Abstract
Aidan Chambers’ Breaktime (1978) is famous for its unique narrative style and sexual content. This focus has obscured another significant aspect of the novel: the role of social class in Breaktime and Chambers’ working-class background have rarely been explored. Chambers was an example of what Richard Hoggart calls “the scholarship boy,” a working-class boy educated in a grammar school in mid-twentieth-century Britain. In this article, Haru Takiuchi argues that Chambers’ scholarship-boy experiences are crucial for understanding Breaktime. For his analysis of the cultural and psychological aspects of class that concern representations of scholarship boys in British children’s literature of the 1960s and 1970s, he draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of class habitus, more focused studies of class in Britain and research into the experiences of scholarship boys. Using material from the author’s archive supplemented with interviews, Haru Takiuchi highlights Chambers’ unique representation of the scholarship boy and social class in the book.
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Notes
For a biographical and general discussion of Breaktime, see Greenway (2006, pp. 15–29). For a discussion of Chambers’ narrative style, see Deluca (1979–1980, pp. 144–48), Nikolajeva (2001, p. 438) and Reynolds (1994, pp. 49–58). For an analysis of the role of sexuality in Breaktime, see Reynolds (2007, pp. 118–119) and Trites (2000, pp. 72–73, 96–97). For female characters’ roles in Chambers’ novels, see Russell (2008). In addition, Ted Hipple introduces and explains Breaktime in Lost Masterworks of Young Adult Literature (2002).
Scholarship boys/girls is a term used in cultural studies to refer to working-class people who received education in grammar schools and/or universities. This term is used whether or not they were in receipt of scholarships.
Although Bourdieu does not deny the notion of the symbolic three-tier classes—the working class, the middle class and the upper class, his model of class is theoretically much more ramified, complicated and fluid, as he locates class in a three-dimensional space, whose axes are not only economic but also cultural and social capital, and which is potentially always changing.
According to Chambers (2012), Robby and Jack are in a sexual relationship, but Ditto does not notice this, and therefore in the novel it is not clear.
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Haru Takiuchi is a PhD candidate at Newcastle University. His thesis focuses on British scholarship-boy writers for children in the 1960s and the 1970s, with a particular emphasis on Aidan Chambers, Alan Garner and Robert Westall.
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Takiuchi, H. Aidan Chambers’ Breaktime: Class Conflict and Anxiety in the Work of a Scholarship-Boy Writer. Child Lit Educ 47, 36–49 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-015-9245-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-015-9245-3