Literature and class: From the Peasants’ Revolt to the French Revolution

By Andrew Hadfield

This book explores the intimate relationship between literature and class in England (and later Britain) from the Peasants’ Revolt at the end of the fourteenth century to the impact of the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth. The book argues throughout that class cannot be seen as a modern phenomenon that occurred after the Industrial revolution but that class divisions and relations have always structured societies and that it makes sense to assume a historical continuity. The book explores a number of themes relating to class: class consciousness; class conflict; commercialisation; servitude; rebellion; gender relations; and colonisation. After outlining the history of class relations, five chapters explore the ways in which social class consciously and unconsciously influenced a series of writers: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Behn, Rochester, Defoe, Duck, Richardson, Burney, Blake and Wordsworth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Aug 24, 2021
• ISBN: 9781526125842

Andrew Hadfield

Andrew Hadfield is Professor of English at the University of Sussex

Book preview

Literature and class

ffirs01-fig-5001.jpg

Literature and class

From the Peasants’ Revolt to the French Revolution

Andrew Hadfield

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Andrew Hadfield 2021

The right of Andrew Hadfield to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 2583 5 hardback

First published 2021

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image:

A fifteenth-century depiction of the killing of Wat Tyler, leader of the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381. From Jean Froissart’s Chronicles (Bib. Nat. Fr. 2644, fol. 159v), fifteenth century.

Cover design:

Abbey Akanbi, Manchester University Press

Typeset

by New Best-set Typesetters Ltd

For Maud Rosa May

Contents

List of figures

List of tables

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Introduction: hidden in plain sight

1 Class in England from the late Middle Ages to the end of the eighteenth century

2 Perceptions of class in the late Middle Ages

3 Class struggle in Renaissance literature

4 The Civil War and its aftermath

5 An increasingly commercial society, 1700–50

6 Gathering pace: towards the revolutions, 1750–98

Epilogue: Shelley in Ireland

Bibliography

Index

List of figures

1.1. Nicholas Breton, The Court and the Country (1618), title page.

2.1. Quentin Massays’ ‘Ill-Matched Lovers’ (c.1520–25).

3.1. Arden of Faversham's House, Faversham. Photo by Alison Hadfield.

3.2. Arden of Faversham (1592), title page.

3.3. John Taylor, The Sculler (1612).

List of tables

1.1. English society at the end of the seventeenth century.

Acknowledgements

For reading and commenting on the whole book (and much else besides) my special thanks to Willy Maley. For reading sections my thanks to David J. Baker, Peter Boxall, Alex Davis, Matthew Dimmock, Pat Palmer and Neil Rhodes. For stimulating conversation, helpful observations, answering queries and recommended reading, my thanks to Richard Adelman, Jennifer Batt, Jill Burke, Lesley Carvello, Paul Davies, Alison Hadfield, Paul Hammond, Tim Hitchcock, John Mullan, Emma Newport, Sarah Prescott, Kirsty Rolfe, Jim Shapiro, Cathy Shrank, Naomi Tadmor, Elizabeth Upton, John Watts, Henry and Deborah Woudhuysen.

I have wanted to write about literature and social class for many years, and I am glad I have finally managed to produce something. The book has gone through a number of possible forms, iterations, and guises, large and small, broad-brush and myopically focused. I hope I have written a book in a form and style that more or less works for some, possibly many, readers. Consideration of class has been a relatively marginal subject in English and literary studies for a long time now, despite the occasional complaints of scholars, and the wonderful work of literary critics such as David Aers, John Barrell, Sandy Byrne (whose book, Poetry and Class appeared just as I was finishing this one so is not as fully incorporated into the argument as it might have been), John Goodridge, Donna Landry, Neil Rhodes (and many others acknowledged in the text), and historians such as Patricia Crawford, Rodney Hilton, Anne Laurence, Sara Mendelson, Steve Rigby, Kevin Sharpe, Alex Shepard, E. P. Thompson, Andy Wood and Keith Wrightson. It will be obvious to many pioneering writers how much I owe to their work. I hope the book stimulates productive further debate, whatever its failings. A second volume covering material from the beginning of the nineteenth century should follow in due course.

