From childhood comics to the literary canon, Peter Thomas reflects on a personal reading journey that challenges Ofsted’s rigid model of literary progression. Exploring the true motivations behind reading — from vicarious pleasure to attitudinal challenge — this piece makes the case for a broader, more inclusive approach to literature, with Jane Austen as an unexpected but compelling ally.

Cultural bigotry and misunderstanding are not, I think, the best drivers of human development or educational progress. However, probing their sources and suffering their effects can be surprisingly productive. Thus, from irritation with the confident errors in Ofsted’s model of literary progression—from phonics to ‘mastery’ via a linear journey through books of increasing ‘literary merit’—I have come to a new understanding.

Ofsted’s model of reading development seems more in line with past Tory Department for Education policies than with the consensus of academic professionals represented by NATE, EA, NAAE, UKLA, and EMC. Its source lies in the Govian narrowing of literary merit to Anglocentric totems, and its effects can be seen in student disaffection with GCSE Literature and reduced take-up at A Level. It is analogue thinking in a digital age. By that, I do not mean that the digital age has replaced or is superior to the healthily surviving Caxtonian tradition. Rather, it is time to call out the Ofsted model for crippling the best of the inheritance of print-through-to-digital evolution. That evolution calls for an expanded repertoire of literacies and a more realistic grasp of the motivations for developing them.

A Personal Reading Journey

This is not an academic paper, so forgive this diversion into the personal. Like many others, I got into English teaching because I liked reading as a child. The reading that I liked, however, had nothing to do with what I read at school, though the school library helped. My reading of choice was comics, a genre with its own progression path through graphic texts like The Beano to The Eagle to semi-print texts like Adventure. Comics were followed by school stories (set in schools nothing like my own) and Richmal Crompton’s William books, where William resisted the pressures to conform to polite society, bourgeois culture or school rules in his ambitions to be a pirate or gangster with his friends called the Outlaws. His contempt for the posh Hubert Lane was an added notch on the familiarity score. 

The fiction trail disappeared as books about World War Two experience took over. Growing up in the pre-digital age meant finding print gateways to a wider life that today takes Google seconds but was essentially the same process: one of developing a personal identity and a self-affirming culture.

The Extra Zest in Reading

Whatever the content — and whatever the ‘literary merits’ — of that reading, the motivation was the vicarious pleasure of immersion in other lives, other times and other places. And, for me, there was something else — an extra zest when characters flouted convention, when situations were presented with humour or irony, or when simple morality was served by the fall of a bully, the triumph of an underdog or the righting of a moral wrong. Seeking more of that extra zest led to more focused searching of the library shelves. Tales of decent outlawry with Robin Hood, witty subversiveness at Colditz, gritty survival in a Japanese PoW camp and the noble poignancy of Scott’s last diary satisfied an appetite for what may be better in the world, rather than merely different or exciting. Reading developed a coherent repertoire of values, attitudes and feelings that might have had some origins in the home, the cinema, the playground (if not the classroom), but was nurtured by print in the private security of the sofa or eiderdown. I was fortunate that my secondary modern joined with the local grammar school when the county went comprehensive and an inspirational English teacher expanded that repertoire by making novels, plays and poems seem like personal communication with writers rather than monuments.

From Dennis the Menace to Literary Canon

Despite those double strokes of fortune, lessons took second place to snooker and to non-  academic friendships, and my eventual small clutch of O levels was just enough to admit me to A levels, and to a late grasp that school may be a gateway to other kinds of life. A Level English with that same inspirational teacher became a causeway whose stepping stones were daunting canonical texts set in environments hugely different from a rented terrace house in a small Welsh town. What helped me bridge the gaps in experience and cultures was the early experience of that vicarious pleasure, and of the extra zest of attitudinal challenge and confirmation, that made me ready to take those steps. Dennis the Menace’s triumphs, failures and (as we say today) resilience may not equal those of Hamlet or Gabriel Oak or Samson Agonistes, but they are firmly part of the continuum. And his contempt for posh swot, ‘softy’ Walter nailed an attitude that linked to novels later to be encountered.

