, Latin
America and the global north. Her work is influenced by the thoughts
of Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Frantz Fanon and Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak among others.
Peter Clandfield currently teaches in the Department of English at
MacEwan University in Edmonton, Alberta. His research interests
include contemporary Scottish literature and culture, representations
of urban environments and urban development, and crime fiction.
He has published recent articles and book chapters on related top-
ics: explorations of spatial justice in the novels of Denise Mina and Ian
Rankin; critiques of “regeneration” in police procedurals; representations
of Glasgow’s Red Road housing scheme in various media; the depiction
of Baltimore in The Wire; and the presence of Edinburgh in the work of
Irvine Welsh (a piece co-written with Christian Lloyd).
xi
xii Notes on Contributors
Ben Clarke is Associate Professor of British Literature after 1900 at

the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, USA. He is author of
Orwell in Context: Communities, Myths, Values (2007), and co-author
of Understanding Richard Hoggart: A Pedagogy of Hope (2011). He
has written articles or book chapters on subjects including public
houses, mining communities, Englishness, and Western representations
of Taiwan, and on authors including Jack Hilton, H. G. Wells, Edward
Upward and Virginia Woolf.
Cassandra Falke is a Professor of English Literature at the University
of Tromsø and the coordinator for the English Literature section. Her
books include Intersections in Christianity and Critical Theory (ed.
2010), Literature by the Working Class: English Autobiography, 1820–
1848 (2013), and most recently The Phenomenology of Love and Reading
(2016). She has also authored articles about Wordsworth, Byron,
Coleridge, Keats, liberal arts education, contemporary phenomenol-
ogy and the portrayal of violence in literature. Her grants and awards
have included a Fulbright professorship, two National Endowment
for the Humanities stipends, a workshop coordination grant from the
Nordic Research Councils for the Humanities and Social Sciences, and a
Distinguished Professor designation for teaching.
Jason Finch is Assistant Professor of English Literature at Åbo Akademi
University and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Comparative
Literature at the University of Turku, both in Finland. He has written
or co-edited six books, most recently Deep Locational Criticism (2016)
and Literary Second Cities (co-edited, 2017). Jason is a co-founder
of the Association for Literary Urban Studies (ALUS) and currently
(2018–2020) its President. His current research focuses on the liter-
ary history of the London ‘slum’, and on mediations of the urbanity of
British and US cities which boomed in the nineteenth century, including
Birmingham, Liverpool, Bradford, St Louis and Memphis.
Pamela Fox is a feminist scholar of working-class and women’s litera-
ture/culture. She is the author of numerous articles, two books, and one
co-edited critical volume including: Class Fictions: Shame and Resistance
in the British Working-Class Novel, 1890–1945 (Duke UP); Natural Acts:
Gender, Race, and Rusticity in Country Music (University of Michigan
Press); and Old Roots, New Routes: The Cultural Politics of Alt.Country
Notes on Contributors xiii
Music, co-edited with Barbara Ching (University of Michigan Press).

She is Professor of English at Georgetown University (USA), where she
teaches classes for both the English Department and the Women’s and
Gender Studies Programme on feminist lit and cultural theory, British
and American working-class literature and popular culture, and cultural
constructions of motherhood.
Nick Hubble is Reader in English at Brunel University London, UK.
Author of Mass-Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History, Theory
(2006/2010) and The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question
(2017); co-author of Ageing, Narrative and Identity (2013); co-editor
of The Science Fiction Handbook (2013), London in Contemporary British
Fiction (2016), The Science Fiction of Iain M. Banks (2018) and four vol-
umes of Bloomsbury’s ‘British Fiction: The Decades Series’: The 1970s
(2014), The 1990s (2015), The 2000s (2015) and The 1950s (2018); and
also co-editor of special issues of the journals EnterText, Literary London
and New Formations. Nick has published journal articles or book chap-
ters on writers including Pat Barker, Ford Madox Ford, B. S. Johnson,
Naomi Mitchison, George Orwell, Christopher Priest, John Sommerfield
and Edward Upward.
Simon Lee recently received his Ph.D. from the University of
California, Riverside, where he researches and teaches twentieth and
twenty-first-century British literature. His scholarship explores the ram-
ifications of space and environment on class consciousness and his new
book project, Working-Class Heroics, centres on the aesthetics of the
kitchen sink realism movement of the long 1960s. He has published
on authors such as John Osborne, Alan Sillitoe, Shelagh Delaney, Nell
Dunn, and Colin MacInnes in addition to publishing essays and arti-
cles theorizing working-class writing. He is currently developing articles
on censorship in the British New Wave and the role of nostalgia in Sid
Chaplin’s Newcastle novels.
Phil O’Brien completed his Ph.D. on class, neoliberalism, and
twenty-first-century British fiction at the University of Manchester in
2016. He has written on the contemporary British novel for Textual
Practice and on 1930s fiction for Literature and History. He is sec-
retary of the Raymond Williams Society and on the editorial board of
Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism. His forthcoming projects
xiv Notes on Contributors
include an edited collection to be published by Verso of Williams’s pre-

viously uncollected essays as well as a book chapter on radical 1980s
theatre which will appear in Accelerated Times: British Literature in
Transition, 1980–2000 (Cambridge University Press).
Natasha Periyan is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at Goldsmiths
College, University of London, having previously taught at Royal
Holloway and Falmouth University. She has published articles and book
chapters on Virginia Woolf, periodical culture, and modernism and edu-
cation. Her book, The Politics of 1930s British Literature: Education,
Class, Gender (Bloomsbury, 2018) considers how the educational
involvements and teaching practice of a wide range of 1930s writers
informed their class and gender politics, their cultural ideals, and the
development of their aesthetics. Her current research considers the poli-
tics and aesthetics of interwar women writers.
Matti Ron is a doctoral candidate at the University of East Anglia,
working on his Ph.D. thesis, Representing revolt: working-class representa-
tion as a literary and political practice from the General Strike to the
‘Winter of Discontent’. His research focuses on intersectional approaches
to class in twentieth-century British literature as well as the structural
limitations of particular forms in representing, both in the political and
literary sense, working-class subjectivity and agency. He is author of ‘A
Vision of the Future: Race and Anti-Racism in 1950s British Fiction’
in Nick Hubble, Alice Ferrebe and Nick Bentley (eds.) The 1950s: A
Decade of Contemporary British Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2018) and in 2018
received a ‘Young Scholar and Activist Fellowship’ from the Working-
Class Studies Association.
Luke Seaber is Tutor in Modern European Culture for the
Undergraduate Preparatory Certificate for the Humanities at University
College London; he was previously a Marie Curie Research Fellow in
the Department of English at the same university. His most recent book
is Incognito Social Investigation in British Literature: Certainties in
Degradation (2017).
Jack Windle was awarded a Ph.D. by the University of Sheffield for
his thesis Class, Culture & Colonialism: Working-Class Writing in
the Twentieth Century. His work covers the whole spectrum of British
working-class literature, from eighteenth-century balladeers through
Notes on Contributors xv
the ‘golden ages’ of twentieth-century prose, theatre and film (the

1930s and the 1950s–1960s) right up to Tony Harrison’s recent poetry.
Publications include a chapter on Harrison, Sam Selvon and immigration
in Goodridge and Keegan’s CUP volume A History of British Working
Class Literature, a republication of The Songs of Joseph Mather (both
2017) and an influential article on Walter Greenwood’s 1933 classic Love
on the Dole (2011 in Literature & History). He has collaborated with
musicians, artists, writers and theatre practitioners (Ray Hearne, Sarah
Jane Palmer, Steven Kay and the Babbling Vagabonds) on projects about
working-class culture and is currently researching Jack Hilton and the
Sheffield novelist Len Doherty proletics.wordpress.com.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Ben Clarke and Nick Hubble
On 13th July 2016, Theresa May gave her first speech as Conservative
leader and British Prime Minister outside 10 Downing Street. Her pre-
decessor, David Cameron, had resigned less than a month earlier after
losing a referendum on Britain’s European Union membership that
had exposed deep divisions within the country, and she sought to rein-
force her image as a one-nation Conservative by speaking directly to
people previously excluded from the political process. These included
working-class voters who had been marginalized or ignored by the
Conservatives, who were, as May herself had recognized more than a
decade earlier, “too narrow” in their “sympathies” (White and Perkins).
Her speech promised a new relation between government and the gov-
erned founded on an extension of these sympathies to include the poor
and precarious:
B. Clarke (*)
University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC, USA
e-mail: b_clarke@uncg.edu
N. Hubble
Department of Arts and Humanities, Brunel University London,
Uxbridge, UK
e-mail: Nick.Hubble@brunel.ac.uk
© The Author(s) 2018 1

B. Clarke and N. Hubble (eds.), Working-Class Writing,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96310-5_1
2 B. CLARKE AND N. HUBBLE
If you’re from an ordinary working class family, life is much harder than
many people in Westminster realise. You have a job but you don’t always
have job security. You have your own home but you worry about paying
the mortgage. You can just about manage, but you worry about the cost
of living and getting your kids into a good school. If you’re one of those
families, if you’re just managing, I want to address you directly. I know
you’re working around the clock, I know you’re doing your best and I
know that sometimes life can be a struggle. The Government I lead will be
driven, not by the interests of the privileged few, but by yours. We will do
everything we can to give you more control over your lives.
Even in her relatively brief remarks, May repeatedly returned to the claim
that her government would “prioritize not the wealthy, but you,” that
it would “work for every one of us” (May). She not only addressed a
working-class audience (“you”) but identified with it, including herself
in a national “us,” implicitly constructed in opposition to an ill-defined
but powerful “them.” She maintained this approach at the Conservative
Party conference later in the year, in a speech Charlie Cooper described
for Politico as making a “bold appeal to working-class voters disillusioned
by rising inequality,” in which she promised to shift “the balance of
Britain decisively in favour of ordinary working-class people” (“Theresa
May”). The idea of “blue-collar Conservatism” promoted by David
Cameron, with its emphasis on “hard-working” families who wanted
the “dignity of a job, the pride of a paycheque, a home of their own,”
(Mason and Watt) became a defining feature of May’s early tenure, a
response not only to the immediate conditions of Brexit but to longer-
term economic and political changes.
In practice, May’s government has not supported “ordinary
working-class people” against the “privileged few”; her commitment was
always rhetorical not material. Her speech is significant, not as a statement
of intent, but because it demonstrates both the increased prominence of
the working classes in political discourse since the Great Recession began
in 2008 and its limited impact on political practice. Despite the promise
to give the working class “more control” over their lives their concerns
and perspectives have not shaped policy and have largely been represented
by powerful forces and figures who claim to speak on their behalf. The
process is not confined to Britain; there are parallels between May’s prom-
ise to articulate the concerns of “ordinary” people and Donald Trump’s
insistence in his inaugural address that he represented the interests of
the “forgotten men and women of our country” (“Inaugural Address”).
1 INTRODUCTION 3
Trump’s speech may have been, as his Republican predecessor George W.

Bush allegedly said, “some weird shit” (Tracy) but his claim continued a
major strategy of his campaign; as Molly Ball argued, the “blue collar man
is the mascot and enigma of the Trump era,” (Ball) repeatedly evoked
to suggest his distance from “elites,” a vaguely-defined category which,
as Cathleen Decker pointed out, has so far included “the government’s
intelligence agencies, the media, foreign allies, the Department of Justice,
establishment politicians, scientists and the Congressional Budget Office”
(Decker). Both May and Trump recognize that economic and political
pressures demand a renewed concern with the working classes, but have
sought, in different ways, to confine this to their representation, to give
them, in Walter Benjamin’s terms, “not their right, but instead a chance
to express themselves,” (234) or, more strictly, to be expressed. Despite
conspicuous differences between the methods the two employ, perhaps
best demonstrated in the contrast between Trump’s disorderly, sometimes
violent populist rallies and May’s limited, uncomfortable, choreographed
interactions with the public, there are common elements in the conditions
they confront and their attempts to address them without altering the dis-
tribution of power.
What has been largely absent from recent discussions has been the
perspectives and voices of the working classes, and consequently any sub-
stantive attempt to examine, disrupt, or extend existing understandings
of them. Despite considerable media attention, they have largely been
both celebrated and demonized in stereotypical terms, as, on the one
hand, the “ordinary,” hard-working families of May’s speech and, on the
other, as the kind of dysfunctional communities represented by Kevin
Williamson, “whose main products are misery and used heroin needles”
(Williamson). Political discourse continues to engage, not with the work-
ing classes, but with fantasies that simplify the people they purport to
describe. These images are determined by their function rather than their
ostensible object, the ways in which they can be used to justify specific
political and economic practices. The policies of both the Trump admin-
istration and some advocates of Brexit, for example, depend partly on
their ability to deploy an idea of the working class as a neglected white,
“native” population, centred on traditional manufacturing industries and
threatened, not only by ill-defined transnational elites and “outsiders”
such as refugees, but by minorities within the country, who supposedly
received preferential treatment from previous, more liberal, govern-
ments. Defining the working class in this way limits both inclusion in the
nation and the values it embodies and has an effect on the distribution
of material as well as symbolic resources. There is consequently some-
thing at stake in such acts of interpretation. Changing the ways in which
the working classes are represented and understood has the potential
to alter the political culture and actions of notionally democratic states
whose legitimacy depends upon their claim to represent the will of the
“people.” This means not only recognizing the agency of working class
people, their ability to speak about their own interests, but the diversity
of experiences and identities potentially encompassed by the category
“working class” itself. Accepting that the “forgotten men and women”
of America include Hispanic agricultural workers in California as well as
white coal miners in Virginia would lead to a radically different under-
standing of the United States to that which currently shapes government
policy, though it is not a matter of simply substituting one for the other.
The object of a new critical and political practice cannot be choosing
between existing narratives of oppression, a process that inevitably results
in what Sally Munt calls the “fragmentation of sympathetic discourse,”
(7) but must involve an extension of existing categories that recognizes
the material and experiential connections between seemingly disparate
people and phenomena. Despite their differences, undocumented clean-
ers and unemployed former steel workers are victims of the same system,
which forces them into competition with one another.
Struggles over definitions necessarily occur in a variety of cultural
spaces, and, within universities, across a range of disciplines. This vol-
ume contends that the production, reading, and analysis of literature is
central to this process, that it can make a distinct, valuable contribution
to the understanding not only of working-class histories but the cate-
gory “working class” itself, and that a greater critical attention to class,
and the working class in particular, would extend both the methods
and object of literary studies. While important work has been done in
this area, many of the key texts, such as Jeremy Hawthorn’s collection
The British Working-Class Novel in the Twentieth Century (1984), Andy
Croft’s Red Letter Days: British Fiction in the 1930s (1990), Pamela Fox’s
Class Fictions: Shame and Resistance in the British Working-Class Novel,
1890–1945 (1994), and Ian Haywood’s Working-Class Fiction: From
Chartism to Trainspotting (1997), are now more than twenty years old.
The marginalization of working-class studies not only exposes the con-
servatism of many literature departments but changes in the priorities of
many on the left. Critical attention began to shift away from questions
1 INTRODUCTION 5
of class as early as the nineteen-seventies in response to new theoretical

