THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

‘active socialism of the immediately coming generation’ would help shape ‘the political structure of the rest of the
century’ rather than merely revise ‘the forms which now embody the past and confuse recognition of the present’.
Even to those to whom, through age, temperament, or lack of opportunity, the events of 1968 signified little, it was
none the less a year which served to focus minds. When Lindsay Anderson’s surreal cinematic study of a machinegun-toting
public-schoolboy revolution, if . . ., was released in the following year, it struck many sympathetic chords.
In terms of other international commitments and the long-term political destinies, the 1960s were notable for the
attempts of British governments to negotiate a belated entry into the European Economic Community. Although the
first two attempts were rebuffed by General de Gaulle and a French veto, the prospect of closer European involvement
was not necessarily greeted with
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unadulterated enthusiasm on the part of the British electorate. In a symposium organized by the magazine Encounter
in December 1962 some hundred ‘writers scholars and intellectuals’ were asked to express an opinion about what was
styled the ‘Britain and Europe debate’. The replies received revealed deep divisions and often irrational prejudices
parallel to those evident in the nation at large. T. S. Eliot declared that he was ‘strongly in favour of close cultural
relations with the countries of Western Europe’, but E. M. Forster remained equivocal; W. H. Auden hoped that
Britain would join the Community, but opined that that would not make her part of Europe, ‘because Europe no
longer exists’; Graham Greene, writing, he announced, ‘as a materialist’, was merely ‘inclined’ in Europe's favour;
Arthur Koestler, referring back to an article he had written in 1950, pressed for the idea of a supranational federation,
while Kingsley Amis claimed to be very disturbed by any future surrender of sovereignty; Iris Murdoch urged longer
reflection because ‘joining Europe’ had such a dangerously romantic appeal to ‘many naive hearts’; Angus Wilson
admitted to being ‘filled with suspicion’ and John Osborne proclaimed a faith in Britain’s going it alone and making
‘a small start on the socialist revolution by slinging away our defence expenditure’. Harold Pinter bluntly announced:
‘I have no interest in the matter and do not care what happens.’ Little enough did happen for some nine years.
Together with the Republic of Ireland and Denmark, Britain became a full member of the European Community on 1
January 1973, a decision later confirmed by a referendum. Debates about the ramifications of these decisions for
national sovereignty have continued just as divisively into the 1990s.
In 1957 the Conservative Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, had blandly declared that Britain had ‘never had it
so good’. The relative prosperity of Britain in the late 1950s and 1960s may have been insecurely based on illusions of
an economic renewal and a more equable distribution of wealth, but such economic optimism both propped up
successive Conservative administrations and helped support the dream of a technological revolution sponsored by the
Labour Government that supplanted them in 1966. Although the emphatically working-class fiction of Alan Sillitoe
(b. 1928) offers little comfort to any Conservative, his first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958),
confirmed that the living and working conditions of many working people had improved beyond measure (even
though their real freedom of action had not). Although Sillitoe’s promiscuous protagonist, a Nottingham factory
worker, may angrily recognize that his social and economic horizons remain severely restricted, his father believes
that a decent wage, a holiday, and a television set have transformed his life. The 1960s and 1970s did not merely see
wide-scale slum clearance and the reconstruction of swathes of industrial Britain in accordance with the high-rise
architectural principles of the Modern Movement, they also offered new opportunities for travel and home
entertainment. What had once seemed unaffordable luxuries, such as continental holidays and televisions and stereos,
were gradually transformed into virtual necessities.
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Social deprivation and homelessness may not have been abolished, but they seemed less noticeable and were
consequently less addressed as pressing problems. The material prosperity and consumerism of the 1960s and 1970s
led directly to the relative complacency of the Thatcherite 1980s. The ‘New Morality’ and ‘You’ve never had it so
good’ did not begin to sound really hollow until the frugal, AIDS-haunted 1990s.
Female and Male Reformulations: Fiction in the 1960s and 1970s
The broadening of women’s perspectives and women’s opportunities proved the most radical and substantial of the
social changes of the 1960s. Not only had the ‘New Morality’ begun to challenge received perceptions of gender,
sexuality, and marriage, but new patterns in women’s employment, and particularly professional employment, had
steadily emerged since the end of the Second World War. Germaine Greer’s lively and largely untheoretical book, The