The Inability to Escape One's Social Class: a Social Issue

An overarching social issue in the different genres of British literature that we read that I noticed was the inability to escape the social class that you were born into. This seemed to be an apparent theme in all of the genres that we read. This is something that I was unfamiliar with, having only read mostly American literature where you can rise from poverty all the way to West Egg. In many of the poems and novels, this issue was not directly addressed. It is something that I have simply observed that seems to lie within many texts that we have read. This issue of inability to escape one’s social or economic class is problematic for me as an American reader because I have grown up reading and being submerged in a culture that promotes, and often encourages, people to work hard to move on up the ladder.

            Starting in the Romantic Era, a prime example of inability to escape one’s social class is The Chimney Sweeper. In this poem William Blake describes a young boy who is sold by his parents to a chimney sweeping company. This poem describes the miserable life as a chimney sweeper and the awful conditions that they work in that inevitably leads the working children to their death. The fact that a boy’s parents are forced to sell their son to a chimney sweeping company leads me to believe that he comes from a poor family who could use every last dime they could get. It is clear that little Tom Dacre will not have a fair chance of making a steady living sweeping people’s chimneys and eventually work his way up to the top of the company and retire a rich man after sweeping for several years. On the contrary, we learn the little Tom Dacre will, soon, die a chimney sweeper, never having the chance to advance from a low social standing to a higher social class.

            In the Victorian Era, a clear example of the inability to escape social class is shown in Dickens’ A Walk in the Workhouse. In this short story, Dickens attempts to draw sympathy from the reader on the lower class people in this workhouse. He successfully does this by given detailed descriptions of the different kinds of people that are in the workhouse. He describes this congregation as having few “young women, and beetle-browned young men; but not many” but “aged people were there in every variety” (751, Broadview Anthology). The description of all the different types of old people and their disabilities leads the reader to the fact that these are people who have been in the workhouse for their entire lives, and the abundance of elderly people show that there is no escape from their poverty.

            Finally, in the 20^th Century we get another, perhaps the clearest, example of the inability for people to escape their social class. In E.M. Forster’s novel, A Passage to India, we see an obvious social divide between the colonized Indians and the Anglo Indians. A direct example of this conflict is when two friends, one Indian (Aziz) and the other British (Fielding), are discussing their friendship at the end of the book. In their last dialogue, Aziz claims that he and Fielding cannot be friends and it is clear that the reason for this is because Fielding is of a different social class that Aziz. They cannot be friends because one is a colonizer and the other is the colonized, which creates an inequality between the two that neither can escape due to their nationality. In conclusion, the texts that we have read this semester all seem to carry the theme of the inability to escapes one’s social class, regardless of the time period or genre it was written in.