ideas, social conditions and emancipatory movements; as Munt argues,
the fact that “the CCCS [the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies] moved away from working-class (primarily youth) sub-
jects and subcultures, to critique other social structures such as gender,
sexuality and race” at this time responded to “[m]ore general political
transformations” (5). The change in focus exposed the limitations of
much contemporary left-wing thought and practice, the forms of oppres-
sion it failed to recognize or address, but too often displaced rather than
extended existing emancipatory theories. The problem continued and
intensified in some later forms of identity politics. This collection does
not ignore the considerable political and interpretative advances made in
the process, but argues it is time to return to the problems of class that
were abandoned to right-wing populists. Neither Donald Trump nor
Theresa May can be allowed to speak for the marginalized; they must be
allowed to speak for themselves. Literary scholars can contribute to this
process by opening critical spaces, by recovering and discussing voices,
analyzing methods, and tracing debates and struggles.
Any return to working-class writing must be informed by femi-
nist, postcolonial, and queer studies, exploring the intersections of class
with gender, ethnic and sexual identities rather than reverting to ear-
lier critical models from which these categories were largely absent. It
must also recognize class as a contingent political category that not only
alters in response to changes in the means and relations of production,
but is always deployed under specific conditions for particular ends.
New analyses are always necessary because both the object and meth-
ods of study change. Working-class writing is essential to understand-
ing this complexity, in part because it insists upon the specificity and
complexities of working-class experience, which political, historical and
sociological accounts often erase. Its attention to the particular reveals
the ways in which class intersects with other identities and allegiances,
resulting in productive tensions, new forms of knowledge and activism.
Both the working class and the discourses through which its interests
are articulated have been redefined, even in recent decades, by a vari-
ety of historical events and forces, from the intensification of neoliberal
policies and ideas to changes in patterns of immigration and the rise of
new protest movements. Literature is able to trace the lived impact of
these changes and the complex relations between the various elements
that shape individual and collective identities. Its commitment to what
Richard Hoggart called “experiential wholeness,” with the ways in which

lives are shaped by many “different orders of things, all at once,” (20–
21) enables it to avoid establishing reductive hierarchies. A concern with
class does not somehow displace or supersede one with gender or sexu-
ality; these categories are mutually constitutive, continually shaping and
reshaping one another at the level of the individual as well as society.
As this suggests, the term working class does not describe a fixed or
essential quality of a group or person; it at once represents and inter-
prets a condition that is at least in principle contingent. An individual’s
class identity is a product of their economic and cultural position rather
than their essential nature, and may alter with changes in their situation,
though rarely as simply or completely as narratives of social mobility
suggest. It also depends on both the individual and social understand-
ing of that position, a process of interpretation informed by a range of
factors, from philosophy to political organization and activism. Class is
never simply there, a neutral, obvious, generally accepted category. Any
study of working-class writing must consequently explore the ways in
which the category is constituted and used, as well as analyzing specific
texts. The subtitle of this volume reflects this divide, as well as the neces-
sary relation between theory and practice central to radical traditions, a
relation most famously articulated in Marx’s argument that philosophy
should not only interpret but change the world (Marx 118). The chap-
ters have been loosely divided into two groups, those in part one which
focus on the ways in which the term working-class writing is under-
stood and the functions it serves, and those in part two which concen-
trate on specific textual interpretations. The difference is one of emphasis
rather than kind; all the essays perform both kinds of work. Making this
abstract distinction as the outset is important because it emphasizes the
nature and complexities of working-class literary studies, which must
continually explore and define the field it analyses.
The volume opens with Ben Clarke’s chapter, “Working-Class Writing
and Experimentation.” This considers how the emphasis on experimen-
tation in twentieth-century literary histories has served to marginalize
working-class writing, which has repeatedly been described as confined
by nineteenth-century realist forms and as innovative only at the level of
content. Working-class novels and even poetry are often aligned with the
“lower” category of documentary writing, and figured as significant pri-
marily as a source of historical data. Clarke employs a close analysis of
interwar texts including James Hanley’s Men in Darkness, James Barke’s
1 INTRODUCTION 7
Major Operation and, particularly, Jack Hilton’s Caliban Shrieks to chal-

lenge the idea that working-class writers simply reproduced conventional
realist forms. He argues that their work instead attempted to redefine
these under new conditions, to exploit their aesthetic and political pos-
sibilities without being confined by their histories. In advocating for a
renewed critical consideration of working-class writing that sees it, not
as breaking with the modernist critique of modernity but as an attempt
to rethink its terms within the context of particular social and political
struggles, this chapter draws on the work of Rancière to construct a his-
toricized, political model of experimentation; a theoretical project that
has implications, not only for the understanding and evaluation of work-
ing-class writing but also for broader literary histories.
In Chapter 3, “Interwoven Histories: Working-Class Literature and
Theory,” Jack Windle responds to Peter Hitchcock’s assertion that
“theories of class must be rethought on the basis of postcolonial histo-
riographical, anthropological, and literary research on subaltern voice
and subjectivity,” by arguing that a multifocal discussion of theory is
necessary not only for a new model of social class but for a new criti-
cal understanding of working-class writing. The chapter consists of three
interlocking sections. The first considers the ways in which working-class
writers traverse the lines between criticism, political engagement, theory,
and literary production by means of an analysis of Richard Hoggart’s
reception by French theorists such as Lévi-Strauss and Passeron and
working-class writers including Braine and Harrison to explore a deep-
seated antipathy towards the working class within the academy in gen-
eral and literary criticism in particular. The second section examines the
interwoven histories of the British working class and postcolonial peo-
ples. Engaging with recent work by Gilroy, Skeggs, Garner and Tyler,
it argues that whilst contemporary academic and political discourse is
complicit in a long history of racializing the working class, working-class
writers have consistently rejected this “centuries long ideological labour”
(Garner). The British working-class is a postcolonial constituency whose
“demotic multiculturalism” (Gilroy) resists notions of a racist “white
working class” and challenges the divisive rhetoric of politicians, journal-
ists and some critics. The third section draws on Skeggs’s understanding
of the “white working class” as the “constitutive outsider ‘at home’” and
her discussion of historical constructions of the working class as excre-
ment to consider materiality and the body in working-class writing. By
outlining how an interdisciplinary approach that combines postcolonial
and social theory with a radically engaged stance can shed new light on
the tradition of working-class writing in Britain, the chapter seeks to
develop the kind of theoretical framework for the study of working-class
writing that has so enriched the analysis of postcolonial and feminist texts
since the middle of the twentieth century.
Cassandra Falke’s chapter, “Meaning It: Everyday Hermeneutics and
the Language of Class in Literary Scholarship,” is concerned with finding
a language for studying working-class authors and experiences. Noting
how historical accounts of British literary criticism often insist on an
opposition between empathy and theory, and the consequent accusation
of Williams and Hoggart for “romanticization” and “nostalgic organi-
cism,” Falke asks where contemporary critics look for the particular kind
of writing needed to discuss working-class authorship? She goes on to
explore the ways in which working-class scholars have contributed to
the rhetoric of literary criticism; paying particular attention to how such
authors strive to write in a way that will resonate with readers whose lan-
guage is grounded more in embodied than in textual experience. Rather
than emphasize the obstacles remaining, Falke focuses on what has been
accomplished so far by scholars who rebelled against a language that
would alienate them from their working-class upbringing and the strate-
gies they have employed.
In Chapter 5, “Kings in Disguise and ‘Pure Ellen Kellond’: Literary
Social Passing in the Early Twentieth Century,” Luke Seaber provides a
different perspective on working-class writing by focusing on the phe-
nomenon of “social passing” in which an upper- or middle-class writer
passes themself off as working-class. After outlining some of the issues
involved in such social passing, particularly in relation to the genre of
incognito social investigation, he moves on to a fascinating compari-
son between the uses of working-class or lower-middle-class voices in
T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses. In arguing that
the effect of such texts is to draw attention to the difference between
the (privileged) writing voice and the voices represented, Seaber suggests
that perhaps modernism was more conservative than the writing of a
generation before in its refusal to let working-class voices speak for them-
selves. In the remainder of the chapter, he goes on to consider the extent
to which the generation following the modernists, the writers of the
1930s, crossed over to the working class, with particular reference to the
example of W. H. Auden. In conclusion, Seaber wonders whether literary
social passing is more concerned with the needs of a literary intelligentsia
1 INTRODUCTION 9
to appropriate the voices of others than to give any expression to the

working classes themselves.
Natasha Periyan’s chapter, “Democratic Art or Working-Class
Literature? Virginia Woolf, the Women’s Cooperative Guild and Literary
Value in the ‘Introductory Letter’,” provides an interesting contrast
with Seaber’s in its focus on Virginia Woolf’s work to develop a suita-
ble framework for the introduction she was writing for a volume which
most certainly did give expression to working-class voices: Life as We
Have Known It, a collection of testimonials by members of the Women’s
Co-operative Guild which was edited by Margaret Llewelyn Davies. As
Periyan demonstrates, Woolf paid sustained attention to the women’s
narratives and the resultant manner she found of critiquing middle-
class literary discourse and thereby opening the way for working-class
involvement in literature and criticism contradicts familiar accusations
of Woolf’s snobbery and exclusiveness. Periyan goes on to suggest that
the pains Woolf took with the “Introductory Letter” place it within a
broader literary continuum with others such as John Lehmann, who also
made sustained efforts to publish working-class writers.
In Chapter 7, “The Bakhtin Circle in Caribbean London: Race, Class
and Narrative Strategy,” Matti Ron notes how although discussion
of the working class has, after lengthy absence, re-entered mainstream
discourse, this class is often assumed to be an inherently white one har-
bouring “legitimate concerns around immigration.” Arguing that the
working class is always ethnically heterogeneous, he analyses how the
struggles—both political and literary—of Britain’s black working-class
led to a radical reevaluation of the very concepts of class and class
struggle. In particular, Ron applies Vološinov’s concept of the “multi-
accentuality” of the word to the frequent use of vernacular in Britain’s
“Windrush Generation” authors, who experimented with form and nar-
rative voice, to assert the legitimacy of their own cultural identities. By
taking Vološinov into Caribbean London via Sam Selvon’s The Lonely
Londoners, George Lamming’s The Emigrants and ER Braithwaite’s To
Sir, With Love, Ron shows how these forms of struggle inherent within
language, rather than contradict each other, actually intersect to form
a complex understanding of the articulation between class and racial
oppressions, doing so in such a way as to parallel the socio-political com-
ing-into-being of the black working class in Britain.
In Simon Lee’s chapter, “‘Look at the State of This Place!’: The Impact
of Domestic Space on Post-war Class Consciousness,” he analyses the
British Kitchen Sink movement to explore shifts in the British working-

