Of all the changes that the British novel has undergone in the past ten years, the most marked is in the social origins of its leading representatives. The great majority of English writers over 45 who have contributed in a real sense to the national literature followed the typical trajectory of the English professional: birth into a bourgeois family, boarding-school education, then either Oxford or Cambridge. In the first half of the twentieth century, this was more than ever the conventional path for the English novelist. But for writers under 45, things are very different. A proportionally larger number hail from shopkeeping families, from white-collar or working-class backgrounds; many have been educated in local-authority schools; and if they too have gone to Oxford or Cambridge, the fact is that since 1945 those universities have become more accessible.

If this type of analysis needs to be treated with caution, we can nevertheless trace some features of the English novel in recent years to the emergence of two social groups: on the one hand, young people from working-class and petty-bourgeois families who have been admitted to the elite universities on scholarships; on the other, young men and women who have received only a summary education and acquire their formation, literary and ideological, elsewhere. Both sets are quite distinct from their predecessors and share some positive characteristics. They are alert to past writers from similar backgrounds—D.H. Lawrence in particular—with whom they have some affinity. But they also differ from one another in important ways. The first group, many with a degree in English literature, come into contact early on with traditional culture and ideas, which they later modify or abandon. The second group, if they have encountered that culture, will have done so altogether differently, and with divergent results.

At the same time, there has been a steady increase in the number of readers. In 1950, for the first time in English history, a majority of adults read books with some regularity, a trend encouraged by the growing number of libraries and paperback imprints. But this does not necessarily mean that authors from the new social strata are read by those from their own background. The fact that regular readers in England make up only a bare majority illustrates the limits of this expansion. And most of the writers in the second group are in fact playwrights, and therefore write for a public whose social composition has changed far less. Television drama has diminished this somewhat, but the paradox stands. There remains a disequilibrium in the relationship between writers and their public in England today, with repercussions for the field of literature. There is a notable difference between narrating particular experiences for a public that has shared them, and narrating them for a readership fascinated by novelty but with no comparable grounding in experience. Commercial promotion has added further complications: ‘personality’ may be more important in the relationship between writer and reader than the quality of the work.

At the intersection of these diverse factors is the figure of the ‘angry young man’, a deceptive formula and the coinage of a theatrical publicist, not a writer or a critic. It would be absurd, for example, to put both John Osborne and Kingsley Amis in this category: if the definition fits one, it cannot fit the other; their writings from every point of view are radically different. In its simplistic reduction, fashioned for the consumption of foreign audiences as well as the national market, a definition of this sort simply adds confusion to a situation that is already complicated enough.

Writers like Amis and John Wain began to publish after 1945, and it is common to point to this as the source for their rejection of certain forms of English bourgeois culture, exposed as irrelevant and ridiculous in the post-war world. But this sort of rejection was already typical in the thirties among leftwing poets, novelists and playwrights, when it was accompanied by a form of protest that combined political and social aspirations. In the English novel of the late 1940s, it was precisely this type of protest and consequent challenge to the social order that was missing. Amis and Wain did not continue the principal strand of the thirties but reconnected with its dissidents, above all Evelyn Waugh, William Empson and George Orwell; each different enough from the others but sharing certain preoccupations.

Another important influence in the early fifties was a type of American novel, sceptical and disengaged, known in England mainly through the writings of J. D. Salinger. Amis’s Lucky Jim and Wain’s Hurry on Down are far from alike: there is a hysteria and a want of seriousness in Wain that is absent from Amis, who, in a narrower field, is more measured and precise. But the novels have important elements in common, in particular the figure of the isolated, uprooted young man, for whom the place he comes from, where he is now and where he will go to, has little or no significance. Not only the past, but also his present reflections on the past, crumble before this demystifying investigation, as does the future, any future. The type of protest in vogue in the thirties, the oft proclaimed if not always intimately felt demand for a better, more just and happier future, had become fundamentally suspect. The reason, of course, lay partly in the bitter difficulties of left politics and in the split between social democrats and communists in the harsh post-war years. But it seems also that the strange marriage of Freudian and Marxist doctrines in the thirties led to social protest as such being viewed with marked scepticism. An early example of this reaction was Nigel Dennis’s novel Boys and Girls Come Out to Play. Amis has recently written, in a pamphlet on Socialism and the Intellectuals, that the only honest political interest is a strictly personal one. All the rest is psychologically dubious, ‘and behind that again lies perhaps your relations with your parents’.footnote¹ The irony was that the left-wing writers of the thirties themselves now landed on the same shores. We can see this in Auden’s development and the changes he made to some of his early political poems. This was not simply a matter of differing sensibilities, but of historical pressures.

The scepticism of Amis and Wain was, therefore, conservative at bottom. This does not mean it could not be lively and sometimes acute, in response to the uncertain social and cultural climate of the post-war years. Without a doubt, this scepticism was itself an integral part of the culture of the time—that of first-generation university students who saw in aspects of the new social order mere hypocrisy, irrelevance and sometimes absurdity. The figure of Professor Welch in Lucky Jim unites many of the traits of this falseness, in a society that complacently defines itself as ‘superior’. Amis’s parody successfully gives form to the response. It is unimportant, then, that Welch is a professor at a provincial university, and that this prose, midway between parody and satire, does not tackle more fundamental problems in English life, or take aim at more commanding targets. Amis instead focuses on isolated aspects of the culture that invite ridicule, all the more so in a provincial context. Wain, in Hurry on Down, widens his sphere of interest with the same underlying convictions of the shrewd youth, that nothing has value—or rather, that the only value is honesty towards oneself, recognizing the disillusion and the complex motives behind choices, whatever they may be. There is no doubt that this tone and moral temperament are typical of the time. Any curiosity about the past serves only to expose the errors committed in the name of social investigation and interpretation, of the most obvious kind. The elements of protest and rejection are strong, but the structure, the combination of parody and farce, seems to be a convenient means of avoiding the conflicts that such positions involve. Describing these feelings in a convincing way in the contemporary world—as opposed to the world of vivid details, sparkling with satire—would have led these writers to an extremely difficult question: the nature of reality today. Instead, their novels offer a phantasmagorical flight: profanities on the telephone, caricatured speech, marginal social types in whom aggression can be exaggerated. This is indicative of the social context of these works, which itself could be dated to the 1930s.