Home in British Working-Class Fiction

Nicola Wilson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317121350
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Home in British Working-Class Fiction offers a fresh take on British working-class writing that turns away from a masculinist, work-based understanding of class in favour of home, gender, domestic labour and the family kitchen. As Nicola Wilson shows, the history of the British working classes has often been written from the outside, with observers looking into the world of the inhabitants. Here Wilson engages with the long cultural history of this gaze and asks how 'home' is represented in the writing of authors who come from a working-class background. Her book explores the depiction of home as a key emotional and material site in working-class writing from the Edwardian period through to the early 1990s. Wilson presents new readings of classic texts, including The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Love on the Dole and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, analyzing them alongside works by authors including James Hanley, Walter Brierley, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Buchi Emecheta, Pat Barker, James Kelman and the rediscovered 'ex-mill girl novelist' Ethel Carnie Holdsworth. Wilson's broad understanding of working-class writing allows her to incorporate figures typically ignored in this context, as she demonstrates the importance of home's role in the making and expression of class feeling and identity.

Chapter 1
Writing Home and Class

The place of home and domesticity in ideas about class is full of contradictions. On the one hand, theoretical and sociological models of class have traditionally ignored the significance of home as a site of class formation. The making and consciousness of class has, at least since the influential theories of Karl Marx, been framed in terms of a waged workplace encounter. The process of industrialisation, according to Marx, entailed the alienation of labour, an estrangement from home (its diametrical opposite) that was both physical and ontological: ‘He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home.’¹ The emergent factory system and the alienation one experienced at the point of production made a class-conscious man of the exploited worker. As Peter Williams wrote in the late 1980s, ‘work and the workplace have dominated our conceptions of the ways social relations and institutions are constituted and reproduced. All else, it seems, has been regarded as secondary and as a reflection of the primary relations established through work’.²

Once we move from the more abstract ‘home’ to the concrete ‘house’, however, the situation is quite the reverse. Houses constitute one of the most basic social and economic indicators of class and help to determine its ‘lived’ experience. While, for Marx, home may have been contrary to the alienation of paid work, in terms of capitalist economic development, houses are central to what he and Engels posited as ‘the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeoisie and of its rule’.³ A key tenet of Max Weber’s theory of stratification is that ‘“property” and “lack of property” are … the basic categories of all class situations’.⁴ To live in or own a house is a conduit to selfhood and active citizenship; the concept of private property has historically determined whether one had the right to vote. (Homeless people have had the right to vote since 2000, when the Labour Party changed electoral registration rules to allow them to register by means of a ‘declaration of locality’.)

An important body of research has emerged in the last three decades to challenge the neglect of home and domestic space in traditional models of class and class formation. This takes two different tacks. Feminists in the social sciences (primarily sociologists and geographers) have explored how domestic relationships and the material spaces of home constitute the ‘drama of class’, affecting one’s take-up of classed, raced and gendered attributes.⁵ They argue that the scripts of ‘lived class’ are first learnt and reproduced through the interaction between parents – particularly mothers – and children in the home. ‘There is a story to be told about “the kitchen” … mothering, is an essential part of a story about class and social democracy in Britain’, wrote Valerie Walkerdine and Helen Lucey in their seminal Democracy in the Kitchen: Regulating Mothers and Socialising Daughters (1989).⁶

Such insights have added to the work of cultural historians and literary critics (influenced by poststructuralist ideas and the work of Michel Foucault) who have drawn upon novels and other forms of written discourse to argue that class, or the idea of class, might have existed as a written or literary formation, something pre-existing social-class formation in historical time. In Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987), the pioneering Nancy Armstrong adopted a Foucauldian paradigm to argue that women’s domestic fiction from the late eighteenth century actually produced the gendered and class-based dictates of a middle-class social hegemony.⁷ Armstrong’s influential work on the novel’s production of middle-class ideology, with fiction operating as ‘a document and … an agency of cultural history’, has been taken up by other critics to address the literary formation of the working class.⁸ As Lynette Finch powerfully argues in The Classing Gaze (1993):

[T]he emergence of the idea, the working-class … was first articulated through social and epistemological, rather than economic determinants. … The range of surveys which predated Marx’s location of the working class within the economic order of production capitalism, including Frederick Engels’ survey, all organised the observed people through reference to morality not to political or economic order. These nineteenth century environmentalist surveys gave ‘the proletariat’ to the political economist, Karl Marx, as an already constituted grouping.⁹

Unwholesome Dwellings and the Way In

Though we have few historical images of the inside of working-class houses, the working-class home is prominent as a series of representations in the reports of visitors and philanthropists, journalists and social commentators, novelists, diarists and poets. Some of our earliest reports of the working-class interior stem from the concern to raise general awareness about the poor’s dismal and unhealthy living conditions. The earliest images of working-class homes in the nineteenth century come from the reports of sanitary reformers and municipal advisors: in the Reports of the Royal Commissions of the 1830s and 1840s, and in the articles, books and pamphlets written by men exploring the failings and disparities of modern industrial society. This includes Edwin Chadwick’s Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (1842); Hector Gavin’s Sanitary Ramblings (1848); Henry Mayhew’s hugely influential London Labour and the London Poor (published as a series of articles between 1849–50 and later in four volumes, 1861–62); George Godwin’s London Shadows; A Glance at the ‘Homes’ of the Thousands (1854); and James Hole’s The Homes of the Working Classes, with Suggestions for their Improvement (1866).¹⁰ Describing and illustrating the ‘homes’ of the poor and working classes enabled these writers to convey for their readers, as George Godwin noted, ‘without fear, and at their leisure, the extraordinary and distressing scene it presents’.¹¹