class imaginary. Arguing that disciplinary mechanisms of working-class
domestic spaces in mid-century England produced frustration, inscrib-
ing behavioural norms tied to class identities, he seeks to show how
books written in the 1950s and 1960s suggest a modification in class
consciousness that challenges the domestic and anticipates a restructur-
ing of working-class attitudes and beliefs. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s
tripartite model of spatial production, Michel Foucault’s conception
of non-hegemonic space, and work by Doreen Massey, David Harvey,
Edward Soja, and Bertrand Westphal, Lee explores fictional representa-
tions of working-class environments to argue that space is never truly sta-
ble, but is always being rewritten by the changing needs of those it seeks
to inscribe. These changing needs are at the root of a powerful shift in
the working-class imaginary that challenges the notion of a unified class
consciousness.
The first chapter of “Part Two: Practices,” Pamela Fox’s “Ethel
Carnie Holdsworth’s Helen of Four Gates: Recasting Melodrama in
Novel and Cinematic Form” was originally published as the introduc-
tion to the 2016 reissue of Ethel Carnie Holdsworth’s Helen of Four
Gates in the Kennedy and Boyd edition of Carnie Holdsworth’s works.
It includes perhaps more biographical and descriptive material than usual
for an analytical academic article but this was the very quality which sug-
gested its suitability to us as a case study illustrating how the complexities
of intersectional demands can be met in practice by working-class writers.
Fox outlines how the former mill worker’s writing career developed at
the beginning of the twentieth century and, in particular, how Carnie
Holdsworth’s journalistic work enabled her to develop theories includ-
ing a conception of emotional sensibility as a key component of both
class and poetic consciousness. Fox shows how Helen of Four Gates dis-
tills these theories within a melodramatic framework that allows her
to align romance conventions with socialist-feminist aims in order to
reimagine freedom. Fox also goes on to discuss, how due to Carnie
Holdsworth’s underlying narrative, the 1921 film version of Helen of
Four Gates provides a darker vision of post-First-World-War England
than the pastoral norms of its cinematic competitors, which complicates
the class and gender politics of such films.
In Chapter 10, “Representation of the Working Classes of the British
Colonies and/as the Subalterns in Mulk Raj Anand’s Coolie,” Sabujkoli
Bandopadhyay argues that the colonial working-class of the subcontinent
1 INTRODUCTION 11
shared a dialogic relationship with British working classes during the late
colonial period. Focusing on Mulk Raj Anand’s 1936 novel Coolie, she
examines how the colonial, racial and imperial relationship between the
Empire and its colony influenced the nature and scope of working-class
literature. In analyzing how, despite being assigned the nomenclature
of the “native-informant,” Anand’s choice of writing about the subcon-
tinental working-class in English emancipated his work from its regional
boundaries and attained a true international character, Bandopadhyay sit-
uates Coolie as an example of inter World War working-class literature, and
considers how his fictional representation of the colonial working-class
adds to our understanding of the British working-class tradition.
Jason Finch’s chapter, “London Jewish … and Working-Class? Social
Mobility and Boundary-Crossing in Simon Blumenfeld and Alexander
Baron,” sets out to fill in the gaps that are left when “working-class writ-
ing” is understood as paradigmatically concerned with the lives of indus-
trial workers and their families, in the Midlands, the North of England,
South Wales or central Scotland, where the oppositions between capi-
tal and labour were locally the starkest. Arguing that London itself has
a rich, complicated and nuanced place in the story of twentieth-century
British class relations, he suggests that London Jewish writers tell, in
a way that with few exceptions non-Jewish London writers before the
1960s do not, the story of the London working classes. Moreover, Finch
demonstrates how London Jewish writers challenge “working class” as a
category in the way that they chronicle the “up-and-out” move in which,
in class-stratified Britain, working-class people often aspire not to be
working-class. In this manner, he introduces a particular complexity to
discussions of the working class, which is that members of the working
class can make money as capitalists and successful capitalists can perceive
themselves as working-class. As Finch notes, this tendency has powerful
resonances in the era of a government attempting to redefine the work-
ing class as the people who work, as opposed to those who survive on
benefits.
In Chapter 12, “The Deindustrial Novel: Twenty-First-Century
British Fiction and the Working Class,” Phil O’Brien draws on Raymond
Williams’s argument that work and the industrial landscape are key
formative influences and applies it to twenty-first century fictional rep-
resentations of once industrial working-class communities, which have
undergone profound social and economic change due to neoliber-
alism, deindustrialisation, and unemployment. He analyses Anthony
Cartwright’s The Afterglow (2004), Catherine O’Flynn’s What Was Lost

(2007), and Edward Hogan’s Blackmoor (2008) as texts which attempt
to document a specific structure of feeling emerging out of the distinc-
tively post-Thatcher landscape of late twentieth/early twenty-first cen-
tury deindustrial Britain. O’Brien demonstrates how the consequences
of deindustrialisation are not restricted to those (predominantly) male
workers, who lose their jobs through the closure of industrial plants, fac-
tories, and mines which feature in the novels of Cartwright, O’Flynn,
and Hogan, but also alter the dynamics of class, creating shifts in the
gender roles which make up the “traditional” working-class family, as
well as creating an inheritance of loss which is passed onto successive
generations.
Peter Clandfield’s chapter, “Working-Class Heritage Revisited in
Alan Warner’s The Deadman’s Pedal,” focuses on The Deadman’s
Pedal as a novel which highlights the contemporary value of revisiting
the social-democratic, public heritage that was constructed largely by,
as well as for, working-class people in Britain during the decades after
the Second World War. Comparing the novel with Raymond Williams’s
Border Country (1960), he focuses on how both novels reveal a pow-
erful incremental emphasis on movement—of trains, goods, people—as
central to the work that working-class people do. Clandfield also makes
a compelling comparison between Deadman’s Pedal and Evelyn Waugh’s
Brideshead Revisited and argues that Warner employs these echoes and
connections to challenge post-Thatcher underminings and co-options of
working-class culture. In this manner, Clandfield argues Warner’s work
to be exemplary in the way that it shows that the work of the novelist
is to construct and recycle cultural resources: all novelists, even Waugh,
might be seen as workers in this sense.
Finally, Nick Hubble’s chapter, “Respectability, Nostalgia and Shame
in Contemporary English Working-Class Fiction,” examines gendered
working-class responses ranging from shame to nostalgia for the “com-
mon proletarian way of life” which the historian Eric Hobsbawm iden-
tified, in mainly masculine terms, as the dominant structure of feeling
within the British working class during the first half of the twentieth
century. Through analysis of three key texts—Pat Barker’s Union Street
(1982), Gordon Burns’s The North of England Home Service (2003),
and Zadie Smith’s NW (2012)—he maps out a process by which some
working-class women are shown to reject the structures of feeling and
social contexts which restrict them to a subaltern status, while their male
contemporaries are more likely to internalize and defend that subaltern
1 INTRODUCTION 13
consciousness. Suggesting that this process leads to the prevalence of

the familiar and nostalgic trope “whatever happened to the working
class?,” which dates back at least to 1970s concerns as reflected in the
television series Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, Hubble argues
that new intersectional focuses on difference are important to contest the
implicitly homogenizing nostalgia of historical laments for the decline of
working-class solidarity and consciousness.
This book is not intended as the definitive word on working-class
writing viewed from the perspective of 2018; it can only address a finite
number of issues and writers. However, we hope that it will contribute
productively to the reawakened interest in matters of class which has
risen steadily since at least the 2008 financial crisis. There needs to be a
much wider discussion than is currently occurring as to how class oper-
ates in the twenty-first century and what different forms are now available
to working-class writing in a continually changing social context. Once
upon a time, the working class appeared easy to define. The historian
Eric Hobsbawm (1978) identified “the famous cap immortalized by the
Andy Capp cartoon” (282) as one of the key signs of “a common style
of proletarian life” (281) that was dominant in Britain from the 1880s to
the 1950s. While it is important to commemorate that culture – as Jane
Robbins’s sculpture of Andy Capp, featured on the cover of this book,
does (while also implicitly drawing attention to the question of how the
working class is represented)—it is equally important not to allow our-
selves to become trapped within the social constraints of that past. The
analysis of working-class writing and representation over the decades
ahead requires new approaches and this book signals an intent that such
analyses will assume a central role within academic literary study.
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function-real-opportunity-needed-not-trump.
PART I
Theories
CHAPTER 2
Working-Class
Writing and Experimentation
Ben Clarke
The literature of the nineteen-thirties is conventionally seen as a failed

experiment. As Valentine Cunningham argues, critics represent the dec-
ade as a time “of Political Art, of Documentary deviationism, a time of
sad Realist cravings, of rampant anti-Formalism, anti-Textualism, and
so a sort of unfortunate historical blip or bypass on which writing got
snagged and slowed down in the good march of the twentieth century
from modernism at the very beginning to postmodernism at the end”
(5). From this perspective, the period is significant primarily because its
errors clarify the value of the movements that come before and after.
In particular, the perceived failings of the nineteen-thirties are used to
assert the destructive consequences of commitment and, by extension,
the inherent opposition between art and politics. George Orwell’s argu-
ment that “the literary history of the thirties seems to justify the opinion
that a writer does well to keep out of politics,” (105) a statement best
understood as an intervention in historically-specific debates centred on
relations between writers and the Communist Party, has acquired what
Andy Croft calls an “orthodox authority” (Red Letter Days 17) as a
B. Clarke (*)
University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC, USA
e-mail: b_clarke@uncg.edu
© The Author(s) 2018 17

B. Clarke and N. Hubble (eds.), Working-Class Writing,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96310-5_2
18 B. CLARKE
final judgement on the decade and on artists’ responsibilities more gen-

erally. The nineteen-thirties function as a cautionary tale, a demonstra-
tion of the cost of engagement. Its errors are identified not only with
the “Auden generation,” who, as Alison Light argues, continue to exer-
cise a “mesmeric fascination” over a literary and critical establishment
obsessed with “cultural elites,” (x) but with the working-class texts pub-
lished during the decade. As this chapter demonstrates, the position
uses established generic hierarchies and ideas about experimentation
and artistic value to reinforce the division between literature and poli-
tics and in so doing, as Croft argues, exclude “working-class writing –
working-class experience… from ‘English Literature’” (Red Letter Days
340). The process not only misrepresents working-class texts as passively
reproducing received artistic and political forms but narrows the discus-
sion of innovation itself. A reinterpretation of the nineteen-thirties cen-
tred on working-class writing would not only produce a broader model
of ‘English Literature’ but a more complex understanding of experimen-
tation that analyses its functions as well as describing its forms.
Despite a wealth of revisionist scholarship, the idea of the nine-
teen-thirties as an anomaly, a misguided diversion from the productive
main current of twentieth-century literature, has proved remarkably per-
sistent. The decade remains a critical problem that scholars often deal
with by simplifying or ignoring it; as Benjamin Kohlmann observes, the
“recent flourishing of neo-formalist criticism has virtually bypassed thir-
ties literature, with two notable exceptions: Auden’s ‘September 1, 1939’
and his elegy for Yeats with its resonant warning that ‘poetry makes noth-
ing happen’,” (12) two texts that seem to support the claim that com-
mitment was an artistic and ethical mistake. As these poems and Orwell’s
comments indicate, the idea that the decade demonstrates the dangers of
engagement emerges in its immediate aftermath, as writers and intellectu-
als, many of whom had been actively involved in its literary and political
struggles, sought to define its major currents and establish new cultural
positions for themselves. Their interpretations of the period were used
during the Cold War to construct the United States and the countries
of Western Europe as open societies in which artists were able to pur-
sue their interests without state interference and to emphasize the ways
in which the Soviet Union stifled free expression. In The God that Failed,
one of the most prominent texts in which writers recanted their involve-
ment with Communism, Stephen Spender insisted that “[a]mongst the
Communist intellectuals during the 1930’s I noticed behavior which in
2 WORKING-CLASS WRITING AND EXPERIMENTATION 19
Eastern Europe has to-day become institutionalized in the Syndicates

of Writers which dictate to novelists and poets what they should think
and feel” (266). The idea that commitment restricted artistic freedom
became a critical orthodoxy that continues to shape literary analysis. As
Kohlmann argues, “our own standards of critical evaluation are still more
deeply embedded in the anti-thirties discourse of the 1940s and 1950s
than we commonly admit” (199). Approaches developed under specific
historical pressures continue to shape critical practice decades later. This
is a particular problem at the moment when, as Nick Hubble argues, “the
tenor of our times makes comparison with the 1930s ever more appo-
site,” (31) when there is a particular need to make sense of the literature
of the nineteen-thirties and the problems it addressed.
The myth of the nineteen-thirties claimed that political commit-
ment not only limited the subjects writers addressed but the methods
they employed and their concern with innovation. This was not simply
because authors submitted to prescribed forms but because a focus on
the content and social impact of texts led to a neglect of aesthetic and
technical questions. As Virginia Woolf put it in “The Leaning Tower,”
writers
were forced to be aware of what was happening in Russia; in Germany; in

