2 - Disaffections
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
Summary
In Culture and Society 1780–1950 (1958), Raymond Williams identified the Industrial Novel as a subgenre in its own right: a place where social conditions, indeed the condition of England, were discussed.
Our understanding of the response to industrialism would be incomplete without reference to an interesting group of novels, written at the middle of the [nineteenth] century, which not only provide some of the most vivid descriptions of life in an unsettled industrial society, but also illustrate certain common assumptions within which the direct response was undertaken. There are the facts of the new society, and there is this structure of feeling […].
(1963: 99)Williams' last phrase remains a useful way of describing imaginative responses to social change. But where Williams identified a literature of industrialisation, in reviewing the Britain of the 1980s we can more plausibly seek a literature of de-industrialisation; and of the landscape, social conditions and identities associated with that process. In the Introduction we considered the culture of public relations and consumption as central to the experience of the decade. But the process of deindustrialisation and mass unemployment was as central to many people's lives. The two processes stood as contrary aspects of contemporary Britain. To an extent they could be distributed geographically. Finance, service industries and increased disposable income were centred primarily in London and the South-East. The industries of coal, steel and shipbuilding were concentrated in the North of England, Wales and Scotland.
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- Literature of the 1980sAfter the Watershed, pp. 67 - 99Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2010