It has been a pleasure to work on this book with Matthew Frost at Manchester and I am only sorry that I have kept him waiting so long. Thanks also to David Appleyard, Paul Clarke and Caroline McPherson at Manchester, who saw the book through the press. Back in Hove Alison has had to put up with my ravings, meanderings and assertions about class for far too long. I am grateful to her for listening, responding and making suggestions, reminding me that I am right far less often than I imagine, as well as so much more. The book is dedicated to Maud Rosa May Hadfield, a wonderful daughter and star nurse.

Abbreviations

Introduction: hidden in plain sight

‘literature can be made to yield the outlines of social history’ ¹

Afternoon tea and social mobility

As so many writers have recognized, the realities of class underpin our lives in superficial and profound ways. Class determines our material existence, our prospects, our horizons, how we relate to other people, our tastes, our manners, our feelings of well-being and anxiety and so much more. Our understanding of who we are is conceived in terms of our social status so that the fundamental aspects of our existence, ‘our bodily movement, speech and actions … are formed by class’.² Such matters are all, of course, the stuff of literature: they lie behind its mode of production and are represented within specific texts.³ It is easier to state this truth than to provide a convincing analysis. As Gareth Stedman Jones has observed, ‘in England more than in any other country, the word class has acted as a congested point of intersection between many competing, overlapping or simply differing forms of discourse – political, economic, religious and cultural – right across the political spectrum.’ ⁴ ‘Class’ is both a political-economic structure and a language, hence the familiar paradox that an improvement in living standards as Britain became more industrialized could be perceived as a ‘catastrophic experience’ by most people.⁵ Two examples from relatively recent literary works will demonstrate the significance of this distinction.

I will start with a significant, apparently trivial example. Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea (1978) follows the protagonist, Charles Arrowby, a successful, philandering actor, director and playwright, who leaves London and buys a large house by the sea on the edge of an unnamed village. He intends to write his memoirs away from the bustle of his life in the metropolis, only to encounter his first love, Hartley. They had planned to marry but she had suddenly disappeared and now re-appears, unhappily married to a brutal man with a troubled son. Charles thinks that it is his duty to save her and, in doing so, recover the innocence of their first love. Towards the end of the novel, after her son, Titus, has drowned at Charles’ house (Charles had befriended him in order to get closer to Hartley), Hartley invites Charles round to tell him that she and her husband are emigrating to Australia to start a new life.

Murdoch's novel is full of symbolic material, much of it warning Charles that he cannot return to his past as easily as he thinks and that his self-appointed role as Hartley's saviour is deluded and doomed to failure. One of the many things he fails to understand is the gulf in class that separates him from Hartley, a central reason why their early love would never have flourished and why his clumsy attempts to rekindle her affections cannot work. Despite his conscious affection for Hartley, Charles is repelled by what he sees as the shabby, mundane nature of her house and everyday existence. Confronted by a barking black and white collie, he is disgusted by the atmosphere: ‘The smell of roses, of which there were several vases even in the hall, mingled with the stuffy stench of the house, a sweetish sickly fussy interior smell like the smell of a very old woman's room.’ ⁶ The repetition of ‘smell’ demonstrates not just how strongly this affects Charles, but how his senses overwhelm his intellect and his eloquence. He makes a snobbish and belittling connection between lower-middle class and old age, an observation that clearly does not reflect well on him and should serve as a serious warning sign that there can be no meaningful link with Hartley.

The reader understands that Hartley has gone to a great deal of trouble, partly because, we infer, she is unused to having guests and wishes to please them and be understood to have behaved properly; and partly because she is afraid of Charles, a powerful man of higher social status, to whom she is about to give some unwelcome news. Accordingly, ‘An elaborate tea had been laid out on a little round table and on a plate stand. There was bread and butter, scones, jam, some kind of sandwiches and an iced cake.’ This afternoon tea (Charles has been invited round at four o’clock) clearly mimics one served in a café or department store, a meal that Hartley thinks of as a special treat but which Charles would never eat. Afternoon tea became popular in the late nineteenth century after the fashion of Anna Russell, Duchess of Bedford (1783–1857), who wanted a meal to bridge the gap between an early lunch and the later evening meal eaten after 8pm. English working-class families would eat their evening meal, often called tea, at around 6pm when they returned from work, so afternoon tea was a meal associated with privilege and aspiration.⁷ For a well-heeled metropolitan bohemian like Charles it is to be endured rather than enjoyed.