Italy; in Spain. They could not go on discussing aesthetic emotions and
personal relations. They could not confine their reading to the poets; they
had to read the politicians. (172)
The artist “turns from the private lives of his characters to their social
surroundings and their public opinions,” (“The Artist and Politics” 230)
neglecting in the process both the psychological complexities that had
occupied their immediate predecessors and the methods they had devel-
oped to explore them. When they did use innovative formal strategies,
these were borrowed from writers “like Mr. Yeats and Mr. Eliot” rather
than the result of their own engagement with their subject; they “took
over from the elder poets a technique which, after many years of experi-
ment, these poets used skilfully, and used it clumsily and often inappro-
priately” (“Leaning Tower” 172). Their attempts to extend the subjects
literature considered and the audiences it addressed were undermined by
a formal conservatism that contrasted with the conspicuous innovations
of the older generation of writers, by their failure to develop techniques
of representation and analysis appropriate to their project.
20 B. CLARKE
This idea of a break from literary modernism, in the sense, as Malcolm

Bradbury and James McFarlane put it, of an “era of high aesthetic
self-consciousness and non-representationalism, in which art turns from
realism and humanistic representation towards style, technique, and spa-
tial form” (25) is integral to numerous accounts of the nineteen-thirties,
including some produced by its most prominent writers. Stephen
Spender, for example, insisted in that his generation was “aware of hav-
ing renounced values which we continued nevertheless to consider
aesthetically superior in Joyce, Yeats, Eliot, Lawrence and Virginia
Woolf” (“Background” 6). The statement suggests that due to particu-
lar historical pressures he reluctantly made the decision not to focus on
artistic concerns as these had been understood by his predecessors but
continued to recognize their importance and accept the terms in which
they were defined. This idea is reproduced in academic studies, the most
influential of which is still Samuel Hynes’ The Auden Generation. As
Kristen Bluemel argues, since its publication in 1976 “it has been diffi-
cult to discuss interwar British writers in terms other than those provided
by his accounts of young Oxbridge poets, parable art, and the apoca-
lyptic ‘Myth of the Next War’,” (65) Hynes’ study is structured by the
idea of a “swing in the early ‘thirties toward political commitment and
away from ‘individualism’,” which resulted in “a deviation from the main
thrust of the modern movement”. He argues that “by 1936 the results
of that swing were apparent: political commitment had produced no art
of any importance, and no aesthetic that seemed adequate to a genera-
tion raised on Eliot’s essays and the books of Richards” (206). The rejec-
tion of modernism was, in effect, a rejection of art itself.
The foundations of this position are visible in Cyril Connolly’s edito-
rials in Horizon. Connolly represents the journal, which first appeared in
January 1940, as the embodiment of a new literary period defined partly
by a reaction to the previous decade. He argued that “the impetus given
by Left Wing politics is for the time exhausted” and that Horizon, as “a
reflection of its time,” would focus on artistic values understood in iso-
lation from broader social concerns; “[o]ur standards are aesthetic, and
our politics are in abeyance” (January 1940, 5). Connolly recognized the
reasons for the “Marxist attack on the Ivory Tower dwellers, on Proust,
Joyce, Virginia Woolf etc.” and acknowledged that it had “set fire to a
lot of rotten timber,” but argued that its positive achievements had been
limited, that “the desolation is hardly compensated for by the poems
of Swingler and Rickword, or the novels of Upward and Alec Brown”.
Horizon was intended to reassert the idea that “writing is an art, that it
is an end in itself as well as a means to an end,” and to “reeducate the
peppery palates of our detractors to an appreciation of delicate poetry
and fine prose” (February 1940, 70). In this account, committed texts
are distinguished by a crudity of method that stems from an instrumental
understanding of writing. Their emphasis on the working class is cen-
tral to the problem. In a later editorial, published a few months before
Horizon closed, Connolly argued that Marxist theories maintained that
the “only salvation for the artist lies in his representation of the problem
of the working class”. The inadequacy of the claim was demonstrated by
its failure to produce significant work; the texts “which we should take
as a model… don’t exist”. Even working-class artists themselves rejected
these injunctions, and “whenever they have a chance to exhibit their art
and not what they are told ought to be their art, it appears more ‘deca-
dent’ than bourgeois art because its neurotic qualities are not enriched
by competent technique” (Connolly 1949: 305–306). The statements
encapsulate a number of influential arguments about the nineteen-
thirties and working-class writing, from the idea that commitment
involved artists relinquishing their freedom and submitting to political
prescriptions to the notion that working-class artists were distinguished
by their technical failings.
As Connolly’s arguments suggest, writing about the working class is
central to both the dominant image of the nineteen-thirties and its crit-
ical marginalization. The idea that it was a misguided concern with the
working class that led to a neglect of aesthetic problems and the kind of
formal experimentation practised by canonical modernists has been used
to dismiss left-wing texts in general and those produced by working-class
writers in particular. Hynes states bluntly that “[v]irtually no writing of
literary importance came out of the working class” (206) in the decade.
In exploring and challenging his claim, this chapter not only argues that
working-class writing is more innovative than has often been acknowl-
edged but insists on the need for a renewed critical engagement with the
concept of formal experimentation. It briefly considers some of the radi-
cal implications of modernist technique, before examining the argument
that working-class authors rejected formal innovation and uncritically fol-
lowed the conventions of documentary writing and nineteenth-century
realist fiction. It then analyses a number of contrasting working-class
texts, considering James Barke’s combination of modernist technique
and didacticism in Major Operation (1936) and the innovative qualities
22 B. CLARKE
of James Hanley’s ‘plain’ prose in his early collection of short stories,

Men in Darkness (1931), before focusing on the work of Jack Hilton,
and in particular his first, autobiographical book, Caliban Shrieks (1935),
a text that exemplifies what Andy Croft describes as his “highly provoc-
ative rhetorical prose style” (“Jack Hilton” 31) and illustrates the ways
in which he extends the form as well as the content of literature. The
chapter insists that, far from simply following inherited forms, or naively
assuming a direct relation between language and the world it describes,
these texts are experimental in ways that do not simply reproduce the
strategies of canonical modernism but respond to distinct historical and
literary problems.
In “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown,” Virginia Woolf argued that the
“immense care” (78) with which Edwardian novelists such as Bennett
detailed the material condition of their characters paradoxically obscured
their most important qualities; Bennett was “trying to hypnotize us into
the belief that, because he has made a house, there must be a person liv-
ing there” (80). As a reading of Bennett, Woolf’s essay has significant
flaws. It ignores the way in which, as Richard Hoggart argues, “Bennett
found transcendence precisely by feeling his way through … thisness,”
(xiii) as well as his recognition that individual identities are always pro-
duced under particular material and social conditions and can be
explored through them. This process is most obvious to those with lim-
ited resources, whose attempts at self-definition are continually restricted
by their circumstances, and for John Carey that the fact that “Woolf does
not see the relevance” of the kinds of environmental pressures Bennett
detailed to the “inner self” demonstrates her “her upper-middle-class
obtuseness” (175). Woolf’s essay is considerably more productive as a
reading of the modernist project, which she here constructs as an attempt
to represent individuals and experiences literature had previously ignored.
Bennett functions as a straw man, an imagined orthodoxy in opposition
to which new ideas and methods of representation could be developed.
Modernist literature would later function in similar ways for some of the
radical artists of the nineteen-thirties who were, as Kohlmann argues,
“writing against modernism, rather than simply after it,” (12) and who
used a reductive idea of modernists as confined to “the Ivory Tower”
(13) to clarify their own practice. In both instances, the object was not
simply to establish a distinct position within a contested literary culture
but to finds ways of representing people, objects, and experiences previ-
ously excluded from literature.
The most valuable forms of modernist experimentation are not arbi-

trary exercises but seek to change what Jacques Rancière calls the “par-
tition of the sensible,” the structures that define the limits of the “visible
and the sayable, which allows (or does not allow) some specific data to
appear; which allows or does not allow some specific subjects to desig-
nate them and speak about them” (“Politics of Literature” 152). The
attempt to redefine perception is not one political strategy amongst oth-
ers but, for Rancière, defines politics; “knowing how to impose one’s
will to other human beings is a science that any kid can learn in the
playground of his/her school” (“A few remarks” 118), but the ‘parti-
tion of the sensible’ determines which people and ideas can participate
in government, in the broadest sense, and reimagining it consequently
has the potential, not simply to alter a specific distribution of power but
the nature and limits of power itself. It is a necessarily disorientating
process, and the difficulty and insights of much modernist writing both
stem from its disruption of what is normally taken for granted, a criti-
cal response enacted at the level of the phrase and sentence. As Astradur
Eysteinsson argues, modernism attempts to “interrupt the modernity
that we live and understand as a social, if not ‘normal,’ way of life,” in
part by “refusing to communicate according to established socio-se-
miotic contracts” (6–7). It implicitly argues that dominant values are
reproduced in the form as well as the content of normative modes of
representation and that style and structure are consequently sites of ideo-
logical struggle. The complexity of writers such as Joyce and Woolf, and
their concern with their own rhetorical strategies, undermines the notion
that language offers a direct, unmediated access to a stable, coherent
reality and exposes the assumptions and implications of particular tech-
niques. Their status as art depends on this concern with method, which
fulfils a critical as well as aesthetic function, or more strictly demonstrates
that these cannot, in the last analysis, be separated.
As Tony Davies argues, working-class writing is conventionally seen
as lacking this concern with the process of representation, as being “real-
istic in the most unpremeditated and unselfconscious fashion,” a liter-
ature that “‘tells it as it is’ (or, more often, was) in plain words, valued
for their sincerity and simple truth” (125). According to this view, it
assumes a direct correspondence between word and world, and so does
not address the kinds of formal problems that so occupied modernist
writers, focusing instead on content, on particular experiences, objects,
and problems. This does not mean that it has no structure but rather
24 B. CLARKE
that it adopts existing forms without reflecting on their implications.

This is partly because the forms with which it is most closely associated,
such as reportage or realism, are held to elide their own rhetorical strat-
egies, portraying themselves as natural, value-free ways of representing
the world. Jean-François Lyotard argued that the “only definition” of
realism was that it “intends to avoid the question of reality implicated in
that of art,” (75) and this argument continues to inform critical analy-
ses and hierarchies. After the nineteenth century, realism is often under-
stood negatively, as the failure to recognize or address representational
problems.
At first glance, this might seem a plausible interpretation of working-
class writing. Many authors were influenced by nineteenth-century
realists such as Dickens, whose work, as Jonathan Rose argued, pro-
vided a “fund of allusions, characters, tropes, and situations that could
be drawn upon by people who were not trained to express themselves
on paper,” (114) although Dickens’ texts, with their plurality of voices,
shifting narrative perspectives, and use of multiple generic traditions, are
never as straightforward as their dominant image suggests. Many writers
used documentary techniques and, as Christopher Hilliard argues, were
encouraged to do so by editors who supported “plebian authors” partly
because they believed they could describe “working-class experience,
without the taint of middle-class observers’ prejudice” (157). Some
working-class writers even declared themselves indifferent to questions
of technique, emphasizing instead the content of their texts, which they
figured as an immediate transcript of their thoughts and experiences.
Jack Hilton advised aspiring working-class authors to “write your piece
out as though you were talking to yourself, the more spontaneous the
better” (“Writing and the Worker”) and argued that “[f]orm is mostly
a matter of routinous execution” that “belongs to the second lick” and
should be addressed “after creating,” (Letter to Jack Common) although
his comments should be understood as performative, part of a process
of self-fashioning rather than a straightforward description of his writing
process.
Committed writers in the nineteen-thirties were subject to spe-
cific political pressures. Those associated with the Communist Party
were often encouraged to use direct, accessible methods of representa-
tion. These arguments are most famously embodied in the debates over
‘Socialist realism’, a term that continues to haunt accounts of the period.
At the 1934 Soviet Writers’ Congress, Karl Radek demanded a literature
that would reflect “reality as it is, in all its complexity, in all its contrari-
ety, and not only capitalist reality, but also that other, new reality—the
reality of socialism” (157). He saw a new kind of realism as the best
way to achieve this, and rejected modernist experimentation, comparing
Joyce’s work to a “heap of dung, crawling with worms, photographed
by a cinema apparatus through a microscope,” (153) and insisting that
literature should build upon “a consciousness of the fate of humanity”
rather than focusing on “the irrational … the unconscious and the sub-
conscious” (158). Socialist realism was, in theory, new, a break from
bourgeois literary tradition, but it was built upon nineteenth-century lit-
erary models and Radek insisted that “if I were to write novels, I would
learn how to write them from Tolstoy and Balzac” (182).
Despite this, the image of working-class writers retreating from formal
experimentation into the certainties of realism is deceptive. Nineteenth-
century fiction did inform many authors but there were other contem-
porary influences, one of the most important of which, as Andy Croft
argues, was the modernist D. H. Lawrence, whose work suggested the
possibility of “native, national working-class literary tradition to which
they could see themselves belonging” (Red Letter Days 67). Many work-
ing-class writers read widely, including journals such as John Lehmann’s
New Writing and John Middleton Murray’s Adelphi, both of which pro-
vided important forums for their work, and some came into direct contact
with literary figures from more privileged backgrounds. Jack Common,
for example, worked for the Adelphi, was a friend of George Orwell’s, and
corresponded with E. M. Forster, who told him that “[i]f I was a little
younger you might influence me” (Letter to Jack Common). Though
many working-class writers employed documentary techniques, they did
not see themselves as bound by them or regard the form itself as static.
Some worked in a variety of genres, including James Hanley, who wrote
Grey Children (1937), a study of poverty in South Wales, but also the
subversive, disturbing novella Boy (1931), which was initially banned for
obscenity, and the conspicuously experimental No Directions (1943). Few
writers followed the principles of Socialist Realism, which Peter Marks
argues was little discussed outside Left Review and failed “to influence
thirties British literature in any significant way” (34).
The 1934 Soviet Writers’ Congress is significant, not because it pro-
vided a widely used template for left-wing and working-class writing but
because it demonstrates that even explicitly Communist writers were
actively concerned with questions of literary form during the decade. In
26 B. CLARKE
The Novel and the People, Ralph Fox argued that it “is completely for-
eign to the spirit of Marxism to neglect the formal side of art,” (134)
and Radek’s speech to the congress was founded on his conviction that
“the proletarian writer, fighting his way forward, has to labour hard over
problems of form” (146). As Janet Montefiore argues, socialist realism
has come to be used as “an ideological whipping-boy by people who
don’t bother to read Marxist novels, because they already know that
these must be either boring naturalistic slices of proletarian life, or else
even more boring glorification of grain silos in Kiev,” (142) but far from
leading to the abandonment of technical problems it shows the intense
debate over such issues. The nineteen-thirties are characterized, not by
submission to a single formal orthodoxy imposed from Moscow but on
the contrary by widespread experimentation driven by what Kohlmann
calls “deep-seated anxieties regarding literature’s political articulacy” (3).
This was particularly true for working-class writers, who confronted a lit-
erary tradition that was, as Raymond Williams argues, “shaped primar-
ily… by another and dominant class” (219) and offered limited models
for the representation of their ideas and experiences. Extending its scope
and exposing its assumptions and limitations demanded changes in form
as well as content, and working-class writers of the period are often tech-
nically innovative, though in ways that do not always fit the terms estab-
lished by theories of modernism. The range of strategies they employ is
best illustrated through the kind of close attention to specific texts gen-
erally excluded from conventional literary histories, which, when they
consider working-class writing at all, tend to view it, like the people it
describes, as an undifferentiated mass.
One author who does make use of techniques normally associated
with writers such as Woolf and Joyce is James Barke, whose novel Major
Operation is, Hilliard argues, perhaps “the most ambitious” of the direct
“engagements with modernism” (160) by a working-class authors in the
nineteen-thirties. The novel employs a variety of conspicuously innova-
tive formal strategies, particularly to represent the chaos and diversity
of the modern city, though its marked attention to class divisions and
concern with impoverished areas distinguishes it from many more famil-
iar modernist texts. The image of Glasgow, where “slum girls… flash-
ily dressed” made “for Hope Street and Sauchiehall Street to find clients
among the lecherous and hot-blooded section of the middle class,” (72)
contrasts with the more respectable London of Mrs. Dalloway, although
as the repeated references to Joyce in Major Operation suggest there
are parallels to the representations of Dublin in Dubliners, A Portrait of

