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REVIEWS
| To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Britain. By Christopher Hilliard (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. 390 pp. $29.95).
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| This monograph is a thoroughly researched, well-written study of writing by ordinary middle- and working-class people in Britain between about 1900 and 1960. Christopher Hilliard argues that in twentieth-century Britain, writing became democratized, in the sense that it was taken up by significant numbers of people outside the highly educated cultured elite. Drawing on research in a wide range of archives, Hilliard shows remarkable familiarity with the organizations and writing of hitherto forgotten (and largely unpublished) people. He makes no attempt to analyze the influence of these obscure writers, nor does he say much about the intellectual influences on them; but his interpretations of their motivations, aspirations, and literary assumptions, as well as his examples of ordinary writers' lives and difficulties, are consistently interesting. |
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Faced with a huge volume of material, Hilliard wisely choses to focus on three organized movements: 1) the amateur writers' circles associated with the burgeoning number of correspondence schools of writing, writers' advice manuals, and middlebrow magazines and newspapers; 2) working-class writers and writing in the 1930s; and 3) writing by both civilians and soldiers during World War II. His detailed descriptions of these movements, enriched by many fascinating examples, give an impression—it is no more precise than that—of a flowering of interest in writing, especially from the 1920s, as ordinary Britons expressed their "shared sense of entitlement to participate in cultural activities" (p. 6). |
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