Murdoch emphasizes Hartley's social discomfort through her humorous speech patterns, designed to make Charles feel more comfortable, but which only serve to increase the tense atmosphere and distance between the two. ‘Sit you down’, she tells Charles, summoning a familiar, jokey command, ‘I'll wet the tea’, an Irish-English phrase and, so probably associated with the influx of Irish workers into Britain after the Second World War.⁸ The social awkwardness continues as she poses questions without waiting for an answer to assuage her anxiety: ‘You don't mind milk in first? A sandwich? Or something with jam? The cake's home-made but not in this home, I'm afraid!’ (p. 450). Pouring milk into tea is an activity replete with class significance, as George Orwell recognized.⁹ The tradition was that only the finest china cups could withstand the heat of boiling water so that the upper classes would pour the milk in last; pouring the milk in first was an indication that you were of lower social status.¹⁰ Hartley continues with her familiar habit, but apologizes because she feels that Charles will disapprove. She apologizes too for not having made a cake, while recognizing that shop-bought cakes are inferior and therefore has bought a home-made one. In making the nature of her purchase clear Hartley also lets Charles know that she has not baked him a cake, which would have been an act of hospitable friendship.

The scene becomes more comic in its representation of English social awkwardness. Charles is discomforted when Hartley asks him to have another cucumber sandwich, a symbol of social aspiration, the cucumber having upper-class associations because only the rich had enough garden space and could afford the cold frames necessary to grow the vegetable, the cucumber sandwich becoming popular as part of the Victorian afternoon tea.¹¹ However, Charles has not finished the one he has, and he accidentally crushes the new one ‘and some cucumber sped onto the floor’ (p. 452). He attempts to put the sandwich in his pocket and, almost as if to draw attention away from this insignificant faux pas, blurts out his condolences for the death of their adopted son, Titus (who Hartley's husband, Ben, hates because he thinks he is Charles’), his intention only becoming clear to the reader at the end of his words:

I said, ‘I am so sorry – I am so sorry – about –’

‘About Titus,’ said Ben. ‘Yes. So are we.’ He paused, then added, ‘It was one of those things.’

‘It was a tragedy,’ said Hartley. She spoke as if this was some sort of definitive description.

I went on desperately. I wanted to drag us all down into some common pool of feeling. I wanted to stop this conventional machine of awful insincere politeness. But I could not find suitable words. I said, ‘I feel it was my fault – I can't – I shall never –’ (p. 452).

This is a rich mixture of tragedy and comedy, its hybrid complexity signalled by Hartley's description of Titus's death as a ‘tragedy’; Charles wants there to be common feeling between them but his clumsy introduction of the subject is as much about his social discomfort as it is genuine sympathy for the bereaved couple. Ben, as his words suggest, is not especially concerned about Titus, having had little affection for the boy, and he has even less for Charles, retreating into an inappropriate cliché, as if death by drowning were a sad, but inevitably frequent occurrence. Hartley is genuinely affected by Titus's death and her description of a young life needlessly cut short as a ‘tragedy’ is surely appropriate. Charles, however, through whose eyes we see this exchange, inwardly sneers at her use of the word, something that emphasizes the distance between the characters, demonstrating how hopelessly inappropriate is his desire to find common ground between them. There is a beautiful irony in a man who has made a successful career in the theatre being tone deaf not just to his insensitive snobbishness in appealing to the ‘correct’ use of a literary term, but also in his not recognizing conversation that could have appeared in a well-made play at the West End, ordinary words, pauses and hesitations carrying significant meaning.¹² Charles wants there to be an authenticity – a familiar demand of the culturally entitled of the less privileged – but cannot see that he, as much as anyone, prevents genuine communication from taking place. As he leaves, Charles makes a desperate and feeble attempt to coerce Hartley into coming away with him but the novel ends with Ben and Hartley in Australia and Charles having returned to his former London life.