the Artist as a Young Man, and particularly Ulysses. Barke’s use of Joyce
emphasizes a shared attempt to redefine and extend the sensible to
include forms of everyday experience and desire previously regarded as
beneath literature, but Major Operation is also an explicitly committed,
didactic left-wing text. It not only explains but promotes radical ideas,
most obviously in the discussions in hospital between the Communist
Jock MacKelvie and middle-class George Anderson, a “liberal and
humanitarian type” (292) who comes to accept through their conver-
sations that the workers are “in every way superior to his class” (316)
and takes up his “place in the ranks” (340) of the Communist move-
ment. The reader is exposed to the same arguments and may, in the-
ory, be convinced in the same way. There are similarities between this
instructional quality of the novel and method of The Ragged Trousered
Philanthropists, which, as Peter Miles argues, “offers itself for use as
much as contemplation” (6). Barke draws on multiple authors and tra-
ditions, on Tressell as well as Joyce, deliberately destabilizing critical
categories. In particular, he rejects the idea that aesthetic and didactic
concerns are incompatible; his formal experimentation is essential to his
broader argument which, in turn, determines its contours. The stylistic
innovations of Major Operation are not arbitrary demonstrations of tech-
nical skill but integral elements of a coherent political project.
Barke’s novel is not only marked by its self-conscious transgression
of the boundary between art and propaganda central to critical hierar-
chies but by an insistent questioning of the division between high and
low culture. In this respect, his work not only resembles that of mod-
ernists such as Joyce and Eliot but anticipates both postmodernism and
the varieties of cultural studies on which it drew. Major Operation brings
normally distinct texts into dialogue with one another, as when the nar-
rator wonders “what Mrs. Bloom would have thought about Mae West?
Or Mae West about Marion Bloom?” (122) The technique has a critical
purpose, not only drawing connections between seemingly distinct areas
of cultural productions but, in this instance, using the exploration of sex
in Ulysses to expose its exploitation in mass culture. The complexities
of sexual desire and practice, which encompass “horror, brutality, pain,
distress, pleasure and exquisite satisfaction… sweetness, gentleness and
infinite tenderness” (115–116) are obscured in the search for the finan-
cial value of the “thrill left in smut” (100). As Adorno and Horkheimer
argued, the representation of sex in mass culture is problematic, not
28 B. CLARKE
because it is too pervasive and explicit, but because it is reductive; whilst

the work of art is “ascetic and unashamed,” the “culture industry is por-
nographic and prudish” (111). Its appearance of excess obscures a refusal
to explore the complexities of desire.
The accusation that mass culture is obscene is, on its own terms, a
fiction, but persists because it serves distinct social functions. It not
only stimulates a demand it cannot fulfil and conceals the commercial
exploitation of desire, but displaces more fundamental prohibitions.
Barke imagines a representative of the dominant culture explaining that
“we don’t mind a little sex, sir, provided it’s treated in a light, aphrodisi-
acal manner and provided there’s a high moral tone prevailing through-
out,” but there should be no mention of “politics! No, siree. Keep
politics out of literature” (122). Amongst other things, this prohibition
obscures the politics of sex itself, which despite the appearance of unme-
diated spontaneity is shaped by the transactional logic of the market and
broader patriarchal discourses. As Hubble argues, Barke does not “con-
front the full implications” of the “need to incorporate working-class
female agency into his panoramic vision of class conflict in the modernist
city,” (111) but his representation of the tensions between sex and poli-
tics creates a critical space for the kind of intersectional feminist analysis
the text itself cannot achieve.
Barke’s method depends on his use of what are normally seen as
incompatible forms drawn from multiple cultural spaces. As Valentine
Cunningham argues, the novel undermines the notion of any “clear-cut
opposition between Realism and modernism, socialists and modernists,
Social Realism over against Joyceanism” (14). It rejects the notion of
modernism as reactionary but also the notion of a distinction between
art and propaganda often used to marginalize working-class and com-
mitted writing. For Barke, modernism is one revolutionary instrument
amongst others, a way of engaging with immediate political problems.
By extension, he argues that technical experimentation is a means not
an end. Not all acts of formal disruption have radical implications; their
significance depends upon the critical practice to which they contribute.
This does not imply that they can only function as part of a single, coher-
ent political project, in the way envisaged by at least some advocates of
socialist realism, but that they function within particular literary and his-
torical contexts and are subject to interpretation. Major Operation not
only demonstrates the range of techniques employed by working-class
writers, something which in itself disrupts the idea of a homogenous
realist tradition, but insists on a critical engagement with experimenta-

tion that considers its aesthetic and political functions.
In his 1931 collection of short stories, Men in Darkness, James Hanley
also makes use of experimental techniques, in part to criticize what he
perceives as the limitations of his immediate literary predecessors. In
“Narrative,” the feverish shipwrecked sailor Brady delivers a long, asso-
ciative diatribe in which he attacks “Conrad and his tribe bloody mas-
terpieces about Empire written in cabins with carpets and nice fires and
more wine there tiger they’re all right. What about bloody war in ship’s
bunkers ship’s stokehold bleedin’ authors shipping on tramps as pas-
sengers damn-all to do and down to Borneo and Gulf and other places
and masterpiece written in London true story of the sea” (103). The
use of recognizably modernist techniques to criticize a canonical mod-
ernist writer suggests Hanley is concerned with the political implica-
tions of Conrad’s texts rather than the methods he employs, with the
ends his writing serves rather than its means. Men in Darkness, like Major
Operation, demonstrates an ability to use such techniques differently, but
the radicalism of Hanley’s stories does not lie simply in their use of such
overtly experimental narrative strategies but in the contrasting econ-
omy of their dominant representational form. In his introduction to the
text, John Cowper Powys argued that Hanley’s “bald, bleak, stripped,
winnowed and harrowed style” was characteristic of the “most modern
school of aesthetics,” and demonstrated that the “latest and most sophis-
ticated school of young modern writers has thrown in at least its æsthetic
lot with the masses” (x–xi). For Powys, minimalism was conspicuously
radical, a break with previous ideas about the form and function of art.
Whilst it had definite class connotations, it was not the passive reflection
of working-class speech but the product of deliberate technical decisions
informed by the work of innovative contemporaries. In particular, it
drew on American writers such as Hemingway and the popular “‘hard-
boiled’ novelists” such as Dashiell Hammett who, Croft argues, provided
the “best known examples of writing about contemporary working-class
life” (Red Letter Days 169) in the period. The argument encourages us
to see an apparently straightforward passage such as:
He looked up and down the road. All around. A tram came rushing down
on him. The bell clanged. A savagery in its very tone. (Hanley 247)
as a political statement and artistic choice.

30 B. CLARKE
The plurality of Hanley’s writing, in Men in Darkness and elsewhere,

not only emphasizes his use and combination of different techniques for
different ends, but in so doing extends the notion of experimentation.
The inclusion in “Narrative” of both terse sentences such as “More men
running with heaving lines” (55) and the fluidity of Brady’s hallucinatory
monologue as he sees again “bleedin’ Aussies lying there all muck and
s— and blood on their gobs sick on their tunics, doing it there as they
couldn’t move—skipper said too many men on this ship too many men”
(101) suggests a functional rather than qualitative difference between
styles. Hanley does not lack an artistic ability at the beginning of the
story which he gains by the end, nor does he move from an inert realism
to a creative modernism, ascending established literary hierarchies. His
“bald, bleak, stripped, winnowed and harrowed style” is, as Powys recog-
nized, as innovative as more conspicuously experimental techniques with
which it is juxtaposed. The recognition of this raises questions about the
complexities of both, demanding a critical attention to the purposes they
serve rather than just a description of their characteristics. This empha-
sis on the function of innovation also raises questions about the political
implications of canonical modernist works.
Like both Major Operation and Men in Darkness, Jack Hilton’s first,
autobiographical book, Caliban Shrieks (1935) challenges literary con-
ventions by juxtaposing normally distinct styles, a process that disrupts
their apparent coherence and destabilizes the hierarchies used to organ-
ize them. The text is conspicuously less restrained than either Barke or
Hanley’s work, emphasizing its identification with what Hilton called
“the lower working-class type” (English Ways 281) by means of an anar-
chic linguistic excess and even violence. In a letter to Jack Common,
Hilton insisted that although he had “spent two years knocking all the
really necessary rules of English into my reluctant head” he did not
“give a tinkers curse, personally, for the rules of the game” (Letter to
Jack Common). His prose is characterized by a knowing disregard for
conventions that disrupts “established socio-semiotic contracts” but does
not depend on familiar modernist strategies. Its distinct qualities can be
understood partly in terms of Hilton’s sceptical, often adversarial rela-
tion to dominant literary models. Whilst canonical modernist texts often
present themselves as revolutions in a tradition to which they nonetheless
belong, a position indicated in the way they use allusion and adaptation,
Hilton understands canonical literature as a field defined by domi-
nant classes, a tradition to be contested or, in the case of Shakespeare
in particular, reclaimed. In his preface to Caliban Shrieks, he empha-

