To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Britain

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.