It was a big step forward when the facts of working-class life were first got on to paper. I think it has done something to push fiction back towards realities and away from the over-civilised stuff that Galsworthy and so forth used to write. I think possibly the first book that did this was The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, which has always seemed to me a wonderful book, although it is very clumsily written. It recorded things that were everyday experience but which simply had not been noticed before.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "It was a big step forward when the facts of working-class life were first got on to paper. I think it has done something to push fiction back towards realities and away from the over-civilised stuff that Galsworthy and so forth used to write. I think possibly the first book that did this was The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, which has always seemed to me a wonderful book, although it is very clumsily written. It recorded things that were everyday experience but which simply had not been noticed before." in the context of "George Orwell, 'The Proletarian Writer' (1940), quoted in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume II: My Country Right or Left 1940–1943, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (1968), pp. 39-40" to mean that wisdom is timeless.