If working class people hear about a book which is relevant to them, and can get hold of it, many of them will read it.
I recently wrote an academic book about working class life in a public housing estate in Dublin, Ireland, It’s Not Where You Live, It’s How You Live, published by the brilliant Policy Press.
It’s a story of two halves, beginning and ending with theory and analysis while the core of the book tells the stories of people’s lives.
I still have a sense that there is little belief that the working class will read or pick up a book such as this even though it is about them and for them. Prior to finishing the book, I had to give the publisher marketing information about who would or might read the book: they positioned it as more for students and academics who are most likely to be the literate middle class.
If we see books like mine purely in this vein, they will become niche books for a niche audience with the mainstream in a parallel world, where there is only room for fiction, Facebook or mobile phones. As one of our contributors said at the book’s launch, “People are obsessed with the escapism of fantasy”. But if you are fed particular tastes, you tend to seek out the same substance time and again. This would seem to imply that it is best not to show working class people reality.
I beg to differ. Since the book’s publication and official launch in Dublin, I have been surprised to have been approached by many people who are reading the book, which shreds the myth that the working class don’t read. The logic here is that if the book is in sight and in mind, is relevant, people can get hold of a copy and can afford a copy, then they will read it.
The question becomes not whether people will read a book but how do you get a book into sight, into minds and into hands?
Over 200 people attended the book launch in Dublin, many of them from the estate where the book originated. Many of the people who participated in the research were given copies and have been telling me that when they finished it, they passed it onto another family member, friend or neighbour. This book sharing is still happening intensively as I write this in May 2023 – a community library system which works in similar ways to the informal lending system that operates in the estate. Community and youth organisations bought copies of the book in bundles of tens and twenties in order to distribute and disseminate it. Others from the estate came to the book launch with money to buy books for themselves and for others, despite each copy costing 25 euros.
Another of the undoubted reasons for the book getting wider circulation than it normally would was my fortuitous appearance on Irish national radio one afternoon – a good friend who chaired the launch was able to make this contact. As I was leaving, the presenter told me that the show had a listenership of around 200,000 people. Not long after the show, my sister-in-law went into a small bookshop in the small heritage town of Trim, about 40 minutes from Dublin, to buy the book. The woman who owns the shop had a copy in hand and another in an addressed envelope on the counter in front of her. Friends and acquaintances have told me similar stories of finding copies in small bookshops in shopping centres and others hidden away in backstreet bookshops in rural Ireland.
It seems that the book is getting some traction and that the working classes who are its subject matter are reading it in good numbers.
Why is this important? It is important because knowledge and understanding are critical in any movement for change. In this book I describe the conditions of life on a public housing estate: hardship, exploitation, love, care and violence are all part of the story. The people who are the subject of the book do have a role in changing the status quo and changing the conditions they live in. Books like mine are potentially part of a radical education process – emancipatory education even, to borrow a phrase from Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster.
On several occasions since the book’s publication I have had conversations with readers asking questions about why their lives are the way they are. They are extremely invested in the lives of their children and what might to happen to them. We need to look at ways of deepening and extending this capacity to read and to engage with books and materials in various forms as this knowledge and understanding can transform society.
As Frederick Douglas, the anti-slavery campaigner, said: power concedes nothing without a demand. It is an old idea but books that carry ideas, knowledge and information are the raw material for our demands.
In the coming weeks and months, I will be bringing the book to various corners of Ireland and Britain and perhaps beyond. Who knows what effects it might have? To borrow a chapter title from the book, ‘The Word’ can still have profound effects. It just needs a little help.
John Bissett is a community worker, activist and writer. He has been a community worker for over 35 years and has organised and participated in significant housing, anti-austerity and public debt campaigns. He is the author of Regeneration: Public Good or Private Profit? and is a member of Housing Action Now.
It’s Not Where You Live, It’s How You Live by John Bissett is available on the Bristol University Press website. Order here for £19.99. (Currently £9.99 in our summer sale.)
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