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From: blp Category: Art Date: 26 February 2007 Time: 08:15 AM Review: It's an incredibly complicated question why this class thing should be a problem for literature here. There are some very good addresses to it in English literature's past - Waugh's dysfunctional toffs, Forster's 'The poor are always with us' echoing Hardy's ill-fated working class characters yearning for betterment. I think, where once it was a problem that was barely acknowledged, then one where the stratifications were clearly marked out, now it's become insidious. At the level of literature, it becomes, as I say, a problem of voice, which is, in itself, a problem of identity. The old upper class voice has become a joke. The idea of a middle class voice - one that was simply a matter of intelligence, sensibility and learning, largely divorced from obvious badges of status, has no tradition here. To the extent that it exists, it's completely insipid.