When the working class writes, it writes of return. The prodigal child heads home only to find that everything has changed — they have changed. The experience of a new world beyond the confines of their former life has caused a rupture between what was and what is now. Most often, this change comes in the form of education. Scholarships, grammar schools, universities, and, finally, the move into white-collar employment in the big city — this is the path that the proletarian bildungsroman treads. On this path, homecoming itself becomes a kind of break. In returning to the closed world of the working-class home, the narrator experiences a shock, one that propels the narrative on, into the cracks between social worlds.

Raymond Williams notes in Politics and Letters — his glorious series of interviews with the New Left Review published in 1979 — that this theme of displacement and mobility entered the working-class novel proper with D. H. Lawrence. Prior to Lawrence, working-class writers had sought to reconstruct the world of laboring men and their families. Yet, in rebuilding these communities in prose, they had to remove themselves from the narrative. Once the children of the working class become writers or artists, they no longer fit so easily into the communities of labor. Education means leaving what you once knew for something else. The working class itself is not given — and cannot attain — the tools with which it could narrate its own story, whether that be the requisite room of one’s own and an annual income with which to write, or even the connections in the bourgeois world of publishing needed to get what they’ve written into other people’s hands. Yet each of these forms — both reconstruction from afar and flight and return — lack, as Williams writes, “any sense of the continuity of working-class life, which does not cease just because one individual moves out of it.” In short, what was needed was to see the relationship “between two different worlds that need to be rejoined.”

But what happens to these forms when those once fairly stable relations begin to crumble? What becomes of the narratives of class when those closed worlds break down?