I’ve recently been working with some primary-age kids in Halifax and Wakefield on creative writing projects. I was born nearby in Doncaster.
Whilst I was browsing the phonics texts in one of the schools, it struck me that our particular kind of post-industrial England is absent from the books children have access to: an England that is not London but is not the countryside of Enid Blyton either.
Where are the towns built with solid bricks and history, coated in the memories of factory smoke? Where are the shuttered shops? Where are the out-of-town retail parks?
The world many children live in is absent from the world they encounter on the page.
There are children learning to read in places like Doncaster, Bradford, Plymouth, Dudley, Wigan and Barnsley. When I began writing ‘Myths Don’t Frighten Me’, I decided early on that I wanted my hometown of Doncaster to feature in my fantasy story about two sibling Greek gods fighting against an ancient beast. Not just a ‘Doncasterish’ place but Doncaster itself – by name and by appearance. The wonderful illustrator Jim Crawley brought this vividly to life.
Many children grow up with the sense that books are not for them. However loudly and regularly we try to tell them otherwise, we must be critical about how they reach that conclusion. Perhaps we are saying one thing, but the books children encounter are saying another?
Challenging the middle-class norm
Because social class is itself quite nebulous and contested, representing social class poses challenges. Social class is about positioning in society, but it is also about culture, language, geographical place and social history. It is about tastes and habits, and it is about wealth and poverty.
My family background is quite ‘textbook’ working-class. My Dad worked in a factory making tractor gear components when I was growing up. I was an academic kid who did well in a comprehensive school, first in the family to go to university, and I’m now a teacher and writer. Am I still working class? I feel it. I think I am working class, but others might disagree. Is it about income or history, or something else? Who decides?
As a writer of early reading books, it would be tempting to think I don’t need to consider social class when I’m creating these texts. I write about chaotic geese. I write about kids playing basketball. I write retellings of Greek myth.
Why complicate things by summoning the ghost of Karl Marx into a book that has been written to help children practise the /kn/ grapheme?
Ultimately, because everything’s political.
To not consider whether something I have written has a particular representation of social class, or contains a specific bias, is itself a political and classed action. The cultural autopilot of children’s publishing is to represent ‘the norm’ as a kind of white middle-class existence.
The need for more diverse books suggests that there is a kind of story that we need to ‘diversify from’ – white, middle-class, heterosexual, nuclear families.
School stories abound in children’s books: Hogwarts, Malory Towers, The Worst Witch, The School for Good and Evil… even Narnia. Each of these books features not just a school but a boarding school. Less than 0.5% of children in the UK attend a boarding school, yet in the world of popular children’s fiction, they are ubiquitous. And boarding schools are implicitly private, and private schools are implicitly not working class.
Are the schools that our children encounter in their reading journeys the kinds of places that they can relate to? Is it representing their reality of school?
Representing working class realities without typecasting or mawkishness
Class representation is not just about whether working-class people are being represented, but how they are being represented. Stories can very readily tiptoe into stereotype and two-dimensional representation, even when class is being considered actively by authors, illustrators and publishers.
Not every story showing working-class children needs to be about hardship and triumph over adversity. Working class characters do not need to be pure, humble folk who radiate lamblike goodness.
Identities are complex and intersectional – nobody is only their social class, but instead we assemble ourselves from experience, geography, culture, languages, ethnicity, interests, and so much else. People are complicated and we need to ensure our characters can be too.
Class, for example, intersects with ethnicity. If we consider who is and is not represented in books, we might better understand the fault lines by thinking about social class alongside other cultural markers. For example, we can ask whether a British Bangladeshi child from a middle-class family has ever seen this represented in a book?
Being thoughtful about class representation
In two titles I’m working on with Collins at the moment, the events are set in primary schools.
Together with the illustrator and editorial teams, we have had a great deal of challenging back and forth about representation: about culture, about who gets to tell which stories, about class and about identity.
I try to ‘write like a reader’, as I construct a classroom, or assemble a character. I try to place myself in the position of a range of different child-readers. If I have a child character who is encountering struggles in their home life, how would a real child facing similar circumstances feel upon meeting that child on the page? Will they feel as if they are being ‘seen’ and represented well, or would they feel demeaned, or stereotyped, or patronised?
I can draw upon my experience as a teacher, as well as very literally just asking the children what they think.
Is the fictional school creating a sense of affinity with the readers, or accidentally creating distance? If the primary school uniform consists of shirts, ties and blazers, rather than polo shirts and sweaters, what does that convey about the likely context of the school?
How does that affect how a child interprets the story?
Am I depicting the world as it is, as the way it ought to be, or in a way I wrongly imagine the world to be?
Children are entitled to escapism and fantasy, but they are also entitled to find a sense of belonging in the world of books, to see their lives represented.
As book creators, and for teachers as refined distributors of books, we all need to be considering the real extent to which lives on the page reflect the lives of our young readers.
By Jonny Walker
Jonny Walker is a children’s author, storyteller and educator with a love of myths, folk tales, poetry and wild places. He writes for Collins Big Cat.