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Christopher Hilliard, "To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Britain (Harvard Historical Studies)"

Anecdotal color and a knack for letting history speak with spirit are the signature graces of Hilliard's debut work. A lecturer at the University of Sydney, Hilliard has produced a "literary history from below" that focuses on three social categories-the working class, the lower middle class, and those of the middle class without higher education-and their contributions to British letters, the "culture industry" and 20th-century mass society. Out of exhaustive research (25 archives on three continents) Hilliard introduces three movements that "drew ordinary people into imaginative writing." He begins in the late 1920s with the "amateur writers' 'movement'" associated with magazines, clubs and a thriving literary advice industry. He follows with the surge in working-class literary activity during the interwar period, allowing heretofore-obscure voices to paint the page. Hilliard's anti-fascist, working-class authors marked the influence of the Popular Front before WWII by accepting their invitation to crash the fox hunt of British literature: they toiled and loved, humped and swore, and judging by Hilliard's muscular rendering, they wrote about it all in a vernacular that owed a leg-breaking debt to personal experience, and borrowed from Wordsworth to pay it back. ("Ah'll spank thee arse, an' hard at that," writes one author.) This section is the most interesting, but it also abuts the final movement, poetry and personal essay writing during WWII, and represents the best and worst of the text: impressive research hampered by an overstuffed presentation. This is a work of scholarly information written for the academy.

In twentieth-century Britain the literary landscape underwent a fundamental change. Aspiring authors--traditionally drawn from privileged social backgrounds--now included factory workers writing amid chaotic home lives, and married women joining writers' clubs in search of creative outlets. In this brilliantly conceived book, Christopher Hilliard reveals the extraordinary history of "ordinary" voices.

Writing as an organized pursuit emerged in the 1920s, complete with clubs, magazines, guidebooks, and correspondence schools. The magazine The Writer helped coordinate a network of "writers' circles" throughout Britain that offered prospective authors--especially women--outside the educated London elite a forum in which to discuss writing. The legacy of Wordsworth and other English Romantics encouraged the belief that would-be authors should write about what they knew personally--that art flowed from genuine experience and technique was of secondary importance. The 1930s saw a boom in the publication of so-called proletarian writing, working-class men writing "in my own language about my own people," as Birmingham writer Leslie Halward put it. During World War II, soldiers turned to poetry to cope with the trauma of war, and the popular magazine Seven promoted the idea that anyone, regardless of social background, could be a creative writer. Self-expression became a democratic left.

In capturing the creative lives of ordinary people--would-be fiction-writers and poets who until now have left scarcely a mark on written history--Hilliard sensitively reconstructs the literary culture of a democratic age.

Christopher Hilliard is Lecturer in Modern European History, University of Sydney.

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