'Write About What You Know'

In our age of ever-expanding university education, dozens of literary prizes, nationally connected reading groups, and the internet, anyone can aspire to get published and no new book is inaccessible to the general reader. Christopher Hilliard's study aims to trace the development through the twentieth century of the now universal opportunity to respond to, and to produce, literature. He does this by examining many unremembered and unpublished middle- and working-class provincial writers cut off from the metropolitan world of established literature, who wrote for personal satisfaction, financial gain, political expression, or simply as a hobby.

He associates the beginnings of this development with the 1920s, when writing groups, consisting mainly of middle-class women and similar to the reading groups which are so popular today, proliferated. Designed to appeal to those removed from metropolitan culture, they were predominantly suburban and provincial, small local groups connected by magazines, periodicals, and correspondence. In their meetings, they shared their pieces of creative writing and, using publications and magazines such as the Writer for advice, discussed how to structure, and make money from, their work. The last aim is significant, for those who attended the groups often wanted to be commercially successful, and attempted to write plot-based fiction rather than ideas-based literature. The modes of amateur journalism and short stories that middle-class writers practised in the 1920s echo the early experiences of Dickens, something Hilliard does not investigate. Nor does he wonder why Dickens was so popular a literary role model to both working- and middle-class authors in the 1920s and 1930s. It was the Victorian novel documenting social reality which many of these would-be authors hoped to produce; Dickens had also risen from below to achieve great commercial success, in much the same manner that the writers recorded here dreamt of.

Ignoring working-class authors and concerns, the groups espoused 'a conservatism that denies it is political' (p. 75) – as did their work, mostly short stories. Rather than follow the experimental trends of modernism, these writers looked to the Romantics, and their emphasis on feeling, for inspiration. Greatest value was placed on the twin virtues of simplicity and sincerity. Pope's work was dismissed as 'an intellectual poetry, uninfluenced by feeling', in contrast to 'the nobler poetry of passion, imagination, and true appreciation of life and nature' (p. 93).

This idealised emphasis on sincerity was often translated into the more commercially inspired advice to 'write about what you know', a simple philosophy which provided the foundation for the work of writers – from whatever background – in this study. Middle-class writers who wished to achieve some commercial success were advised by the agencies and magazines which they consulted for guidance that 'much of the pleasure in fiction-reading lies in self-identification' (p. 76) and that they should write from 'first-hand knowledge' – 'having something to write about, knowing about his subject' was of paramount importance for an author (p. 78).

The importance of truthfulness and familiarity continued into the 1930s, when the search, by intellectual socialists, began for proletarian writers to express the daily truths of mass unemployment. For working-class writers of the 1930s, who were also careful to avoid modernist excesses, this took on a political dimension, for writing about one's community and experiences provided the opportunity 'to correct the stereotypes and distortions produced by authors from other classes' (p. 118). For miners B. L. Coombes and Sid Chaplin, 'the culture of mining villages provided a seedbed for their writing' (p. 116), while Leslie Halward, of the Birmingham group, resolved 'to write in my own language about my own people' (p. 118). Much of Hilliard's account is familiar from Andy Croft's Red Letter Days, which has the added value of placing 1930s working-class writing in a post-D. H. Lawrence context. However, Hilliard provides a convincing narrative that leads into the 1940s.

Second World War soldiers aspiring to become authors were once again advised...