sizes that “the musings and tirades of my modern Caliban flout all the
accepted rules of writing,” (v) and insists that his “jargon is one of the
‘Clamorous Demagogue’ for which there is no apology” (vi). The text
incorporates the kinds of working-class conversations, stories and polem-
ics conventionally excluded from print and uses constant shifts in style to
emphasize their diversity and, by extension, that of their speakers.
Despite the striking density and richness of what W. H. Auden
described as his “magnificent Moby Dick rhetoric,” (331) Hilton is
often suspicious of the “wonderful trip known as eloquence” (Caliban
Shrieks 10). This is partly because he views it as the product of material
and cultural privilege, arguing that “[w]ell-fedness is the objective stimu-
lus for the nice abstract words,” (36) but largely because of its historical
power “over the Henry Dubbs of time” (10).1 The ability of language
to manipulate and deceive is, inevitably, most visible in political rheto-
ric, or what the text dismissively calls “kidology” (9). Hilton recalls that
after he received “the vote, that wonderful all-powerful thing by which
working men rule the land,” (28) he began to attend meetings, and the
“better the speaker the more I liked his policy.” His conclusion, “[w]
hat lumps of clay are we in our ignorance of the practiced orator,” (29)
interprets such speech as a means of control rather than communication
that limits popular involvement in collective governance whilst maintain-
ing its image. Even “book socialists” are restricted by “the iron rigidity
of terminology,” (126) which reproduces hierarchies within the left by
restricting discussion to those who can use a technical language in which
“Henries are known as proletarians; prosperous idlers, alias gentlemen,
are christened bourgeois” and refer to a complex theory of historical
development that demonstrates “the obvious fact that the ‘haves’ some
time ago diddled the ‘have nots’” (127).
For Hilton, working-class language offers an alternative to rhetor-
ical forms that reproduce divisions in knowledge. As his emphasis on
the need to expose the evasions even of some in the socialist movement
indicates, he recognizes, like Hanley, the radicalism of directness. When
Charlie Smith addresses a working-class meeting in Champion, he does
so as “the embodiment of themselves, a worker” and uses “their own
language, without the ambiguities of academics,” telling “a plain simple
story” (320). The form of his speech demonstrates his commitment to
politics in the sense given by Rancière, who argues that it is not only
defined by the “power of the people” but specifically of those “who have
32 B. CLARKE
no quality to exert power” (“A few remarks” 118). Although Charlie

emphasizes to Jimmy his desire to maintain “my own individuality,”
(Champion 289) his political value depends on his ability to function as
a representative figure. Jimmy’s own status is founded on his exceptional
skills but, as he recognizes, this does not form a basis for political action,
as “you can’t all become champion boxers” (317). The shift in focus at
the close of the novel from him to Charlie marks a movement from the
individual to the collective that is enacted in the form as well as the con-
tent of the text.
The exuberance of Caliban Shrieks demonstrates that Hilton is not
advocating the kind of “plain simple” narrative voice Charlie uses as a
universal model, but as a technique that can be deployed within spe-
cific contexts for specific ends. Like Hanley he is at once eloquent and
concerned with the uses of eloquence, a position demonstrated in his
own experimentation as well as his response to the rhetorical strategies
employed by others. For Hilton, style is strategic as well as aesthetic, and
its political implications determined at least as much by context as by its
characteristics, a view that rejects the idea that any technique is inher-
ently radical. The position not only demands a more historicized form
of reading but insists on writing as an intervention in continually shift-
ing literary debates rather than an autonomous, ahistorical act of crea-
tion. This means that the disruption Eysteinsson emphasizes must be a
continuous process, a perpetual revolution of the word. Hilton achieves
this through the conspicuous instability of his writing and his continu-
ous questioning of the ways in which it is read and interpreted. In a pas-
sage such as his instruction to the reader to “[b]e a human among god’s
chosen, get contaminated, try your skilled springy rapiers, against their
bludgeons; then you will see it is only the benevolence of a caste that
permits you to remain like a marionette with trimmed nails and lemon
coloured gloves,” (Caliban Shrieks 38) coherence begins to break down
because of an excess of meaning, a proliferation that cannot be con-
tained. Whilst Hilton’s writing has survived the conditions it initially
challenged, its plurality and rejection of closure mean that a text like
Caliban Shrieks still has a destabilizing force, heightened by its position
outside dominant literary histories that can neither accommodate nor
explain it.
Hilton prevents the uncritical consumption of his writing by disrupt-
ing, not only established signifying practices, but the act of reading.
Caliban Shrieks confronts rather than simply addresses the reader, whom
it constructs as a middle-class figure, outside the working-class cultures

Hilton inhabits and represents. The authorial voice can be adversarial as
well as informative, not only drawing attention to the process of narra-
tion, a strategy familiar from canonical modernist works but emphasizing
the frictions peculiar to working-class texts operating within a bourgeois
literary tradition. Hilton recognizes from the outset that “[y]ou may not
want to be disturbed by Caliban’s inflated inflicted importance,” (v-vi)
but refuses to accommodate his readers, mocking their lack of knowl-
edge of working-class life (“[y]ou all know I presume that ‘moonlights’
were common events round about the ‘05 to ‘14” (1)) and disrupting
their experience of the text, whether through sudden formal shifts or by
introducing unfamiliar words and phrases, from working-class terms (“a
leathering from the jobber” (7)) to his own constructions (“keep-your-
job-ism,” (66) “Silas-Hockingism,” (72)2 “talkology”) (79). His calcu-
lated provocation of his audience is extended in the invective directed at
a series of symbolic figures such as “Mr. Sub-urban, with your hire-pur-
chase, your endowments (premiums to pay), and your hope of superan-
nuation,” who he instructs to
Offend the rota [sic.] club and the bethel, miss the building society, get
off that stodgy office stool, have a good row with your wife’s family, get
blotto with the booze, have that angel puritan next door collapsing with a
stroke and above all things break his windows. Get out of your smug com-
placency, get action by reaction to your respectable servitude. (41)
Like his attack on the “fat stay-at-home tin gods” (27) who exploited
returning soldiers after the First World War, the challenge depends partly
upon an implicit model of masculinity, contrasting the restrained and
repressed “stiff collared puritans” (38) who dominate the existing order
to the liberated actions and desires of what he elsewhere calls “natural
men” (“The Plasterer’s Life” 22).
Hilton’s attacks focus on the middle classes, whom he often reduces
to stereotypes in a pointed inversion of the way dominant discourses
represent the poor, but his frustrations extend to others who maintain
a restrictive, unjust system. Castigating the “old men” who “complain
about our irresponsibility, our drift, our aimlessness” (Caliban Shrieks
155) but made “the world rich and most people poor,” he insists on the
complicity of those who “got up at three and went to your work day
in day out, since you were nine years of age” because “[l]ife was that
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remained stunted among them—a stage or two more backward than
their position would lead one to expect. But on the whole pottery
distribution in the Southwest does follow the schematic arrangement
with sufficient closeness to warrant the assumption that the history of
its development has been, at least in outline, as just reconstructed.
The facts conform still more closely to the step pyramid
arrangement when consideration is given not to pottery alone but to
the whole culture—agriculture, other arts, social forms, ritual,
religious organization, and the like. In that case Pueblo culture is
seen to comprise easily the greatest number of traits or component
parts, and these to grow fewer and fewer towards the edges of the
Southwest.[13]
88. Historical Induction

The sort of conclusion here outlined is really a historical induction
drawn from the facts of culture distribution among living but
historyless tribes. Where documents are available, the development,
the growth of the pyramid itself, as it were, can often be seen as it
happened. Thus, about the year 100 A.D., Rome, Italy, France,
England, Scotland, stood on successive descending culture levels
related to one another much like Pueblo, Navaho, Pima, Mohave,
Gabrielino; and also in the same placement of ever more outward
geographic situation.
Where written records fail, archæological remains sometimes take
their place. This is true of the Southwest, whose ancient pottery,
stone edifices and implements, and evidences of agriculture remain
as records of the past, telling a story only a little less complete and
direct than that of the Roman historians. One of the archæologists of
the Southwest has drawn up a pair of diagrams to outline the culture
history of the area as he has reconstructed it from comparison of the
prehistoric remains (Fig. 26).
Fig. 26. Diagrammatic representation by Nelson of the geography and history of
the culture of the Indians of the southwestern United States: above, in space;
below, in time, on A-B diameter of circle.
In all this story, what has become of natural environment and

heredity? They have dropped from sight. We have been able to build
up a reasonable and probably reliable reconstruction of the course of
development of civilization in an area without reference to these two
sets of factors. The reconstruction is in terms of culture. Evidently
environment and heredity are in the main superfluous. They need
not be brought in; are likely to be confusing, to diminish the internal
consistency of the findings attained, if they are brought in. This is
true in general, not only of the instance chosen. By using
environment or heredity, one can often seem to explain certain
selected features of a culture, but the appearance is illusory,
because one need only be impartial to realize that one can never
explain in this way the whole of any culture. When, however, the
explanation can be made in terms of culture—always of course on
the basis of a sufficient knowledge and digestion of facts—it applies
increasingly to the whole of a civilization, and each portion explained
helps to explain better all other portions. The cultural interpretation of
culture is therefore progressive, and ever more productive, whereas
the environmental and the biological-hereditary interpretation fail in
proportion as they are pushed farther; in fact can be kept going only
by ignoring larger and larger masses of fact to which they do not
apply.
Historians, who may be described as anthropologists whose work
is made easy for them by the possession of written and dated
records, have tacitly recognized this situation. They may now and
then attribute some event or condition of civilization to an inherent
quality of a race, or to an influence of climate or soil or sea. But this
is mostly in their introductory chapters. When they really get to grips
with their subject, they explain in terms of human thought and action,
in other words, of culture. It is true that they dwell more on
personalities than anthropologists do. But that is because the
materials left them by former historians are full of personalities and
anecdotes. And on the other hand, anthropological data are usually
unduly deficient in the personal element; they consist of descriptions
of customs, tools used by long forgotten individuals, and the like. If
anthropologists were able to recover knowledge of the particular
Pueblo woman who first painted a third color or a glaze on a bowl, or
of the priest who first instituted a masked dance in order to make
rain, we may be confident that they would discuss these individuals.
And such knowledge would throw more light on the history of
Southwestern pottery and religion and culture generally than any
amount of emphasis on the number of inches of rainfall per year, or
the pulse rate or similar hypothetical and remote causes.
CHAPTER VIII
DIFFUSION
89. The couvade.—90. Proverbs.—91. Geographic distribution.—92. The

magic flight.—93. Flood legends.—94. The double-headed eagle.—
95. The Zodiac.—96. Measures.—97. Divination.—98. Tobacco.—99.
Migrations.
89. The Couvade

The couvade is a custom to which the peasants of the Pyrenees
adhered until a century or two ago. When a couple had a child, the
wife got up and went about her daily work as well as she might, while
the husband went to bed to lie-in in state and receive the visits of the
neighbors. This was thought to be for the good of the baby.
The same custom is found among the Indians of Brazil. They
believe that a violation of the custom would bring sickness or ill luck
upon the child. They look upon the child as something new and
delicate, a being requiring not only physical nurture but the
superadded protection of this religious or magical practice.
The Basques of the Pyrenees and the Indians of Brazil are of
different race, separate origins, and without any known historical
contacts. The substantial identity of the custom among them
therefore long ago led to its being explained as the result of the
cropping out of an instinctive impulse of the human mind. Tylor, for
instance, held that whenever a branch of humanity reached a certain
hypothetical stage of development, namely, that phase in which the
reckoning of descent from the mother began to transform into
reckoning of descent from the father, the couvade tended to appear
spontaneously as a natural accompaniment. The Basque peasants,
of course, are a more advanced people than the cannibalistic
Brazilian natives. But they are an old and a conservative people who
have long lived in comparative isolation in their mountainous district;
and thus, it might be argued, they retained the custom of the
couvade as a survival from the earlier transitional condition.
According to this method of explanation, the occurrence of almost
any custom, art, or belief among widely separated and unrelated
peoples is likely to be the result of the similar working of the human
mind under similar conditions. The cause of cultural identities and
resemblances, especially among primitive or “nature” peoples, is not
to be sought primarily in historical factors, such as common origin,
migrations, the propaganda of religion, or the gradual diffusion of an
idea, but is to be looked for in something inherent in humanity itself,
in inborn psychological tendencies. This explanation is that of
“Independent Evolution.” It is also known as the doctrine of
“Elementary Ideas.”
Contrasting with this principle is that of borrowing—one people
learning an institution or belief from another, or taking over a custom
or invention. That borrowing has been considerably instrumental in
shaping the cultures of the more advanced nations, is an obvious
fact. People are Christians not through the spontaneous unfolding of
the whole dogma and ritual of Christianity in each of them, nor even
within their nation, but because of the historically documented
spread of Christianity which is still going on. As a heathen people is
converted by missionaries to-day, so our North European ancestors
were converted by Romans, and the Romans by the Apostles and
their followers. When historical records are available, cultural
borrowing of this sort is generally easy to establish.
Borrowing can sometimes be shown as very likely even where
direct evidence is lacking. If two peoples that possess an institution
in common are known off-shoots one from the other, or if they have
had numerous trade relations, it is hardly necessary to demonstrate
the specific time and manner of transmission between them.
Supposing that a religion, an alphabet, and perhaps a number of arts
have passed from one nation to another, one would normally ask for
little further evidence that a custom, such as the couvade, which they
shared, had also been originated by one and borrowed by the other.
90. Proverbs
Even where contacts are more remote, the geographical setting of
two peoples often makes borrowing seem likely. The custom of
uttering proverbs, for instance, has a significant distribution. It seems
astonishing that barbarous West African tribes should possess a
stock of proverbs as abundant and pithy as those current in Europe.
Not that the proverbs are identical. The negro lacks too many
articles, and too many of our manners, to allude as we do. But he
does share with us the habit of expressing himself on certain
situations with brief current sayings of homely and instantly
intelligible nature, that put a generality into specific and concrete
form. Thus: “One tree does not make a forest”; “Run from the sword
and hide in the scabbard”; “If the stomach is weak, do not eat
cockroaches”; “Distant firewood is good firewood.”
The proverb tendency is a sufficiently general one to suggest its
independent origin in Africa and Europe. One’s first reaction to the
parallel is likely to be something like this: The negro and we have
formulated proverbs because we are both human beings; the coining
of proverbs is instinctive in humanity. So it might be maintained.
However, as soon as the distribution of proverbs the world over is
reviewed, it becomes evident that their coining cannot be
spontaneous, since the native American race appears never to have
devised a single true proverb. On the other side are the Europeans,
Africans, Asiatics, and Oceanians who are addicted to the custom.
Degree of civilization evidently has nothing to do with the matter,
because in the Old World primitive and advanced peoples alike use
proverbs; whereas in the New World wild hunting tribes as well as
the most progressive nations like the Mayas have no proverbs. The
only inference which the facts allow is that there must have been a
time when proverbs were unknown anywhere—still “uninvented” by
mankind. Then, somewhere in the Old World, they came into use.
Perhaps it was a genius that struck off the first sayings to be
repeated by his associates and then by his more remote
environment. At any rate, the custom spread from people to people
until it extended over almost all the eastern hemisphere. Some
cause, however, such as geographical isolation, prevented the
extension of the movement to the western hemisphere. The
American Indians therefore remained proverbless because the
invention was never transmitted to them. Here, accordingly, is a case
of the very incompleteness of a distribution going far to illuminate the
history of a culture trait. The lack of parallelism between the
hemispheres disproves the explanation by instinctive independent
origin. This negative conclusion in turn tends strongly to establish the
probability that the custom was borrowed, perhaps from a single
source, in the four eastern continents.
91. Geographic Distribution

