Writing about working-class joy

An addendum to "The relationship between social class and children's publishing"

Disclaimer: this is a personal opinion piece, I am not speaking with any authority on class, this is just how I perceive my lived experience.

You can find my original piece here but if you don’t want to have to read it, the gist of it is that I think we need more children’s books (and books in general) written by working-class authors.

BUT, as the brilliant

Mel

pointed out, I got in the weeds talking about the barriers working-class people face. That’s all my internalised shame and biases getting involved again.

Firstly, I should say that while yes, I suffered abuse as a child, I don’t think that’s entirely related to my class. That being said, I think it is important to consider how socio-economic background and community impact children’s exposure to hardship and abuse, directly or otherwise.¹ Really though, writing books about unhappy home lives is a separate issue and a post for another day.

But the main point of my original essay is that moving in affluent middle-class circles, being given ready access to what is considered acceptable or elite art, culture and education, and having a posh accent has made it easier for me to have a career in the creative industry. I have privileges too numerous to count; not least being that I unselfconsciously say stuff like “numerous”.

Still, I think a lot of my favourite things about myself can be attributed to what I consider to be my working-class roots. I just got so caught up in the problems of social disparity and discrimination in my last piece that I made it sound like all negatives.

I also want to say that obviously, social class is often difficult to define. My older siblings aren’t sure about me using the working-class label at all. There was some debate in our WhatsApp chat about how our social class shifted when my dad left, but I was still a very small baby at the time, so I don’t remember what it was like when he lived with us. But I learnt that before I was born my mum had a white collar job, and it was also pointed out to me that three out of four us went to a grammar school (its free in Buckinghamshire, but still). On top of that, they flagged that it sort of reads like I was saying bad parenting = working-class. Which is a pretty shitty thing to say and is categorically untrue.

Just leaving this here.

So to be clear: while money and absent and mentally unwell parents were a factor in how I was raised, I certainly don’t think that’s what defines being working-class. I know and grew up around plenty of working-class people with money and/or living within what you could describe as a conventional, happy family.

Maybe if social mobility wasn’t such a hot topic, I would have skirted it, considered my issues with the narrow scope of children’s publishing only by how they relate to unstable homes. But I do also believe that working-class values, cultural interests and tastes are part of my identity. I think that my upbringing gives me a somewhat unique view: reductively, I was what I describe as working-class during the week and middle-class at weekends. Both of those versions of me think we need to cast a broader net when finding stories to read, listen to or tell: the happy, the sad and everything in between.

Photograph by Camina Ripolles

Please share your working-class joy in the comments below.

More things to read/follow:

“Where did all the working class creatives go?” by

The Hopeful Hun

Carmina Ripolles: photographer

“Am I working class enough?” by Mo Fanning (The Bookseller only allows one free article per month, try opening a private window if this is behind a paywall)

1. “Addressing the Relationship between Child Poverty and Child Abuse and Neglect”, Professor Paul Bywaters, Professor of Social Work University of Huddersfield & Dr Ruth Allen, CEO, British Association of Social Workers (February 2021); available here.