The Sea, The Sea is not a novel about class, but it reveals throughout a keen eye for the existence of social barriers and how these contribute to human comedy, misunderstanding and misery. A novel that is much more centrally concerned with class is E. M. Forster's Howard's End (1910). Forster's epigraph was ‘Only Connect’, inviting the reader to wonder whether there had been meaningful connection between the sexes, the generations and the classes by the end of the work. Forster suffered from a complex understanding of his own social position as a homosexual upper-middle class intellectual, simultaneously part of and cut off from the establishment, an acknowledgement that circumscribed his writing.¹³ As his biographer, Wendy Moffat, has noted, Forster's ‘attitude to his social inferiors was complicated. More than many men of his class, [he] saw how working-class people were slighted, treated as nearly invisible.’ ¹⁴ Forster's concern was not simply to counteract prejudice and to make his readers aware of a more inclusive social reality than he thought they were used to encountering, but to show how their social being determines their consciousness far more potently than they realized.

Howard's End concerns the fate of three families: the intellectual, cultured Schlegels; the wealthy Wilcoxes, who have made their money through industry; and the Basts, a young working-class couple struggling to keep their heads above water on Leonard Bast's clerk's wages. The Wilcoxes and the Schlegels live close to each other in central London; the dying Ruth Wilcox befriends Margaret Schlegel and, on her deathbed, writes a note promising to leave her Howard's End, her beloved farmhouse in Sussex. Her widower, Henry, destroys the note. Some years later, now betrothed to Margaret, he advises Leonard Bast – who has been befriended by Margaret's sister, Helen – to leave his job in a bank and seek more gainful employment in insurance. The change of jobs is disastrous, and Leonard and Jacky fall into dire poverty. They are invited to Margaret and Henry's wedding where Henry recognizes Jacky as his former mistress. Helen subsequently has an affair with Leonard and becomes pregnant. Margaret asks Henry to forgive her sister as she has forgiven him his past, but he refuses. The novel reaches its climax at Howard's End where Charles Wilcox, Henry's son, attacks Leonard who dies of heart failure. Charles is convicted of manslaughter; Margaret stands by Henry who rewrites his will to leave her Howard's End, and, after her death, it will pass to his nephew, Helen and Leonard's son.

Whatever the problematic coincidences in the plot Forster's analysis of class immediately before the First World War is never superficial. In conversation with her aunt, and obviously in part to shock someone from an older generation, Margaret asserts that she is planning to take some risks, while also acknowledging that for people with money, apparent risks are never really dangerous gambles:

You and I and the Wilcoxes stand upon money as upon islands. It is so firm beneath our feet that we forget its very existence … we ought to remember, when we are tempted to criticize others, that we are standing on these islands, and that most of the others are down below the surface of the sea. The poor cannot always reach those whom they want to love, and they can hardly ever escape from those whom they love no longer … I'm tired of those rich people who pretend to be poor, and think it shows a nice mind to ignore the piles of money that keep their feet above the waves. I stand each year upon six hundred, and Helen upon the same, and Tibby will stand upon eight, and as fast as our pounds crumble away into the sea they are renewed … And all our thoughts are the thoughts of six-hundred-pounders, and all our speeches[.]¹⁵

This speech hovers over the subsequent action. Margaret is obviously right about the difference between rich and poor and the opportunities that money provides, and those taken away from people without an adequate supply of it. The novel also surely expresses significant anxiety about rich people pretending to be poor. Margaret herself secures her independence and obtains Howard's End through marrying an extremely wealthy man and then is able to stand by him on a matter of principle (his suffering because his son is sent to prison) when it seemed as though she might have had to leave him because of his condemnation of her sister after Margaret had forgiven his shameful past. Such moral luck means that she never has to choose between poverty and her conscience. Helen takes a different path, but she also is saved from having to make a choice by Leonard Bast's fortunately untimely death. Her son will inherent the house but he will never have had to endure the poverty that afflicted his father. Most significantly Margaret's speech poses an uncomfortable question for the reader: are our thoughts determined by our social standing?

