English literature is obsessed with issues of class and its history makes no sense without an understanding that literature and class are invariably linked in a symbiotic relationship. Even if a restrictive definition of ‘class’ is adopted so that class is taken to be a category inaugurated by the Industrial Revolution, we still need to think about related terms such as ‘rank’, ‘status’ and ‘hierarchy’. From Peasants’ Revolts to patronage relations to marriage alliances we cannot avoid thinking about ownership of land and property, social relations, and inequalities. Daily life has always been structured in terms of class divisions: therefore, if issues of class are ignored or disguised literary history is accordingly distorted and impoverished. In Robert Perks and Alan Thompson’s The Oral History Reader (2006) there is a shocking but revealing case study of Dutch colonialism in Indonesia. Former colonists, children at the time but now grown up, when interviewed express fond memories of their servants with whom they felt they had formed closer bonds than their parents, relations, and peer group; the former servants have very different memories of a selfish, oppressive class who took them for granted and who had no understanding of the realities of daily life. What is invisible to one group is central to the lives experience of the other. This dual focus stands as a warning that the stubborn realities of – here, colonial – class divisions are ignored at our peril.
My book, Literature and Class from the Peasants’ Revolt to the French Revolution, part one of a two-volume study, explores the intimate relationship between literature and class from the High Middle Ages to the dawn of Romanticism. The two best known works of the late fourteenth century, Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and William Langland’s Piers Ploughman, were both written in the wake of the cataclysmic Black Death and the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, a serious threat to the authority of Richard II. While Chaucer barely mentions these events his frequent representations of a society in the grip of selfish regard and crude social climbing depicts a land in which accepted hierarchies have broken down, while Langland adopts as his hero the figure of the peasant as Christ to lambast the material greed that he thought had engulfed landlords and ordinary citizens alike. At the end of the eighteenth-century William Blake decried the brutal effect of urbanisation and industrialisation, which blighted the lives of those at the bottom of the social ladder, while William Wordsworth wanted to sweep away what he saw as the artificially stylised language of most eighteenth-century poetry and return literature to the people using the language of ordinary men and women.
In between there are numerous examples of the impact of class relations represented in a wide range of literary texts. In Arden of Faversham, a late sixteenth-century play that was probably co-written by Shakespeare, we witness a brutal murder committed against the backdrop of unstable class relations precipitated by the land grab after the dissolution of the monasteries, which, again, led to rapacious greed as the prospect of previously unobtainable wealth tempted all but the most ascetic to try and transform their family fortunes for ever. After the murderous conflict of the Civil Wars in the middle of the seventeenth century Royalist writers such as Robert Herrick and Isaac Walton celebrated the simple joys of rural retirement in a bid to return a society to some form of stable order, acknowledging that their leaders had been almost as much to blame as their opponents in tearing apart the social fabric of England and the British Isles. On the Parliamentary side articulate radicals such as Gerard Winstanley excoriated the rich for enclosing common land and the immensely popular John Bunyan highlighted the injustice of the law of trespass on the properties of those who had clambered up the social ladder. In the eighteenth-century poets argued in print about the relative oppression of male and female labourers, and Frances Burney, arguably the most significant female novelist before Jane Austen, showed that many male aristocrats saw their female servants as little more than beasts.
The book tells the story of literature and class in England up to the advent of the advent of Industrial society and the dawn of the British Empire as a major global force determining the nature and geography of the world. A second volume, Literature and Class from Peterloo to the Present, will complete the story.
Andrew Hadfield is Professor of English at the University of Sussex and a Fellow of the British Academy.
Literature and class
From the Peasants’ Revolt to the French Revolution
By Andrew Hadfield
Find out more here.