Encyclopaedias in the Family Home
Kit de Waal (ed.), Common People: An Anthology of Working Class Writers
Unbound, 400pp, £9.99, ISBN 9781783527458
reviewed by Thom Cuell
In Authentocrats, the critic Joe Kennedy identified a recent trend in populist discourse for appealing to a homogenised idea of the ‘working class’ experience. Taking as a starting point Owen Smith’s disastrous challenge for the Labour party leadership, during which he attempted to display his proletarian credentials by appearing bemused by the concept of ‘frothy coffee’, Kennedy explored the way in which the working class was both fetishised and distorted by politicians such as Smith, and journalists like John Harris, who created an avatar of the provincial working class, whose ‘legitimate concerns’ they claimed to speak for.
This political development, Kennedy argued, ran in tandem with a trend for ‘grittiness’ and ‘realism’ in culture, for example the replacement of Pierce Brosnan’s glamorous James Bond with the edgier portrayal by Daniel Craig, and the pseudo-realism of a million and one Scandinavian crime drama series. Rather than depicting a reality any working-class people would recognise, however, the culture industry was producing a mere ‘deck of tropes that gesture towards authenticity’. The tropes of authentocracy flattened the landscape of working-class experience, whist also acting as a stick with which to beat working class individuals who developed notions like a taste for cappuccinos.
While Kennedy found plenty of examples of authentocracy in popular media, the literary world provided slimmer pickings. This is less because publishing houses were producing reams of quality work by or about working-class people, and more because of an established and confident layer of middle and upper-middle class people in positions of influence throughout the publishing industry. This is reflected in a deeply conservative outlook, even among supposedly challenging figures: witness Will Self’s disgust at Sally Rooney for daring to write books that might reflect millennial lives, rather than appealing more directly to his own generation (‘its very simple stuff with no literary ambition’, he harrumphed during an interview to promote artisanal macaroons).
The facts are laid out in Common People’s final essay, by Dave O’Brien: 'publishing has a serious class problem, as it is one of the most socially exclusive of all creative industries'. We can look at the numbers: 12.6% of people working in publishing are working class, and the average author income in 2017 was £10,500, significantly below the minimum wage. Publishing is also very white (93%), and top-level jobs are disproportionately male. The effect is insidious, as the make-up of the industry has an impact on the stories which are told: 'it is about the narrowness of the workforce that may have little or no lived experience outside of the white male of middle-class origins. It is about the impact of that on who is permitted to speak, who is allowed to take risks, and who is only offered a clichéd or inaccurate 'gap in the market'. Finally, it is about the lived realities that are overlooked, assumed to be unimportant by commissioners, and never given a chance'.
Kit de Waal’s anthology aims to be a corrective to both of these issues. By opening the collection up to a significant proportion of previously unpublished writers, she offers an entry point into this exclusive industry, and by sharing a diversity of experiences Common People paints a picture of working-class life beyond the white monoculture acknowledged by authentocrat journalists and politicians.
Common People is not the first book to challenge the representation and perception of the working class in British literature. In 2017, Northern independent press Dead Ink released Know Your Place, which also featured an essay from de Waal. That anthology was conceived as a response to media coverage of the EU referendum, in which the working class was portrayed as insular, backward-looking and monocultural. Significantly, both Common People and Know Your Place were crowd-funded, suggesting a genuine popular desire for these texts. Similar projects, including Nasty Women (404 Ink), Liberating the Canon (Dostoyevsky Wannabe) and The Good Immigrant (Unbound), have addressed the experience of female, queer and BAME writers respectively, allowing us to explore the intersections of class, race, sexuality and gender within the canon.
So what does Common People add to the body of work around class in modern Britain? Primarily, the anthology is keen to demonstrate a broad disparity of experience, even within the same generation of the same family. Chris McCrudden, in ‘Shy Bairns Get Nowt’, identifies both the flattening impact of authentocracy and the negative effect of under-representation in publishing - 'we tend to flatten a whole spectrum of experiences into a few tired tropes: the boy or girl done good, the escape from poverty, the sink estate rife with drugs and teenage pregnancies' – and then counteracts it with the story of his aunts, whose opposing tastes in biscuits stood in for a much broader division in their outlooks, ambitions and self-image.