Forster might even seem to be echoing one of Marx's most famous pronouncements: ‘It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.’ ¹⁶ Margaret speaks again in the final scene where the sisters are reunited, along with Paul and Charles’ wife, Dolly, Helen's baby and Tom, a small boy who lives next door. Her speech brings a form of closure to the action, as she ranges outward from her sister and child to the family and on beyond humanity:

Don't fret yourself, Helen. Develop what you have; love your child. I do not love children. I am thankful to have none. I can play with their beauty and charm, but that is all – nothing real, not one scrap of what there ought to be. And others – others go further still, and move outside humanity altogether. A place, as well as a person, may catch the glow. Don't you see that all this leads to comfort in the end? It is part of the battle against sameness. Differences – eternal differences, planted by God in a single family, so that there may always be colour; sorrow perhaps, but colour in the daily gray. Then I can't have you worrying about Leonard. Don't drag in the personal when it will not come. Forget him (p. 328).

Helen asks what Leonard has ‘got out of life’, to which Margaret replies ‘an adventure’. When asked if that is enough, she responds, ‘Not for us. But for him.’

The celebration of the different ways in which individuals can live their lives requires that they forget the tragic life and death of Leonard and concentrate on the rainbow colours that obliterate the grey. Margaret's speech might be seen as a quasi-religious counterpoint to her earlier quasi-socialist speech about money and class. Read one way her speech is generous and forgiving; read another way it is myopic and small-minded. Leonard's posthumous son will be given the opportunities that he never had by well-meaning people who were always sympathetic to him. But, on the other hand, Forster shows that the upper classes have appropriated a lower-class baby and will turn him into one of them. It is hard not to conclude that Margaret's words, whatever their good intentions, are those that someone with a secure income who fears no risk would make in the circumstances, exactly as she noted earlier.

Indeed, Foster's most trenchant social criticism is centred on the fate of Leonard. Leonard, unlike the Schlegel sisters, is devoid of good fortune, and of luck. He desperately wants to improve himself, move up the social scale so that he and Jacky can have a more secure and comfortable life. But he also wants to become more cultured and intellectually sophisticated, like the Schlegel sisters who are at ease with difficult books, music and paintings. To this end he works to improve his written style, attempting to imitate a passage of Ruskin, the famous and elegantly written opening of chapter two of The Stones of Venice, describing the island of Torcello:

Seven miles to the north of Venice, the banks of sand, which nearer the city rise little above low-water mark, attain by degrees a higher level, and knit themselves at last into fields of salt morass, raised here and there into shapeless mounds, and intercepted by narrow creeks of sea (cited on p. 61).¹⁷

Leonard understands that Ruskin is ‘the greatest master of English prose’ and wants to write as much like him as he can, but finds that his efforts are doomed to failure. He discovers there is an unbridgeable gap between his dark and stuffy flat and the beauty signalled by Ruskin's evocative description of Venice (to which, of course, Leonard has never been). Leonard's own, more restricted, imagination starts to intrude as he introduces one of the familiar, clichéd images of Venice into his response:

And the voice in the gondola rolled on, piping melodramatically of Effort and Self-Sacrifice, full of high purpose, full of beauty, full even of sympathy and the love of men, yet somehow eluding all that was actual and insistent in Leonard's life. For it was the voice of one who had never been dirty or hungry, and had not guessed successfully what dirt and hunger are (p. 62).

Leonard moves swiftly from a belief in effort and hard work to faith in ‘sudden conversion’, at which point the narrator intrudes to comment that such notions are ‘peculiarly attractive to a half-baked mind’.

The comment is deliberately harsh and jarring. Forster's critique of the English class system and its relationship to the country's educational institutions is even more pointed than Thomas Hardy's representation of Jude Fawley's harsh rejection by Christminster University. Jude was refused entry on the grounds of his class and told to stick to his profession; Leonard is provided with an aspirational goal that is doomed to inevitable failure.¹⁸ As a young man Forster had taught at the Working Men's College in Great Ormond Street, London. The college had been established in the 1860s to ‘provide a university-style education for men of the working classes’, its courses ‘set to self-consciously mirror the most advanced curricula of the day: systematic study of controversial political subjects, great literature and art’.¹⁹ Ruskin had been a keen supporter, eager to promote his understanding of the dignity of manual labour and the need for there to be a more integral relationship between work and the creative processes.²⁰ Yet, reading Ruskin makes Leonard despair. Instead of raising him up to think more creatively about his own labour and providing him with a more satisfying and inspiring way of living, his studies only serve to point out how dreary, drab and confined his existence has become and will inevitably be. Forster is pointing out the harsh reality of over-optimism, the cruel truth that in a rigidly class-structured society not everyone can enjoy the fruits of their labour. While Margaret is seen as a radical socialist by her aunt for pointing out that the leisured classes are able to think as they do because of the island of wealth that supports them, we now see Leonard thinking like a man on a wage that will barely support a young couple and which not only leaves little time for productive leisure but serves as a constant reminder of the futility of his hard work. Leonard believes himself superior to those who have been able to raise their social status because they have had a ‘bit of luck’ on the stock exchange, but he is forced to anticipate a dramatic shift of fortune that will also transform his cultural knowledge and status:

He did believe in effort and in a steady preparation for the change that he desired. But of a heritage that may expand gradually he had no conception: he hoped to come to Culture suddenly, much as the Revivalist hopes to come to Jesus. Those Miss Schlegels had come to it; they had done the trick; their hands were upon the ropes, once and for all. And meanwhile his flat was dark as well as stuffy (pp. 62–3).

Leonard is placing his faith in an impossible goal, a sudden acquisition of a cultured education. He is not indulging in a risk so much as diminishing his happiness by taking on extra labour that reminds him how limited his prospects are and how dreary his surroundings. Reading Ruskin does not provide him with legitimate aspirations and the ability to see his work as a more creative force but a bitter resentment of the more privileged. For Leonard there is a stark reality: work can be interesting and fulfilling rather than dull, laborious and deadening. But not for him.

Forster's critique of the glass ceiling placed above Leonard points not just to the self-interest of the upper classes – even the most enlightened and empathetic. More radical still, perhaps, is the sad and moving analysis of Leonard himself. Leonard's ideas are, indeed, ‘half-baked’. But, then, so are Margaret's and Helen's. Margaret is capable of acknowledging inconsistencies and hypocritical thinking by members of her class, but she marries a wealthy industrialist and, at the end of the novel, excludes Leonard from her vision of a hopeful future because thinking about him will make them unhappy and, she reasons, at least he has had an adventure (even though it killed him). Helen also sees the failings of her class and the brutal treatment of those beneath them, which is surely why she falls for Leonard and has a child with him. The novel's ending is surely as bleak as it is hopeful. Helen and Leonard's child will inherit Howard's End, but he will be a member of the upper-middle classes and will think like someone on an island of six hundred pounds a year, not like his dead father.²¹ The beautiful prospect of the gathered families in the sunny garden looking out towards fields with the prospect of a magnificent crop of hay is not for the likes of Leonard.

Leonard's story may indeed be one that Forster designed as a response to that of Hardy's Jude.²² Jude cannot succeed because too many obstacles are placed in his way. Leonard cannot succeed because he is not quite good enough. He has cultural aspirations but cannot reach them. If he had been born into another class, probably no one would have noticed and his limitations would not really have affected his life and prospects. Through the miserable story of Leonard Bast, Forster criticizes the meritocracy of the Edwardian education system.²³ With limited places at university – only about 1% of students were working class – evening classes were all that most could hope for, and even the acquisition of culture from such labour was unlikely to transform the lives of many.²⁴ Unless you had a significant income you were unlikely to benefit much from acquiring knowledge of literature, art and music. Most people from the lower classes who believed they could become cultured enough to rise up the social scale were doomed, like Leonard, to bitterness and failure. Forster has often been seen as a spokesperson for a rather elitist and intellectually homogenizing ‘liberal humanism’, remote from the nature of class experience, but Howard's End is arguably as hard-hitting as any novel on class written in the first half of the twentieth century.²⁵

The history of class struggle

‘The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle.’ ²⁶ These words, surely the most famous about social class, open The Communist Manifesto (1848), the most influential work on class and class struggle in history.²⁷ The Manifesto has shaped how people have imagined class, both those who have accepted its broad-brush outline of history, as well as those hostile to its analysis, and those who are bewildered and bored by, or indifferent to, the ideas of Marx and Engels. Subsequent analysis of class, even when sympathetic to Marx and Engels, has attempted to build on Marx's rather sketchy notions of class structure, the vital question being whether such work undermines or detracts from the gnomic force of the original formulation.²⁸