They helped getting over the hurdles of exams, of cultural monumentalism and of language registers unlike those in my street, the snooker hall or my reading. When Wordsworth’s Prelude resurrected childhood feelings of excitement and guilt enough to make the writer seem like an equal, a friend, even, it was possible to see Wordsworth’s companions in the syllabus closet equally reachable, even if they were language-benders like G M Hopkins, idea-twisters like Orwell, or empathy-testers like Hardy or Mary Shelley. Being a reader was enough to bridge the gap across some established — and some contrived — cultural divides. Being a reader was enough to prompt a career in making reading for others what it had been for me.

Discovering Jane Austen

Obviously, there was more to being an English teacher than liking books, and the importation of linguistics into the classroom stock — particularly by the post-Bullock, mind-adjusting LINC programme of the 90s — broadened the horizon. In public life, language in action was as interesting — more interesting — than language used to portray attitudes and feelings in fiction.

But I never got to Jane Austen. Not, that is, until my thirties, and then only because she was on the A Level syllabus I taught. And what a revelation that was! If I’d had any previous thoughts about Austen, they were that she represented a cosy bourgeois view of life in affluent rural circles, where domestic trivia occupied both characters and readers. No thanks. My literary aesthetic owed more to Lukacs, Goldmann, Hoggart and Williams. So: preference for Dickens for social realism, Hardy for challenging moral orthodoxies, Shakespeare for putting on stage a socially comprehensive cast list of comprehensive human virtues and vices. Men, of course, but what men, for portraying the goodness, the wickedness, the folly of — well, mainly men. Arrogance, jealousy, nobility, generosity, patience, decisiveness, self-doubt, love and every kind of human pride and prejudice.

Now there’s a thing.

The Economic Realities in Austen’s Novels

My sixth form class asked for some critical reading about the Austen they were about to study and – with my usual response ‘Just read it and we’ll talk about it’ duly made — I set about sampling the available. It wasn’t long (no Google then) before I came across W H Auden’s lines:

It makes me most uncomfortable to see

An English spinster of the middle-class

Describe the amorous effects of ‘brass’,

Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety

The economic basis of society.

Now that was a steer I gladly accepted, and immediately recognised in the legal position regarding Mr Bennett’s property rights and the insufferable patronising assumption of Mr Collins in relation to his suitability as Lizzie’s husband. Poor, pretty Lizzie must be grateful to be favoured by ugly, stupid, wealthy Mr Collins. There’s a pattern there. Intelligent Emma is expected to be flattered by the attention of wealthy, dim Mr Elton, and humble Fanny Price by pompous Henry Crawford. The economics of male inheritance and its influence on female ambition, potential and marital happiness are eloquently portrayed without strident anger in the novels.

Interest whetted in the author as well as the works, I soon found myself digging into Austen’s collected letters, and discovered a less polite, less inhibited strand of what was so crafted in her art. Auden’s view is confirmed by the evidence of a sharp eye and tongue applied to the morals and motives of those I had wrongly thought cosily portrayed as charmingly costumed figurines in a lost golden England. Her scathing observations in the letters feature women and men alike, and students can be introduced to this aspect of her writing via snippets from her personal correspondence.

Austen’s Relevance for Modern Students

All of which I think explains why Jane Austen has been the go-to canonical writer for lively-minded girls. That is not to say she offers no appeal to boys. That satiric, ego-busting ability of Austen to show how speech reveals attitudes and values the speaker would do better to keep under wraps is of wider appeal than to lively-minded girls. This is where I think we find the motivation for students today to find Jane Austen earlier than I did. It is by appealing to their own experience, to their own experiential, cognitive and affective capital that we can establish common ground. Most teenagers will have a view of people who take on superior airs, or who boast about their possessions, or think that ‘class’ gives them pulling power greater than intelligence or charm. They will be pleasantly surprised to find that Jane Austen shared some of their views:

Another stupid party last night; perhaps if larger they might be less intolerable, but here there were only just enough to make one card table, with six people to look on and talk nonsense to each other… I cannot anyhow continue to find people agreeable; I respect Mrs Chamberlayne for doing her hair well, but I cannot feel a more tender sentiment. Miss Langley is like any other short girl with a broad nose and wide mouth, fashionable dress and exposed bosom.

