A Brief History of Working-Class Writing

The 1930s

The 1930s was a critical period in terms of class identity and politics. And for the production of working-class writing. Male members of the working class appropriated the bourgeois novel, and the fact that it is the working class who are writing about the conditions of the workers is a new and vital development. Many working-class stories of this period have urban settings where issues of unemployment and the effects of poverty are central themes, as seen in the novels of Walter Greenwood, Walter Brierly and Jack Jones.  
The Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the British financial crisis of 1931 resulted in high unemployment and seemed to indicate that capitalism was near to collapse. Exponents of modern art based their assumptions on the idea that conventional forms of representation cannot capture the complex nature of reality. However, this modernist concern with the self seemed inappropriate in an age of acute material issues: mass unemployment, poverty and social conflict. These issues needed to be confronted, which required concentration on external events, not internal processes, and commitment to making people more aware of the world and its problems. A crucial part of this process was challenging conventional representations of the working class as the comedy relief, the buffoon, the idiots or the servants - particularly seen in films. 
A discrete working-class literary heritage emerged, where worker-writer organisations and worker-education movements began to publish more assuredly and created a left-wing literary formation. The concept of working-class culture was consolidated and became more visible in post-war discourse. In 1934, the writer's congress in the Soviet Union coined the new aesthetic of 'socialist realism.' In Britain, George Orwell detailed an account of working-class life and analysed the relations between the classes in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). In 1938 the 'Left Book Club' was founded by Victor Gollancz, and one of its aims was to provide the indispensable basis of knowledge that would help create a better social and economic system.