It is an interesting feature of the book that a great many contributors discuss their childhoods in detail, from Louise Powell’s stories of illicit greyhound racing to Cathy Rentzenbrink’s account of darts leagues and pub days out. Partly this is because, despite some progress in the past decade, where we come from still plays a huge factor in where we end up. There is also a degree of uncertainty over the position of writers within the class structure. On a purely economic level, as evidenced previously, most writers might expect to earn a significantly below-average salary, on a par with unskilled or junior clerical work, whilst a smaller number are comfortably bourgeois. If you want to look at Max Weber’s three-class system, you could say that writers enjoy a high-status role, possessing a talent decreed to be beyond the means of most, which would separate them from the working classes. A Marxist interpretation, however, suggests that writers, like other members of the proletariat, are alienated from the product of their labour.
In the essay ‘Working Class: An Escape Manual’, which opens Common People, Lisa McInerney discusses the way that her profession leads people to make assumptions about her class background (‘competence is a foot out of the door… all a working class person needs to do to become middle class is be good at something’), whilst also going some way to explaining why bourgeois authors are so predominant: 'it is true that writers are more likely to come from comfortably middle-class backgrounds for a number of reasons, not least that it's prudent to have a safety net because there's balls-all money in writing'.
The focus on childhood also raises a third issue. While Common People is billed as a ‘celebration’, there is also a mournful edge. In examining their childhoods, many contributors demonstrate what has been lost by the working class, following years of class war in the guise of privatisation and austerity. Writers like Stuart Maconie and Loretta Ramkissoon discuss housing estates and high-rises which are commonly demonised as crime-ridden and soulless, but which provided a sense of close-knit community and continuity, before their hearts were ripped out by right-to-buy. Louise Doughty remembers her childhood as 'a time when the possibilities that work might be rewarded were much more firmly embedded in our social structures than they are now’, and parents were certain that 'their children would grow up more advantaged than them in every way', in contrast to present-day studies which show social mobility to be virtually stagnant.
In many ways, it is natural to fight back through writing. A recurring theme throughout Common People is the presence of a set of encyclopaedias in the family home, a symbol of a collective urge for self-improvement, and the tradition of the working-class autodidact (I was reminded of Arthur Scargill’s statement ‘my father still reads the dictionary every day. He says that your life depends on your power to master words’). Writing is unlikely to be a pathway to social mobility, but it is a way of fighting back against a distorted narrative of class experience, and the eloquence on show here is a rebuff to the authentocrat vision of working-class culture. If only more space was given to the ‘legitimate concerns’ of the authors represented in Common People.
This political development, Kennedy argued, ran in tandem with a trend for ‘grittiness’ and ‘realism’ in culture, for example the replacement of Pierce Brosnan’s glamorous James Bond with the edgier portrayal by Daniel Craig, and the pseudo-realism of a million and one Scandinavian crime drama series. Rather than depicting a reality any working-class people would recognise, however, the culture industry was producing a mere ‘deck of tropes that gesture towards authenticity’. The tropes of authentocracy flattened the landscape of working-class experience, whist also acting as a stick with which to beat working class individuals who developed notions like a taste for cappuccinos.
While Kennedy found plenty of examples of authentocracy in popular media, the literary world provided slimmer pickings. This is less because publishing houses were producing reams of quality work by or about working-class people, and more because of an established and confident layer of middle and upper-middle class people in positions of influence throughout the publishing industry. This is reflected in a deeply conservative outlook, even among supposedly challenging figures: witness Will Self’s disgust at Sally Rooney for daring to write books that might reflect millennial lives, rather than appealing more directly to his own generation (‘its very simple stuff with no literary ambition’, he harrumphed during an interview to promote artisanal macaroons).
The facts are laid out in Common People’s final essay, by Dave O’Brien: 'publishing has a serious class problem, as it is one of the most socially exclusive of all creative industries'. We can look at the numbers: 12.6% of people working in publishing are working class, and the average author income in 2017 was £10,500, significantly below the minimum wage. Publishing is also very white (93%), and top-level jobs are disproportionately male. The effect is insidious, as the make-up of the industry has an impact on the stories which are told: 'it is about the narrowness of the workforce that may have little or no lived experience outside of the white male of middle-class origins. It is about the impact of that on who is permitted to speak, who is allowed to take risks, and who is only offered a clichéd or inaccurate 'gap in the market'. Finally, it is about the lived realities that are overlooked, assumed to be unimportant by commissioners, and never given a chance'.
