Disruptive, Anarchic and Asocial: Class and the Post-War British Regional Novel

In their study, Working Class Community (1969), Brian Jackson and Dennis Marsden declared that: “besides what the sociologists have given us since 1958, we might also consider another kind of experience: that of the creative artist”. Responding to this statement, this dissertation considers the ways in which the novelist (the creative artist) presents a nation and its people in flux. It also responds to an essay collection edited by Mackay and Stonebridge which set out to investigate the canon of post-war writing with a focus on working-class representation. The introduction concedes that after modernism, and after the Second World War, the post-war novel documented an “increasingly grim reality” and required the novelist to act as a political documentarian. Expanding on this, I have viewed the novels as both works of fiction and of political rhetoric which present the feelings of disenchantment towards a post-war British society.

Divided into three chapters, there develops an argument on whether these are suitable adjectives to describe the working-class people in post-war Britain. There are three novels which are central to this study, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1951), Hurry on Down (1953) and Room at the Top (1957), each of which are formed around an archetypal working-class individual. Interlinking the ambition to rise in the social hierarchy, or lack thereof, this study positions the novel (a typically middle-class form) as a sociological text, capable of describing the condition of the nation, and the condition of the collective individuals. Explicitly regional, each novel has a distinct voice which is directly tailored to the working-class man in his respective region. The regions of West Yorkshire, Nottingham and Stoke-On-Trent, in wartime Britain, were starkly industrial; this fact helps to inform my study of said archetypes, with the backdrop of the grim industrial landscape.