Bad Teeth: British Social Realism in Fiction

Abstract

A documentary style of realism was sponsored during the Second World War by magazines such as Penguin New Writing , where it was deployed in short stories that captured the unpredictable, interrupted, fragmented temporalities of the home front during aerial bombardment. The shrinking number of novels published during the war was owing partly to the suspension of cultural continuity and of an imaginable future (see Mengham 2001). When the post-war settlement allowed for the projection of a way of life that might integrate past, present and future, the novel responded by replacing the experimental temporalities of modernism with a restoration of the linear conventions associated with realism. But the realism that observed the socialist years of the late 1940s was also in place for the dramatic social changes of the conservative1950s, with their redistribution of employment opportunities and expansion of consumer choice. The meritocratic eclipse of class privileges seemed like a spectacular reassertion of class structure to the majority who could not benefit from it. The emergence of social realism was coincident with the disillusionment of a populist culture that had both won the war and lost the peace. The social realist novels of the late 1950s and early 1960s documented new forms of alienation as a result of growing income inequality and the effects of mass culture on class, regional and gender identities. The anthropological dimension of these fictional studies of the condition of post-war Britain echoed the founding principles of Mass Observation and authoritative methods of the British documentary film movement, although the proleptic assertiveness of both was replaced with an elegiac inquest into the kinds of loss experienced in an era of affluence. In the terms proposed by Nigel Balchin’s factory novel, Sundry Creditors (1953), social realist fiction was in large measure an account of what was still owed to those whose needs were not comprehended by the materialistic criteria of never having had it so good.KeywordsFemale CharacterWrong ThingSunday MorningMale ProtagonistHome FrontThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.