The ending of the work is as famous as its beginning: ‘the proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men [sic.] of all countries, unite!’ ²⁹ As Aijaz Ahmad has argued, Marx had written thousands of pages before he was thirty and the Manifesto ‘distilled, in prose of great brevity and beauty, a wide range of themes – from history, philosophy, political economy, philosophy of history, socialist theory, and much else besides – that had preoccupied him at much length’.³⁰ Marx, largely following classical economists, represented history as a series of transformations, from a political economy based on slavery to a feudal mode of production, then, with the rise of industry, a bourgeois mode of production centred on profit rather than assumed inherent social relations. With the rise of capitalism comes the rise of globalism: ‘And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.’ ³¹ The phrase ‘world literature’ is pivotal: Marx, as is well-known, was both influenced by his wide reading in world literature, and, in turn, his conceptions of society, revolution and class depend on his literary sensibility and imaginative engagement with literary texts.³²

It is surely no surprise, therefore, that notions of class, class distinctions and class consciousness are not only the stuff of much literature, but that thinking about class is intimately bound up with literary categories, structures and details. For Ernst Fischer, art and class society are inextricably related, the birth of art being ‘an expression of the beginnings of alienation’, mankind's rupture with nature as a small number of the powerful exploited those in their power.³³ We do not need to take Fischer's narrative on trust to understand that the history of literature, therefore, is the history of class – perhaps even of class struggle.

In order to make this apparently grand claim one has to make the case that an understanding of class, class identity and class consciousness existed before the advent of ‘modernity’ and modern industrial society, a history that is often disputed or dismissed. The word ‘class’ entered English – certainly as a widely used term – in the seventeenth century and many commentators have argued that what we understand by social class post-dates its usage.³⁴ Peter Laslett's influential book, The World We Have Lost (1965), for example, claimed that the division of society into classes was a direct result of industrialization, which swept away pre-industrial society based on the family and the local community.³⁵ In some ways Laslett's understanding of social change mirrors that of Marx, envisaging the world becoming ever more connected with the rise of capitalism and the bourgeoisie. But the belief that society was more or less unified before ‘modernity’ is open to serious challenge. Laslett's analysis, which often employs literary examples (Arnold Bennett, Defoe, George and Weedon Grossmith, Pepys, Shakespeare), stands as a counterpart to T. S. Eliot's attack on the impoverishment of experience after the Industrial Revolution. In his essay on ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ (1921), Eliot argued that modern men and women could no longer experience the world in the ways that their ancestors had done because they had lost a unified, common sensibility. Writing about how he thought John Donne interacted with the world, Eliot argues that

A thought to Donne was an experience: it modified his sensibility. When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.

We may express the differences by the following theory: The poets of the seventeenth century … possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience.³⁶

Eliot's words are not simply about how poets and poetry have changed after the advent of industrial society; they are an analysis of the consequences of the division of labour that had to happen for that transformation to occur and, therefore, implicitly a comment on social division and social class. Before the advent of ‘modernity’ people were socially united and shared a common experience so that the most articulate and sensitive of them, a poet like Donne, ‘could feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose’.³⁷ Afterwards, even the best poets, like Tennyson and Browning, are unable to feel or write in the same way.

Eliot's historical narrative is also an inversion of that of Marx: while Marx sees the rise of capitalism and the division of labour connecting people through the creation of global links and the consequent advent of ‘world literature’, Eliot sees only separation and division so that even reading a high-brow philosopher such as Spinoza cannot build any bridges in the nature of experience. It is worth noting that Peter Laslett's understanding of pre-modern society is remarkably similar to Eliot's in terms of questions asked, analysis and – most significantly here – language. Laslett sees a society that had a hierarchy that was both inchoate and definite, a fundamental division between those who had power and those who did not:

[T]he head of the poorest family was at least the head of something. The workers did not form a million outs facing a handful of ins. They were not in what we should call a mass situation. They could not be what we should call a class. For this, it has been claimed, if the expression can be used at all, was a one-class society.³⁸

Despite all the careful qualifications, Laslett argues that society was simple enough: a common experience of life, with a few governing who also shared the social horizons of those over whom they exercised power. There was a ‘graduated ladder from top to bottom of the social scale’, the ‘status system’, but this was really only significant for the ‘nobility and the gentry’.³⁹ For the rest there was a shared sense of order and purpose:

The plain Richard Hodgsons, Robert Boswells, Humphrey Eltons and John Burtons of the English villages, the labourers and husbandmen, the tailors, millers, drovers, watermen, masons, could become constables, parish clerks, churchwardens, ale-conners, even overseers of the poor. They had something of a public life, within the tiny boundaries of the village, and this might give them a minor consequence in the surrounding villages. If they happened to be technically qualified, they might even cast a vote at an election. But in none of these capacities did their opinion matter very much, even in the last. They brought no personal weight to the modest offices which they could hold. As individuals they had no instituted, recognized power over other individuals, always excepting once again those subsumed within their families.⁴⁰

Laslett concentrates on the unified, collective social experience, one that connects members of society: ordinary people can exercise power at certain points but they still share the worldview of their fellow villagers. Eliot made a similar case that apparently diverse modes of thinking and experiencing the world were unified in pre-modern society, a sensibility that was later lost. Common to both is a view of society as a fundamentally homogenous entity, something accepted by virtually all its members.

It is, of course, true that society changed dramatically with the dawn of the Industrial Revolution and the transformation of the means and relations of production that this entailed. Keith Wrightson, like Peter Laslett, sees early modern English society as one dominated by local interests and not possessing the wider institutional and organizational means to foster ‘broader class consciousness’.⁴¹ Even so, he acknowledges that it was ‘perhaps a society which possessed an incipient class dimension in its distribution of wealth, productive relations and market situation, and in which antagonisms between social strata undoubtedly existed’.⁴² Undoubtedly the most fundamental problem that any social historian examining the evidence for this period faces is that most people were illiterate and so leave behind no obvious traces or clues about what they really thought of their position in society; how things might be changed for the better; or whether, indeed, they had any coherent thoughts on such subjects.⁴³ Accordingly, it is surely helpful to think about class in terms of Marx's comments on ‘small holding peasants’ in nineteenth-century France in a rather later work, one which, like The Communist Manifesto, is saturated with literary learning, style and references: The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852).⁴⁴ The peasants, according to Marx, ‘form a vast mass’, but their social conditions of heavy toil and isolation, as well as their lack of access to the media and printed word, mean that they are not able to enter into ‘manifold relations with one another’.⁴⁵ Therefore, ‘They are … incapable of enforcing their class interest in their own name … They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented.’ ⁴⁶ The same is true of any largely illiterate group/class – and, it is worth pointing out, there has frequently been moral panic about the consequences of spreading literacy too widely and too rapidly, most notably after the Reformation.⁴⁷ It is surely significant that the leaders of the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381 seem to have adopted names that were literary and literate, and also emblematic of the class they sought to represent: Jack Straw, Jakke Mylnere, Jakke Carter and Jakke Trewman. One chronicler even thought that one of the leaders of the revolt was called Piers Plowman, a sign of the close relationship between literature and class identity.⁴⁸ Might this be an indication that Langland's great poem was more widely read than is often assumed, perhaps as an oral work? Or that its radical message inspired the leaders of the revolt, even if they knew relatively little about its substance?⁴⁹

This desire to speak for others, to represent them as a class, suggests that we might sometimes usefully think of class, following Benedict Anderson's influential categorization of the nation, as an ‘imagined community’ – one that connects people who do not know each other and have no obvious link other than, here, their socio-economic position in society.⁵⁰ For Anderson it is the growth of a print culture in the form of the mass circulation of newspapers that leads to the growth of nationalism, as people are able to start imagining connections to others who live in the same territory and share a common language.⁵¹ Anderson's chronology has been widely criticized by many keen to point out that a number of apparently modern phenomena have a much longer history than is often assumed.⁵² The same might be said of class, especially if one thinks of class in terms of assumed and imagined links between people with shared interests, rather than solely in terms of structures of hierarchy and inequality (which is the point made by both Laslett and Wrightson). We should, therefore, be able to date class and class consciousness back beyond the Industrial Revolution, especially as writers such as Christopher Dyer have no difficulty in writing about the Middle Ages in terms of class analysis, real and ‘imagined’.⁵³

It should not, therefore, be such a hard task to write a history of literature and class. Obviously, the changing nature of class relations and the relations of production needs to be acknowledged and analysed; the frame of frame of reference has to be defined and restricted; and a paradigmatic set of examples selected that will enable readers