She is sharply aware that economics as well as feelings influence women’s marriage choices:

Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor – which is one very strong argument in favour of matrimony…

Such an awareness is evident in the novels. In Pride and Prejudice, Lizzie suffers the confidence of wealth in place of personal merit as Mr Collins’ credentials. The letters too show her to be equally sharply aware that both men and women can be losers in the race to be well-married:

All of you that are well enough to look, are now passing your Judgements, I suppose, on Mrs John Butler; and ‘is she pretty or is she not?’ is the knotty question. Happy Woman! To stand the gaze of a neighbourhood as the Bride of such a pink-faced, simple young Man! 

The realities of middle-class female life are accepted, but she sees the cost, perhaps personally acknowledged in her own life-choices, of such an argument for matrimony. In her advice to her niece, Fanny, she presents the case:

And now, my dear Fanny, having written so much on one side of the question, I shall turn round and entreat you not to commit yourself farther, and not to think of accepting him unless you really do like him. Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without Affection. 

…nothing can be compared to the misery of being bound without Love, bound to one and preferring another. That is a punishment which you do not deserve.

Specifically, her criticism relates to those who, having wealth, feel unabashed at lacking other human attributes:

Our acquaintance grows too fast. To the Berties are to be added the Lances, with whose cards we have been endowed. And whose visit Frank and I returned yesterday. We found only Mrs Lance at home, and whether she boasts any offspring besides a grand pianoforte did not appear. She was civil and chatty enough, and offered to introduce us to some acquaintance in Southampton, which we gratefully declined. They live in a handsome style and are rich, and she seemed to like to be rich, and we gave her to understand that we were far from being so; she will soon feel therefore that we are not worth her acquaintance. 

She takes a particular relish in recording how the trappings of wealth may themselves not bring the joys their owners imagined:

Mrs Welby takes her out airing in her barouche, which gives her a headache – a comfortable proof, I suppose, of the uselessness of her new carriage when they have got it.

An introduction to Austen from these brief cuts from her private letters is enough to sense an attitudinal repertoire familiar to most young people. And it is attitude that creates the affinity and engagement needed for further study — not reverence for the tokens of gentility that tempt film designers into lavish sets and costumes. And I think this is something that can draw in boys as well as girls. There’s no gender-slanted relish for the sending-up of a wealthy bragger about his latest macho acquisition, the equivalent of a Porsche or Maserati.

The fetishization of wealth that is so monstrously evident in a Trump and so desperately in a Gatsby is no less evident in charmless elites and celebs in the UK today, memorably satirised in the 90s by Harry Enfield’s ‘Loadsamoney’ character. Austen is particularly good at replicating the mindset and mannerisms of those for whom Property is Personality. Here is Mrs Elton vaunts her connection with property and ownership of the latest in hi-tech prestige transport: ‘’My brother and sister have promised us a visit in the spring, or summer at farthest,’ continued Mrs Elton; ‘and that will be our time for exploring. While they are with us, we shall explore a great deal, I dare say. They will have their Barouche-Landau, of course, which holds four perfectly; and therefore, without saying any thing of our carriage, we should be able to explore the different beauties extremely well.’

Austen, writing to Walter Scott, and awed by the social and historical sweep of his novels, modestly described her own work as: ‘…the little bit (two inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a brush as produces little effect after much labour.’ 

Elsewhere, she puts into the mouth of one her characters a more robust defence of fiction in general, one that I think sums up her appeal to a wider audience other than literary scholars: ‘Oh, it is only a novel!’

Or, in short, only some work in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are to be conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language. 

Yet in Northanger Abbey, she offers a robust defence of fiction:

Oh, it is only a novel! … or, in short, only some work in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are to be conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.

This, I think, sums up her appeal — not just to scholars, but to a much wider audience.