Kit de Waal’s anthology aims to be a corrective to both of these issues. By opening the collection up to a significant proportion of previously unpublished writers, she offers an entry point into this exclusive industry, and by sharing a diversity of experiences Common People paints a picture of working-class life beyond the white monoculture acknowledged by authentocrat journalists and politicians.
Common People is not the first book to challenge the representation and perception of the working class in British literature. In 2017, Northern independent press Dead Ink released Know Your Place, which also featured an essay from de Waal. That anthology was conceived as a response to media coverage of the EU referendum, in which the working class was portrayed as insular, backward-looking and monocultural. Significantly, both Common People and Know Your Place were crowd-funded, suggesting a genuine popular desire for these texts. Similar projects, including Nasty Women (404 Ink), Liberating the Canon (Dostoyevsky Wannabe) and The Good Immigrant (Unbound), have addressed the experience of female, queer and BAME writers respectively, allowing us to explore the intersections of class, race, sexuality and gender within the canon.
So what does Common People add to the body of work around class in modern Britain? Primarily, the anthology is keen to demonstrate a broad disparity of experience, even within the same generation of the same family. Chris McCrudden, in ‘Shy Bairns Get Nowt’, identifies both the flattening impact of authentocracy and the negative effect of under-representation in publishing - 'we tend to flatten a whole spectrum of experiences into a few tired tropes: the boy or girl done good, the escape from poverty, the sink estate rife with drugs and teenage pregnancies' – and then counteracts it with the story of his aunts, whose opposing tastes in biscuits stood in for a much broader division in their outlooks, ambitions and self-image.
It is an interesting feature of the book that a great many contributors discuss their childhoods in detail, from Louise Powell’s stories of illicit greyhound racing to Cathy Rentzenbrink’s account of darts leagues and pub days out. Partly this is because, despite some progress in the past decade, where we come from still plays a huge factor in where we end up. There is also a degree of uncertainty over the position of writers within the class structure. On a purely economic level, as evidenced previously, most writers might expect to earn a significantly below-average salary, on a par with unskilled or junior clerical work, whilst a smaller number are comfortably bourgeois. If you want to look at Max Weber’s three-class system, you could say that writers enjoy a high-status role, possessing a talent decreed to be beyond the means of most, which would separate them from the working classes. A Marxist interpretation, however, suggests that writers, like other members of the proletariat, are alienated from the product of their labour.
In the essay ‘Working Class: An Escape Manual’, which opens Common People, Lisa McInerney discusses the way that her profession leads people to make assumptions about her class background (‘competence is a foot out of the door… all a working class person needs to do to become middle class is be good at something’), whilst also going some way to explaining why bourgeois authors are so predominant: 'it is true that writers are more likely to come from comfortably middle-class backgrounds for a number of reasons, not least that it's prudent to have a safety net because there's balls-all money in writing'.
The focus on childhood also raises a third issue. While Common People is billed as a ‘celebration’, there is also a mournful edge. In examining their childhoods, many contributors demonstrate what has been lost by the working class, following years of class war in the guise of privatisation and austerity. Writers like Stuart Maconie and Loretta Ramkissoon discuss housing estates and high-rises which are commonly demonised as crime-ridden and soulless, but which provided a sense of close-knit community and continuity, before their hearts were ripped out by right-to-buy. Louise Doughty remembers her childhood as 'a time when the possibilities that work might be rewarded were much more firmly embedded in our social structures than they are now’, and parents were certain that 'their children would grow up more advantaged than them in every way', in contrast to present-day studies which show social mobility to be virtually stagnant.
In many ways, it is natural to fight back through writing. A recurring theme throughout Common People is the presence of a set of encyclopaedias in the family home, a symbol of a collective urge for self-improvement, and the tradition of the working-class autodidact (I was reminded of Arthur Scargill’s statement ‘my father still reads the dictionary every day. He says that your life depends on your power to master words’). Writing is unlikely to be a pathway to social mobility, but it is a way of fighting back against a distorted narrative of class experience, and the eloquence on show here is a rebuff to the authentocrat vision of working-class culture. If only more space was given to the ‘legitimate concerns’ of the authors represented in Common People.