Chapter 1 outlines the principal issues in the study of class and applies them to the history of England – then a ‘united’ Britain – from the late Middle Ages to the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution. The chapter shows how unstable English society was in the late fourteenth century. Ravaged by the Black Death, it was seriously under-resourced with pressures on both knights and peasants, as well as urban society, and the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 was the predictable result. An analysis of a series of revolts throughout the late Middle Ages enable us to understand the fractious nature of late medieval society in England, one in which class consciousness developed as both a reality and a concept. While we cannot see an obvious transfer of power from one class to another, we can observe social relations changing as the material conditions of existence alter. The move towards a more commercial and commercialized society was accelerated by the sale of monastic lands after the Reformation and subsequent technological developments enabled the development of agrarian capitalism. There was a significant growth in urban society, most pronounced in London, which precipitated further class conflict. Class distinctions were as often local as they were national. By the end of the eighteenth century, England was a country characterized by, in E. P. Thompson’s words, class struggle without class society. Daily life has always been structured in terms of class: if issues of class are ignored or disguised literary history is accordingly distorted and impoverished.

Chapter Five begins with an analysis of Daniel Defoe’s A Tour Through The Whole Island of Great Britain and Moll Flanders. While Defoe’s geographical survey sees a united England and Scotland working together to increase the prosperity of its inhabitants, the novel explores the nature of class divisions. In Samuel Richardson’s Pamela the union of the aspirational, virtuous Pamela and the rakish upper-class Mr. B functions to revivify what might otherwise be a moribund social order. For labouring class poets such as Stephen Duck, whose example inspired the subsequent popularity of such writers, life was undeniably complicated, often hard. Duck’s rapid rise left him with anxieties and a sense of deracination that was exploited by his detractors. Mary Collier, who responded to Duck’s criticism of female indolence, explored the conflicted ways in which women labourers existed within communities of women, as well as agricultural workers. Like Duck, there is a genuine anger in her work, one that laments the lack of opportunities of the many who can never really recover from a lack of education. By 1750 the traditional rural ways of life were disappearing as farming became more mechanized, and many who would once have been employed as agricultural labourers became domestic servants. The chapter concludes with a comparison and contrast of Henry Fielding’s novel, Tom Jones (1749), and Thomas Gray’s poem, Elegy in a Country Churchyard (1750). While Fielding’s narrator looks back with nostalgia to a rapidly disappearing way of life, Gray’s acknowledges its class-bound limitations.

This chapter develops a critique of official discourses of multicultural Leicester, using the literary genre of Young Adult fiction as its source material. The writer Bali Rai is from the city and has a global reputation. He is signed to Penguin Random House and his debut novel has been translated into 11 languages worldwide. Original interviews with Rai and close reading of his novels feed into broader debates about representations of diversity – whether in terms of race, gender or socioeconomic status – in books for young people. Rai’s fiction directly concerns the lived experience of young people living in Leicester and reflects upon how some of the challenges associated with multiculturalism impact on their lives.

This microhistory provides an overview of some of the key moments in the development of multicultural Leicester, from the post-war years through to the early twenty-first century. It does so in order to foreground the conditions conducive for the wealth of literary talent which emanates from the city and which, in the case of writers such as Sue Townsend, Bali Rai, Nina Stibbe and Joe Orton, has achieved mainstream success nationally and internationally. The multicultural character of Leicester is often (mis)understood solely in terms of large South Asian in-migration since the late 1960s. This is a vastly important part of Leicester’s story, although it does not give a fully representative picture.

Leicester author Sue Townsend’s The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13 3/4 (1982) was the best-selling novel of the 1980s and forms the basis of the fifth chapter. Through close reading of Townsend’s debut novel, this chapter demonstrates that Leicester’s apparent image problem has been both an obstacle and a boon for regional writers. Using little-known archival materials from Townsend’s personal collection, Kew unearths a secret history of The Secret Diary, to reveal how the city was erased from manuscript drafts and replaced with a nameless ‘anyplace’. This bland suburban backdrop for Adrian Mole’s comic exploits raises questions about national and regional identity, particularly when the teenage diarist starts to document the increasingly multicultural character of 1980s’ Leicester. This chapter takes innovative approaches to reading a well-loved text and is among the first in-depth critical assessments of Sue Townsend, an iconic Midlands writer.

This chapter interrogates the ways in which digital technology is being creatively deployed to augment Sillitoe’s fiction and to reposition his oeuvre as a body of interactive working-class writing in which the reader actualises the text in real time, on the streets of Nottingham. The chapter examines the innovative ways in which Nottingham literature is marketed as ‘rebellious’, in a bid to strengthen support for the city’s literary heritage, attract visitors and generate much-needed revenue. In an increasingly screen-based digital world, literary tourism is a refreshingly grounded cultural activity that deserves scholarly attention and regional funding. In Nottingham, literary tourism is mapping exciting new routes through the city, using innovative technologies.

The introduction argues that an understanding of class relations is vital to an understanding of English literary history. A reading of sections of Iris Murdoch’s novel, The Sea, The Sea (1978) and E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End (1910) demonstrates that writers understood that class determined peoples’ lives in both trivial and significant ways. Karl Marx was right to claim that all existing history has been that of class struggle and argues that class divisions existed well before the Industrial Revolution and the advent of modernity, despite claims to the contrary. Representations of class, and an understanding of the nature of class, are intimately intertwined with the history of literature, which is why both have to be studied together, the one illuminating the other. The history of class without literature and literature without class results in an impoverished understanding of both. Political analysis that concentrates on gender and race makes little sense without an understanding of class, further indicating the need to consider and analyse social class as represented in literary texts as well as a determining factor in how literary texts are produced. The introduction also includes an overview of the book and a reflection on aspects of class structure that appear not to have changed.

Before exploring the diverse and exciting literature which emanates from the West Midlands, this introduction first interrogate how London cannily adopted Stratford-Upon-Avon’s most famous son; why the West Midlands struggles to take ownership of its cultural legacies; and how ‘tall poppy syndrome’ may contribute to talented writers leaving the Midlands for London. Is the aspiration of a Midlands writer to be, as Auden wryly reflects, ‘like some valley cheese/ local, but prized elsewhere’?

Chapter 3 explores the issue of class relations in the Renaissance. Sir Thomas Smith’s De Republica Anglorum (published in 1583) has an elaborate taxonomy of social ranks from those born to govern down to those who cannot rule ‘and yet they be not altogether neglected’. The classification of social strata was applied to literary texts by George Puttenham, indicating that class and literature were connected by contemporary literary theorists and that writers in Renaissance England certainly had the intellectual tools at their disposal to think about class. The chapter explores the economic prospects and social assumptions of a number of writers, most of whom came from the ‘middling sort’, many of whom felt themselves over-educated given their prospects – one reason why they gravitated towards writing. A number of plays are analysed, including Arden of Faversham, which explores the social changes inaugurated by the Reformation and the availability of cheap land; The Shoemaker’s Holiday, which examines fantasies about work and holiday; and Massinger’s A New Way To Pay Old Debts, which laments the destruction of stable social values and the rise of the unscrupulously wealthy under James I. Edmund Spenser demonstrates an acute sense of class status in the Amoretti; Richard Barnfield represents Lady Pecunia, an allegorical representation of wealth. The chapter concludes with an exploration of the career of John Taylor the water poet, a writer whose work expresses the anxieties of uncertain class status and who fashions himself as someone outside social systems, able to speak truth to power.