Whatever Common People Do

This chapter traces developments in the representation of the working class across two centuries of publishing for children in the United Kingdom. It examines middle-class uses of class as a form of social control, and resistance to middle-class attitudes in the work of socialist writers. Finally, it shows how, during the twentieth century, working-class children’s writers who had been educated out of their class found ways to write sympathetically about working-class life and culture from their position as former insiders. Their work contributed to larger social change in attitudes to class and class relations.