The Working Class Library

For this episode, Richard and Claire are joined by novelist Sarah Hall to consider Flora Thompson’s memoir Lark Rise to Candleford. These days, Lark Rise to Candleford is perhaps the best-known English rural memoir in print. Thanks in no small part to the BBC’s 2000s TV adaptation, and historic class-washing in its jackets and illustrations, it is commonly thought of as a rather cosily nostalgic book. In reality, however, it is strongly class-conscious and political. Why is Thompson’s trilogy not celebrated as a classic of working-class literature?

For this episode of the Working Class Library, the writer Craig McLean joins Richard Benson, editor of The Bee, and Claire Malcolm, CEO of New Writing North, to discuss Irvine Welsh’s 1993 novel Trainspotting.Trainspotting has become, as McLean says, a multi-media “literary industrial complex”, with prequels, sequels, films, theatre productions and a mooted TV series having given its characters lives far beyond the pages of the original book. Given its fame, and the dark slapstick with which it is sometimes associated, it is easy to overlook Welsh’s serious intent in writing the novel. Using heavy dialect, he set out to write a representative account of a generation’s suffering under 1980s economic policies, a popularisation of heroin, and an AIDS epidemic. He has since made it clear that he intended this to be part of a working-class saga. In the podcast, aided by McLean’s recollections of Edinburgh’s 1990 book scene, we ask if it deserves a place on the shelves of our imaginary library of great books by and about ordinary people.

Readers who came to Hilary Mantel after her double-Booker-winning success with Wolf Hall made her a star of the literary world may not be aware that she grew up in a working-class home in a Derbyshire mill town. She, however, said many times that that background had a decisive influence on her as a person and a writer, and in Giving Up the Ghost she shows how. In the end, her status as a working-class woman almost leads to her death. Her memoir prompts the question, how much things changed – or not?

Gissing wrote New Grub Street to skewer the new literary crowd as books boomed with the arrival of mass education in Britain. What does it teach us about book publishing, the British class system and working class writers today?