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Haru Takiuchi, British Working-Class Writing for Children: Scholarship Boys in the Mid-Twentieth Century

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Haru Takiuchi, British Working-Class Writing for Children: Scholarship Boys in the Mid-Twentieth Century 24 書 評 Works Cited Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness and Other Tales. Ed. Cedric Watts. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990. ---. The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’. Ed. Jacques Berthoud. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984. ---. The Rover. Eds. Andrzej Busza and J. H. Stape. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992. ---. The Secret Sharer and Other Stories. Eds. J. H. Stape and Allan H. Simmons. London: Penguin, 2014. Watt, Ian. Conrad in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: U of California P, 1979. Haru Takiuchi, British Working-Class Writing for Children: Scholarship Boys in the Mid-Twentieth Century Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave, 2017. viii + 218 pp. Reviewed by ARAI Megumi, University of Tokyo In his introduction to The Puffin Book of School Stories (1993), the editor Bernard Ashley writes that when he was growing up, he never came across school stories which dealt with the kind of schools he was attending. The school stories which were available at that time were all set in boarding schools. The boys I read about didn’t go home at the end of the afternoon, they went to their school Houses, where, instead of doing homework, they did prep; and at the end of term there were no school holidays for them, but vacations. And we identified with these remote characters and went around talking about doing our prep and having vacations – generally feeling inferior – because there was no alternative. (p. 2) School Houses, ‘prep’ (short for preparation), and ‘vacation’ belong to the world of the public school (fee-paying independent school) where traditional school stories, from Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s School Days (1857) to the popular Billy Bunter series (1908-40) have been set. In fact, the Billy Bunter series, which were originally published in the popular boys’ weekly magazine The Magnet, were written by Frank Richards, who himself had never been to public school, and were read, as George Orwell pointed out in his essay ‘Boys’ Weeklies’, by lower-middle-class and working-class children ‘whom Haru Takiuchi, British Working-Class Writing for Children: Scholarship Boys in the Mid-Twentieth Century 25 one might expect to be completely immune from public school “glamour”’ (Orwell, p. 96). Robert Roberts, in his account of his early life in a working-class slum of Salford, The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century, describes how he and his friends had ‘developed an addiction’ to the Billy Bunter stories, and even developed a strong sense of loyalty towards Greyfriars, the fictitious public school where the stories are set. He then depicts the rude awakening he experienced when he realized that he belonged to the class of ‘cads’ who are so despised by the boys of Greyfriars. And yet, because there were no alternatives as Ashley points out, these school stories and the ‘public school ethos’ they promoted, made a strong impression on the lower-middle- class and working-class readers, often strengthening their sense of social inferiority and class consciousness. The series of education acts passed towards the end of the nineteenth century may have fostered in the children of the lower middle and working classes the habit of regular reading, but there were very few works written for this new class of readers. Haru Takiuchi points out in the Introduction to British Working-Class Writing for Children: Scholarship Boys in the Mid-Twentieth Century that although there were a number of working-class writers of children’s fiction in the first half of the 20th century, the majority of books which dealt with working-class children were actually written by middle-class writers (p. 4). Takiuchi’s book, however, does not deal with such works. His focus is on a group of writers from the working class who wrote children’s books in the 1960s and 1970s. Most of these writers were the products of grammar schools, which are state-run secondary schools that select their pupils by means of a written examination known as the ‘eleven-plus’, or ‘the scholarship’. In theory, grammar schools were intended to provide an opportunity for lower-middle and working-class children of limited means to receive a high level of education free of charge, and to go on to university and enter the professions if they wished to do so. Indeed, according to the writer Marilyn Yurdan, who herself went to grammar school in the late 1950s and wrote a book about her experiences, many found the experience a distinct advantage, which ‘opened up a whole new world’ (p. 185). And yet, because the grammar schools were modelled on the traditional public schools, the pupils were instructed not only in academic subjects, but in a whole new