Complicity and British Fiction

Abstract

In Britain, themes of political guilt and complicity are never far from the subject of social class, and can be traced back at least as far as the period following the World War Two, when the progressive educational reforms introduced by the 1945–1951 Labour government permitted children from working-class backgrounds increased access to higher education and therefore to increased social mobility. A significant character is the ‘scholarship boy’ — often associated with such figures as the critics Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, and with the playwright Dennis Potter — whose self-conscious unease at being removed from his social origins was the result of a tension between a nostalgia for the social intimacy and stability provided by those origins, and by an individualistic impulse to escape from their alleged restrictions and prejudices.1 This tension bore fruit in the work of those writers whose work consisted of a broad assault upon the perceived conformity and stagnation of cultural life within postwar Britain.KeywordsCultural LifeSocial InjusticeEntrepreneurial SpiritContemporary LifeMoney MotiveThese 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.