Thus it appears that it is not always easy to settle the origin and
history of the phenomena of culture. Evidently, many facts must be
taken into consideration: above all, geographic distribution. Because
a habit is so well ingrained in our life as to seem absolutely natural
and almost congenital, it does not follow that it really is so. The vast
majority of culture elements have been learned by each nation from
other peoples, past and present. At the same time there are
unexpected limits to the principle of borrowing. Transmission often
operates over vast areas and for long periods but at other times
ceases.
Two reflections arise. The first is the discouraging but salutary one
that the history of civilization and its parts is an intricate matter, not to
be validly determined by off-hand guesses. A second conclusion is
that the geographic distribution of any culture element is always
likely to be a fact of prime importance about it. It is because the
Basques and the Brazilian Indians are geographically separate that
there is fair prima facie probability of the couvade being the result of
independent origin. It is because of another geographic fact, that
proverbs are known throughout one hemisphere and lacking from
the other, that it must be inferred that they represent a borrowed
culture trait.
In the following pages a number of culture elements will be
examined from the point of view of their distribution with the aim of
determining how far each of the two principles of parallel invention
and of borrowing may be inferred to have been operative in regard to
them. In place of “independent origin” the terms “parallelism” or
“convergence” will be generally used. As an equivalent of
“borrowing” the somewhat less metaphorical word “diffusion” will be
applied. Well known historic cases of diffusion, such as those of
Christianity and Mohammedanism, of Roman law, of the printing
press and steam engine and of the great modern mechanical
inventions, will not be considered. It is however well to keep these
numerous cases in the background of one’s mind as a constant
suggestion that the principle of diffusion is an extremely powerful
one and still active. In fact, the chief reason why early
anthropologists did not make more use of this principle seems to
have been their extreme familiarity with it. It was going on all about
them, so that in dealing with prehistoric times or with remote
peoples, they tended to overlook it. This was perhaps a natural error,
since the communications of savages and their methods of
transmission are so much more restricted than our own. Yet of
course even savages shift their habitations and acquire new
neighbors. At times they capture women and children from one
another. Again they intermarry; and they almost invariably maintain
some sort of trade relations with at least some of the adjacent
peoples. Slow as diffusion might therefore be among them, it would
nevertheless go on, and its lack of rapidity would be compensated by
the immense durations of time in the prehistoric period. It is certain
that the simpler inventions of primitive man generally did not travel
with the rapidity of the printing press and telegraph and camera. But
on the other hand, instead of a generation or a century, there would
often be periods of a thousand or five thousand years for an
invention or a custom to spread from one continent to another. There
is thus every a priori reason why diffusion could be expected to have
had a very large part in the formation of primitive and barbarous as
well as advanced culture.
92. The Magic Flight

There is one folk-lore plot with a distribution that leaves little doubt
as to its diffusion from a single source. This is the incident known as
the Magic Flight or Obstacle Pursuit. It recounts how the hero, when
pursued, throws behind him successively a whetstone, a comb, and
a vessel of oil or other liquid. The stone turns into a mountain or
precipice; the comb into a forest or thicket; the liquid into a lake or
river. Each of these obstacles impedes the pursuer and contributes
to the hero’s final escape. This incident has been found in stories
told by the inhabitants of every continent except South America. Its
distribution and probable spread are shown in Fig. 27.
While no two of the tales or myths containing the episode of the
Magic Flight are identical, there can be no serious doubt as to a
common source of the incident because of the co-existence of the
three separate items that make it up. If a people in Asia and one in
America each knew a story of a person who to impede a pursuer
spilt water on the ground which magically grew into a vast lake, it
would be dogmatic to insist on this as proof of a historical connection
between the two far separated stories. Belief in the virtue of magic is
world-wide, and it is entirely conceivable that from this common soil
of magical beliefs the same episode might repeatedly have sprouted
quite independently. The same reasoning would apply to the incident
of the transformation of the stone and of the comb, as long as they
occurred separately. The linking of the three items, however,
enormously decreases the possibility of any two peoples having hit
upon them separately. It would be stretching coincidence pretty far to
believe that each people independently invented the triple complex.
It is also significant that the number of impeding obstacles is almost
always three. In the region of western Asia and Europe where the
tale presumably originated, three is the number most frequently
employed in magic, ritual, and folk-lore. Among the American
Indians, however, three is scarcely ever thus used, either four or five
replacing it according to the custom pattern of the particular tribe.
Nevertheless, several American tribes depart from their usual pattern
and mention only three obstacles in telling this story.
This instance introduces a consideration that is of growing
importance in culture history determinations. If a trait is composed of
several elements which stand in no necessary relation to each other,
and these several elements recur among distinct or remote peoples
in the same combination, whereas on the basis of mere accident it
could be expected that the several elements would at times combine
and at other times crop out separately, one can be reasonably sure
of the real identity and common origin of the complex trait. When a
trait is simple, it is more difficult to be positive that the apparent
resemblance amounts to identity. Such doubt applies for instance to
isolated magical practices. A custom found among separate nations,
such as sprinkling water to produce rain, may be the result of an
importation of the idea from one people to another. Or again it may
represent nothing more than a specific application of the assumed
principle that an act similar to a desired effect will produce that effect.
This magical belief is so broad, and so ramifying in its
exemplifications, as to become almost impossible to use as a
criterion. The essential basis of magic may conceivably have been
developed at a single culture center in the far distant past and have
been disseminated thence over the whole world. Or again, for all that
it is possible to prove, magic beliefs may really be rooted instinctively
in the human mind and grow thence over and over again with
inevitability. There seems no present way of determining which
interpretation is correct.
93. Flood Legends

This situation applies to many widely spread concepts in folk-lore.
Flood myths of some sort, for instance, are told by probably the
majority of human nations. In the early days of the science, this wide
distribution of flood myths was held to prove the actuality of a flood,
or to be evidence of the descent of all mankind from a single nation
which had once really experienced it. Such explanations are too
obviously naïve to require refutation to-day. Yet it is difficult to
interpret the wide prevalence of flood myths, either as spontaneous
growth from out the human mind, or as diffusion from a single
devising of the idea. Much of the difficulty is caused by the fact that
one cannot be sure that the various flood myths are identical. Some
peoples have the flood come after the earth is formed and inhabited,
and have it almost destroy the human race. Other nations begin their
cosmology with a flood. For them, water was in existence before
there was an earth, and the problem for the gods or creative animals
was to make the world. This, according to some American Indian
versions, they finally accomplished by having one of their number
dive to the bottom and bring up a few grains of sand which were then
expanded to constitute terra firma. The first type of story is evidently
a true “flood” myth; the second might better be described as a
concept of “primeval water.” The difficulty is enhanced by the fact
that the two types are sometimes found amalgamated in a single
mythology. Thus the Hebrew account begins with the primeval
waters but subsequent to the formation of the earth the deluge
covers it. So, according to some American tribes, the flood came
after the earth, but the waters remained until after the diving. It is
clear that flood stories are more shifting than the Magic Flight
episode. They may conceivably all be variations of a single theme
which has gradually come to differentiate greatly. But again, several
distinct concepts—primeval water, flood, the diving animals, the ark
—may have been evolved in different parts of the world, each
developing in its own way, and traveling so far, in some cases, as to
meet and blend with others. This last interpretation is favored by
some of the facts of distribution: the prevalence of the diving concept
in America, for instance, and the absence of flood myths from much
of Africa.
Fig. 27. The Magic Flight tale, an example of inter-continental and inter-
hemispheric diffusion. After Stucken, with additions.
There is a vast amount of folk-lore recorded, and much of it has

lent itself admirably to the working out of its historical origins, so far
as limited regions are concerned. Folk-lorists are often able to prove
that one tale originated in India and was carried into mediæval
Europe, or that another was probably first devised on the coast of
British Columbia and then disseminated across the Rocky mountains
to the interior tribes of Indians. When it comes to intercontinental and
world-wide distribution, however, difficulties of the sort just set forth
in regard to flood myths become stronger and stronger. While the
most interesting mythical ideas are those which are world-wide, it is
in these that uncertainty between origin by diffusion or parallelism is
greatest. The Magic Flight therefore constitutes a grateful exception.
It opens the door to a hope that more assiduous analysis and
comparison may lead to the accurate determination of the source
and history of other common and fundamental myths.
94. The Double-headed Eagle

An unexpected story of wandering attaches to the figure or symbol
of the double-headed eagle. Like many other elements of civilization,
this goes back to an Egyptian beginning. One of the great gods of
Egypt was the sun. The hawk and vulture were also divine animals.
A combination was made showing the disk of the sun with a long
narrow wing on each side. Or the bird itself was depicted with
outstretched wings but its body consisting of the sun disk. These
were striking figures of considerable æsthetic and imaginative
appeal. From Egypt the design was carried in the second millenium
B.C. to the Assyrians of Mesopotamia and to the Hittites of Asia
Minor. A second head was added, perhaps to complete the
symmetry of the figure. Just as a wing and a foot went out from each
side of the body or disk, so now there was a head facing each way.
This double-headed bird symbol was carved on cliffs in Asia Minor.
Here the pictures remained, no doubt wondered at but uncopied, for
two thousand years. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries after
Christ, the Turkish princes, feeling the symbol to be a fit emblem of
sovereignty, began stamping it on their coins. The later Crusaders
brought these coins, or the idea of the pattern, back with them to
Europe, where the mediæval art of heraldry was flourishing. The
double-headed eagle was a welcome addition to the lions and
griffins with which artists were emblazoning the coats of arms of the
feudal nobility. The meaning of sovereignty remaining attached to the
figure, the device before long became indicative of the imperial idea.
This is the origin of its use as a symbol in the late empires of Austro-
Hungary and Russia.
Four hundred years ago Charles V was king of Spain and Austria
and Holy Roman emperor of Germany. It was in his reign that Cortez
and Pizarro conquered Mexico and Peru. Thus the symbol of the
double-headed eagle was carried into the New World and the
Indians became conversant with it. Even some of the wilder tribes
learned the figure, although they were perhaps more impressed with
it as a decorative motive than as an emblem. At any rate, they
introduced it into their textiles and embroideries. The Huichol in the
remote mountains of Mexico, who use the design thus, seem to
believe that their ancestors had always been conversant with the
figure. But such a belief of course proves no more than did the
ignorance of European heraldists of the fact that their double-headed
eagle came to them from Asia Minor and ultimately from Egypt. No
pre-Columbian representation of the two-headed eagle is known
from Mexico. The conclusion can therefore hardly be escaped that
this apparently indigenous textile pattern of the modern Huichol is
also to be derived from its far source in ancient Egypt of whose
existence they have never heard.
95. The Zodiac