way of life; how to dress, how to talk, and how to behave. As Richard Hoggart comments in his The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life, these pupils were ‘often translated, by a process of education, into membership of other classes’ (p. 305). In his book, Takiuchi examines the works of such ‘scholarship boys’; working-class children who were educated ‘outside their class’, and thus ended up in ‘a new kind 26 書 評 of social space where they found themselves caught between classes’ (p. 1). He takes up three writers in particular; Aidan Chambers, Alan Garner, and Robert Westall. These writers have won several prestigious awards and thus can be seen to be held in high regard and as influential in the field of children’s literature. Takiuchi points out, however, that their works are usually discussed in the context of middle-class culture, and not in connection with the working-class culture from which they have emerged. Takiuchi also raises the point that class has attracted less attention than issues such as gender and race in literary criticism, and citing Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of cultural production, suggests that literary critics are unwilling to appreciate the values of working-class cultures, as that would make the critics’ own position insecure (p. 3). As a result, ‘the voices of the British working class and the different set of tastes and views that working-class writers brought into British children’s literature have been continually neglected’ (p. 3), and it is this neglect that Takiuchi sets out to address in this work, focusing on the three ‘scholarship boy’ writers, and showing the influence and impact of their writing and activities on children’s literature in Britain. The book consists of three parts. Part I, which consists of two chapters, deals with the issues which arise between the authors and publishers. The first of these chapters looks at how some working-class writers overcame the ‘bias of children’s editors in favour of white middle-class children’ (p. 25), and enabled working-class writers to depict realistic working-class characters in their children’s books, thus providing stories and characters with which state-school pupils could identify. Especially interesting is the account of how, in the 1960s, two writers, Leila Berg and Aidan Chambers each launched a series of books for state school pupils. Leila Berg started the Nippers series, which was intended for state primary school children and replaced the middle- class Janet and John series and other similar readers which were the only reading texts available. Takiuchi gives a detailed account of how Berg introduced working-class characters in the Nipper series, and how, as a consequence, she had to face harsh criticism that the stories were vulgar and disgusting. It would have been helpful, perhaps, if Takiuchi had included quotations from the Nippers series to show exactly how these texts were ‘working-class’, and contrasted them with quotations from the Janet and John series, which, I remember from my British primary school days, were indeed tediously ‘middle-class’ with their birthday parties and polite dinner-time conversations. The same can be said for Takiuchi’s discussion of Aidan Chambers’ Topliner series which were designed for secondary modern school pupils, especially, as Takiuchi says at the end of the chapter, that the ‘Nipper and Topliner are almost forgotten today’ (p. 41), and not many readers today may be familiar with the texts. Haru Takiuchi, British Working-Class Writing for Children: Scholarship Boys in the Mid-Twentieth Century 27 The following chapter takes up Robert Westall’s semi-autobiographical novel, The Machine Gunners. This novel was first published by Macmillan Children’s Books in 1975. Macmillan was the publisher of the Nippers and Topliner series, and made the decision to publish the novel in spite of the swear words it contained, knowing full well that this might lead to controversy. It was re-issued in 1977 as a paperback by Puffin Books, which made some changes, especially in the language of the characters. Takiuchi makes a comparison between Westall’s original manuscript, the Macmillan edition, and the Puffin edition, and by doing so, looks at the relationship between ‘bad language’ and class in Britain at that time. The ‘respectable’ Puffin Books reduced the amount of swearing, but did not remove it altogether. Working-class characters were allowed their ‘bloody’ and ‘bugger’, but lower-middle-class characters were not, nor were policemen and soldiers, upholders of the country’s morals and values, allowed to swear. Middle-class swearing like ‘damn’, on the other hand, was allowed, and apparently, some of the ‘bloody’s were altered to ‘damn’ in the Puffin edition. Takiuchi points out that this was not simply censorship of ‘bad language’, but a reaction against ‘working-class swear words’, and that although it was now possible to publish working- class children’s books, elements of working-class culture (as represented by the ‘bad’ language) were still being excluded.
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