The Poetry of the 1930s may have been left-wing but it was profoundly upper-class [...] Behind it stood [...] literary Bohemia or Bloomsbury [...] The recent social revolution, gentle though real, in England, has changed this. The typical Movement writer’s childhood background appears to be lower-middle-class and suburban (often staunchly non-conformist, often in the industrial or semi-industrial Midlands or North of England).2

Holloway suggests that the Movement was part of a broad social revolution and that it was motivated by the injustices reproduced in the contemporary class system. The main bone of contention was that despite the 1945 Labour Government’s aims to make Britain a true meritocracy, the entrenched class demarcations proved more durable than expected. Most of the writers associated with the Movement (Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, John Wain, Donald Davie, and Holloway himself) came from lower-middle-class backgrounds, and although all had benefited from the scholarship system, they still felt discriminated against once they tried to make careers after university. The arrival of the ‘Angry Young Men’ in the later 1950s (John Osborne, John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, Stan Barstow, Colin Wilson) appeared to extend this rebellion against the class-based values of the dominant English establishment, and Wain along with Amis was often lumped in with this later grouping.