The foregoing example should not establish the impression that
the main source of all culture is to be sought in Egypt. Many other
ancient and modern countries have made their contribution. It is to
the Chinese, for instance, that we owe silk, porcelain, and gun
powder. The ancient Sumerians and Babylonians, on the lower
course of the Tigris and Euphrates, moved toward definite cultural
progress about as early as the Egyptians, and have perhaps
contributed as many elements to the civilization of to-day.
One of these is the zodiac. This is the concept of dividing the path
of the sun, moon, and planets around the heavens into twelve equal
parts, each named after a constellation. The series runs: ram, bull,
twins, crab, lion, virgin, scales, scorpion, archer, goat, water-carrier,
fishes. Constellations, indeed, had begun to be named at a very
early time, as is clear from the practice being common to all
mankind. But the specific arrangement of these twelve constellations
as a measure of the movement of the heavenly bodies seems to
have made its first appearance among the Chaldæan Babylonians
about a thousand years before Christ. From them the Persians, and
then the Greeks, learned the zodiac; and with its introduction to the
Roman Empire it became part of the fund of knowledge common to
the whole of western civilization. It does not appear to have been
accepted by the Egyptians until Roman imperial times. Knowledge of
the zodiac also spread eastward to India. It seems to have been
carried as far as China by Buddhist missionaries, but failed to be
seriously adopted in that country until its reintroduction by Jesuit
missionaries in the seventeenth century.
The Chinese long before had invented a series of twelve signs
which has sometimes been called a zodiac, and gradually
transmitted it to the adjacent natives of Japan, Korea, Mongolia,
Turkistan, and Tibet. This seems to be of independent origin from the
western or Babylonian zodiac. It appears to have been devised to
designate the hours, then applied to other periods of time, and finally
to the heavens. Its path through the sky is the reverse of the western
zodiac; and its signs are specifically different: rat, ox, tiger, hare,
dragon, serpent, horse, sheep, monkey, hen, dog, and pig. At most,
therefore, it would seem that there might have penetrated to China
from the west the idea of dividing time or space into twelve units and
assigning to each of these the name of an animal. The working out
and utilization of the idea were native Chinese.
Already in ancient times the pictures of the twelve constellations of
the western zodiac began to be abbreviated and reduced to
symbols. These gradually become more and more conventional,
although evidences of their origin are still visible. The sign of the
ram, for instance, as we employ it in almanacs, shows the downward
curling horns of this animal; that for the ox, his rising horns; for the
archer, his arrow, and so on. These cursive symbols, once they
became fixed, underwent some travels of their own which carried
them to unexpected places. The Negroes of the west coast of Africa
make gold finger rings ornamented with the twelve zodiacal symbols
in their proper sequence. They seem ignorant of the meaning, in fact
do not possess sufficient astronomical knowledge to be able to
understand the use of the signs. It also remains uncertain whether
they learned the set of symbols from European navigators or from
the Arabs that have penetrated the northern half of Africa.
Nevertheless it is the true zodiac which they portray, even though
only as a decorative pattern.
There has been some assertion that the zodiac was known to the
more advanced Middle American Indians between Arizona and Peru,
but the claim has also been denied. There does appear to have been
at least one series of animal signs used by the Mayas of Yucatan in
an astronomical connection. It is not known that this series served
the true zodiacal function of noting the positions of the heavenly
bodies. Further, the Maya series consists of thirteen instead of
twelve symbols, and the figures present only distant resemblances to
the Old World zodiac. There is only one that is the same as in the
Old World zodiac: the scorpion. The relationship of the Maya and
Old World series is therefore unproved, and probably fictitious. The
case however possesses theoretical interest in that it illustrates the
criteria of the determination of culture relationships.
The Mexican zodiac would unquestionably be interpreted as a
derivative from the Asiatic one, even though its symbols departed
somewhat from those of the latter, provided that the similar symbols
came in the same order. The Asiatic ram might well be replaced by a
Mexican deer, the lion by a wildcat, and the virgin by a maize
goddess. And if the deer, the wildcat, and the maize goddess came
in first, fifth, and sixth place, it would be almost compulsory to look
upon them as superficially altered equivalents of the Old World ram,
lion, and virgin. It is conceivable enough that similar individual
symbols might independently come into use in remote parts of the
world. But it is practically impossible that a series of symbols should
be put into the same arbitrary sequence independently. As a mere
matter of mathematical probability there would be no more than an
infinitesimal chance of such a complex coincidence. If therefore the
sequential identity of the American series and the Old World zodiac
should ever be proved,[14] it would be necessary to believe that this
culture element was somehow carried into the Middle American
regions from Asia, either across northern America or across the
Pacific.
Identity of sequence failing, there might still remain an instance of
partial convergence. It is within the range of possibility that the
Mayas, who were painstaking astronomers and calculators, and who
like ourselves named the stars and constellations after animals,
arranged a series of these as a mnemonic or figurative aid in their
calendrical reckoning. This, however, would be a case of only
incomplete parallelism. The general concept would in that event
have been developed independently, its specific working out
remaining distinctive.
On accurate analysis of culture phenomena, this sort of result
proves to be fairly frequent. When independent developments have
occurred, there is a basic or psychological similarity, but concrete
details are markedly different. On the other hand if a differentiation
from a common source has taken place, so that true historical
connection exists, some specific identity of detail almost always
remains as evidence. It therefore follows that if only it is possible to
get the facts fully enough, there is no theoretical reason why
ultimately all cultural phenomena that are still hovering doubtfully
between the parallelistic and the diffusionary interpretations should
not be positively explainable one way or the other. This of course is
not an assertion that such proof has been brought. In fact there are
far more traits of civilization whose history remains to be elucidated
than have yet been solved. But the attainments already achieved,
and an understanding of the principles by which they have been
made, encourage hope for an indefinite increase of knowledge
regarding the origin and growth of the whole of human culture.
96. Measures
Another increment of civilization due to the Babylonians is a series
of metric standardizations. These include the division of the circle
into three hundred and sixty degrees, of the day into twenty-four
(originally twelve) hours, of the hour into sixty minutes, of the foot
into twelve inches, and the pound—as it survives in our troy weight—
into twelve ounces. It is apparent that the system involved in these
measures is based on the number twelve and its multiple sixty. The
weights current in the ancient Near East also increased by sixties.
On these weights were based the ancient money values. The Greek
mina, Hebrew maneh, approximately a pound, comprised sixty
shekels (or a hundred Athenian drachmas), and sixty minas made a
talent. A talent of silver and one of gold possessed different values,
but the weight was the same. This system the Greeks derived from
Asia Minor and Phœnicia. Their borrowing of the names, as well as
the close correspondence of the actual weight of the units,
evidences their origin in Babylonia or adjacent Aramæa.
The duodecimal method of reckoning was carried west, became
deeply ingrained during the Roman Empire, and has carried down
through the Middle Ages to modern times. It would be going too far
to say that every division of units of measure into twelve parts can be
traced directly to Babylonia. Now and then new standards were
arbitrarily fixed and new names given them. But even when this
occurred, the old habit of reckoning by twelves for which the
Babylonians were responsible, was likely to reassert itself in
competition with the decimal system. Modern coinage systems have
become prevailingly decimal, but it is only a short time ago that in
south Germany 60 kreuzer still made a gulden; and the twelve pence
of the English shilling obviously suggest themselves.
Certain of these metric units became fixed more than two
thousand years ago and have descended to us by an unbroken
tradition. The Babylonian degrees, minutes, and seconds, for
instance, became an integral part of the ancient astronomy, were
taken up by the Greeks, incorporated by them in their development
of the system of astronomy known as the Ptolemaic, and thus
became a part of Roman, Arab, and mediæval European science.
When a few centuries ago, beginning with the introduction of the
Copernican point of view, astronomy launched forward into a new
period of progress, the old system of reckoning was so deeply rooted
that it was continued without protest. Had the first truly scientific
beginnings of astronomy taken place as late as those of chemistry, it
is extremely doubtful whether we should now be reckoning 360
degrees in the circumference of the circle. The decimal system
would almost certainly have been applied.
The last few examples may give the impression that cultural
diffusion takes place largely in regard to names and numbers. They
may arouse the suspicion that the intrinsic elements of inventions
and accomplishments are less readily spread. This is not the case.
In fact it has happened time and again in the history of civilization
that the substance of an art or a knowledge has passed from one
people to another, while an entirely new designation for the
acquisition has been coined by the receiving people. The English
names of the seven days of the week (§ 125) are a case in point. If
stress seems to have been laid here on names and numbers, it is
not because they are more inclined to diffusion, or most important,
but because their diffusion is more easily traced. They often provide
an infallible index of historical connection when a deficiency of
historical records would make it difficult, perhaps impossible, to
prove that the common possession of the thing itself went back to a
single source. If historical records are silent, as they are only too
often, on the origin of a device among a people, the occurrence of
the same device at an earlier time among another people may
strongly suggest that it was transmitted from these. But the indication
is far from constituting a proof because of the theoretical possibility
that the later nation might have made the invention independently. It
is chiefly when the device is complex and the relation of its parts
identical that the probability of diffusion approaches surety. If
however not only the thing but its name also are shared by distinct
nations, doubt is removed. It is obvious that peoples speaking
unrelated languages will not coincide one time in a thousand in using
the same name for the same idea independently of each other. The
play of accident is thus precluded in such cases and a connection by
transmission is established. In fact the name is the better
touchstone. An invention may be borrowed and be given a home-
made name. But a foreign name would scarcely be adopted without
the object being also accepted.
97. Divination
One other Babylonian invention may be cited on account of its
curious history. This is the pseudo-science of predicting the outcome
of events by examination of the liver of animals sacrificed to the
gods. A system of such divination, known as hepatoscopy, was
worked out by the Babylonian priests perhaps by 2,000 B.C. Their
rules are known from the discovery of ancient clay models of the
liver with its several lobes, each part being inscribed with its
significance according as it might bear such and such appearance.
In some way which is not yet wholly understood, this system was
carried, like the true arch, from the Babylonians to the Etruscans. As
there are definite ancient traditions which brought the Etruscans into
Italy from Asia, the gap is however lessened. The Etruscans, who
were evidently addicted to priestly magic, carried on this liver
divination alongside another method, that of haruspicy or foretelling

Working Class Writing Theory and Practice 1St Ed Edition Ben Clarke Full Chapter PDF

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Working-Class Writing: Theory and

Practice 1st ed. Edition Ben Clarke

Class on Screen: The Global Working Class in

Social Democratic Parties and the Working Class: New

What Work Is (Working Class in American History) 1st

Working-Class Environmentalism: An Agenda for a Just

(eTextbook PDF) for Research Methods: From Theory to

The Working Class from Marx to Our Times 1st Edition

(eBook PDF) Counseling Theory and Practice 2nd ed.

Canadian Defence Policy in Theory and Practice 1st ed.

ISBN 978-3-319-96309-9 ISBN 978-3-319-96310-5 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018949036

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

2 Working-Class Writing and Experimentation 17

3 Interwoven Histories: Working Class Literature

4 Meaning It: Everyday Hermeneutics and the Language

5 Kings in Disguise and ‘Pure Ellen Kellond’: Literary

6 Democratic Art or Working-Class Literature? Virginia

7 The Bakhtin Circle in Caribbean London: Race, Class

8 “Look at the State of This Place!”: The Impact of

9 Ethel Carnie Holdsworth’s Helen of Four Gates:

10 Representation of the Working Classes of the British

11 London Jewish … and Working-Class? Social Mobility

12 The Deindustrial Novel: Twenty-First-Century

13 Working-Class Heritage Revisited in Alan Warner’s

14 Respectability, Nostalgia and Shame in Contemporary

Sabujkoli (Sabu) Bandopadhyay works at the University of Regina,

Ben Clarke is Associate Professor of British Literature after 1900 at

Music, co-edited with Barbara Ching (University of Michigan Press).

include an edited collection to be published by Verso of Williams’s pre-

the ‘golden ages’ of twentieth-century prose, theatre and film (the

Ben Clarke and Nick Hubble

© The Author(s) 2018 1

Trump’s speech may have been, as his Republican predecessor George W.

of class as early as the nineteen-seventies in response to new theoretical

Richard Hoggart called “experiential wholeness,” with the ways in which

Major Operation and, particularly, Jack Hilton’s Caliban Shrieks to chal-

to appropriate the voices of others than to give any expression to the

British Kitchen Sink movement to explore shifts in the British working-

Cartwright’s The Afterglow (2004), Catherine O’Flynn’s What Was Lost

consciousness. Suggesting that this process leads to the prevalence of

The literature of the nineteen-thirties is conventionally seen as a failed

© The Author(s) 2018 17

final judgement on the decade and on artists’ responsibilities more gen-

Eastern Europe has to-day become institutionalized in the Syndicates

were forced to be aware of what was happening in Russia; in Germany; in

This idea of a break from literary modernism, in the sense, as Malcolm

of James Hanley’s ‘plain’ prose in his early collection of short stories,

The most valuable forms of modernist experimentation are not arbi-

that it adopts existing forms without reflecting on their implications.

are parallels to the representations of Dublin in Dubliners, A Portrait of

because it is too pervasive and explicit, but because it is reductive; whilst

realist tradition, but insists on a critical engagement with experimenta-

as a political statement and artistic choice.

The plurality of Hanley’s writing, in Men in Darkness and elsewhere,

in particular, reclaimed. In his preface to Caliban Shrieks, he empha-

no quality to exert power” (“A few remarks” 118). Although Charlie

it constructs as a middle-class figure, outside the working-class cultures

88. Historical Induction

In all this story, what has become of natural environment and

89. The couvade.—90. Proverbs.—91. Geographic distribution.—92. The

89. The Couvade

91. Geographic Distribution