Scoop! Journalists in Fiction: Social class

The Inky Path

Journalists appear in fiction in many guises and play many roles. Sometimes they provide central characters, often they intrude on the action, their attentions as unwelcome as they often are in real life. Scoop! gathers together these appearances under a variety of themes, some amusing, some trivial, some giving an insight into how the Press works and how it is seen to impact on our society. If you have favourite representations of journalists in European fiction or insights into ways they are portrayed, please email Scoop!

Will(iam Asquith) Farnaby (Island, Aldous Huxley) is another of those 'artistes' who feel 'humiliated' by having stooped to earn money through mere journalism.

"And all the time I had been wanting to be a poet and finding I simply don't have what it takes. And then, after the War, I had to go into journalism to make money. What I wanted was to go hungry, if necessary, but to try to write something decent - good prose at least, seeing that it couldn't be good poetry."

...

"Wouldn't you be humiliated if you found yourself making money by turning out the cheapest, flashiest kind of literary forgery. I was a success because I was so irredemiably second rate."

Island was first published in 1962, and social class is clearly a factor in Farnaby's framing of his trade. Dr McPhail diagnoses: "Upper class.. but not a member of the military or county sub species."

"Correct. My father was a barrister and political journalist. That is, when he wasn't too busy being an alcoholic."

Bloomsbury-born Farnaby is beginning life from rather a different perspective than Constance Amory, Gary Pymore or Joe Donovan. It's as Dawn Stone remarks in Fragrant Harbour:

I daresay if I'd gone to Oxbridge I would have had at least half a dozen chums who fell out of bed into useful, networkable positions on the kind of paper I wanted to work for.