These writers came from a variety of backgrounds and moral perspectives. Hector Gavin was lecturer in forensic medicine and public health at Charing Cross Hospital and member of the Committees of the Health of Towns and of London associations; Henry Mayhew was a journalist; George Godwin an architect and editor of The Builder; James Hole director of a building society, honorary secretary of the Yorkshire Union of Mechanics Institutes and member of the Leeds Model Cottage Association. In prefaces to their findings they cite poems on Christian duty and the brotherhood of man (‘And seek the sufferer in his darkest den, / … – feel for all, as brother Men!’).¹² What unites them is the desire to raise public consciousness about life in ‘the foul streets and filthy dwellings’ of the new urban masses.¹³ As James Hole described:

In the metropolis of the kingdom, and indeed in every large centre of population, thousands, nay, scores of thousands of human beings are congregated together, who … dwell in unhealthy, dirty, miserable hovels, crowded into small streets and courts, oft-times hidden behind palatial structures; illustrating, by contrast, the wide extremes of modern civilization.¹⁴

Improving such conditions was regarded as crucial to the health, lives and character of the nineteenth-century poor. ‘It is the “home” of the working man’, wrote Hole, ‘which, more than any other single circumstance, affects his condition, his health, his morals; and its goodness may almost be taken as a measure of his civilization’.¹⁵ In a time of highly contagious diseases like typhus and cholera, it was also crucial to the state of the nation. As George Godwin wrote in his polemical prologue to London Shadows:

The miserable condition in which thousands of human beings are condemned to pass their lives … is a giant evil, a giant which should be slain if we would not have it slay us. … [W]e are all bound by the solemnest of injunctions to bear our part in the fight, – a fight against dirt, disease, disorder, degradation, and death; – a fight in a Holy War.¹⁶

Unsanitary living conditions were seen to be at the root of epidemics, political ferment and social degeneration, and campaigners argued that redressing them was imperative to both Christian duty and the utilitarian self-interest prevalent at the time. As Charles Dickens wrote in the preface to the cheap edition of Oliver Twist (1837–39), published in 1850 after a major outbreak of cholera in London:

Nothing effectual can be done for the elevation of the poor in England, until their dwelling-places are made decent and wholesome. I have always been convinced that this Reform must precede all other Social Reforms; that it must prepare the way for Education, even for Religion; and that, without it, those classes of the people which increase the fastest, must become so desperate and be made so miserable, as to bear within themselves the certain seeds of ruin to the whole community.¹⁷

The tradition of the social explorer, as Peter Keating has pointed out in a study of late nineteenth-century examples, ‘is of real importance for any understanding of class relationships in modern democratic society’. Keating continues:

It is a tradition that is best defined in terms of the language which the writers themselves used to describe their activities. Acting as representatives of upper- or middle-class life, they cast themselves as ‘explorers’, entering, for the good of society as a whole, a world inhabited by the poor and the destitute.¹⁸

What is at stake in this gaze, as Keating gestures towards here, is the sense of distance – sometimes consciously evoked, oftentimes not – between explorer and the seen in this equation. Documentary reports aiming to raise general consciousness about the inhabitants of ‘Darkest England’ (the title of General William Booth’s 1890 exposé that invokes H.M. Stanley’s popular travelogue through Central Africa, Through the Dark Continent (1878)) were often as concerned with the point of view of the outsider as that of its inhabitants. In George Godwin’s London Shadows, for instance, a revealing encounter highlights the lack of concern for the other’s privacy that has traditionally characterised the history of visiting:

In one of these houses, in a cellar reached by a dark staircase, the steps shaky and the stair-rails rotten, we found a dark apartment, in which were two bedsteads, with scanty and dirty covering. The flagged floor was bare and damp …. There was no furniture except the two bedsteads, in one of which was an Irishman, who roused up at our entrance. ‘Not up yet; why, it is nearly eleven o’clock!’ ‘Is it really so late?’ said the tenant of this gloomy abode; ‘but then I was not home until past three this morning: I had not sold my potatoes’.¹⁹

A widespread critical interest in the flâneur in recent years and interdisciplinary research on the city has produced a number of important studies on the gaze, the politics of looking and the cross-class encounter.²⁰ Anne McClintock has spoken with particular sensitivity on the racialised and gendered aspect of t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Writing Home and Class
• 2 The Forefathers of the Working-Class Novel
• 3 Working Women and the Little House
• 4 Home on the Dole in the Hungry Thirties
• 5 Anger, Affluence and Domesticity
• 6 The Uprooted and the Anxious
• 7 Estates and the New Slum Life
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index