Raymond Williams Exposed the Ruthless Class Oppression Behind Our Literary Traditions
Fifty years ago, socialist writer Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City challenged preconceptions about the gap between rural and urban life. His book exposed the realities of class exploitation — and imagined the abolition of the country-city divide.
Oil painting by William Linnell showing a corn harvest in Surrey, England, 1860. (WAVE: The Museums, Galleries and Archives of Wolverhampton / Getty Images)
Raymond Williams was a twentieth-century British socialist intellectual and writer. Born in 1921, he grew up in Pandy, a rural, working-class Welsh community near the English border, before gaining a state scholarship to study at Cambridge University.
He fought in an anti-tank regiment in World War II, taught for fifteen years in the Workers’ Educational Association, and became lecturer in English at Cambridge in 1961 (and professor of drama from 1974). Having worked at Cambridge until his retirement in 1983, Williams died in 1988.
He was a self-described “Welsh European,” and we can understand much of his work as a theoretical transposition of his formative experiences of the “border country” of his youth: a site of national, class, geographical, linguistic, and social complexity that defied easy categorizations. His upbringing also enabled him to see English culture and the English ruling class from the outside — as a dominant provincialism.
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