A Better Class of Person by John Osborne
**Overview of "A Better Class of Person" by John Osborne**
"A Better Class of Person" is an autobiographical work by John Osborne, a pivotal figure in post-World War II English theater known for his influential plays, including "Look Back in Anger." This memoir offers insight into Osborne's tumultuous upbringing in various London suburbs, characterized by an emotionally distant family and a series of negative educational experiences. It candidly explores themes of anger, disillusionment, and the complexities of his early life, including his ventures into journalism and acting before becoming a playwright.
Osborne's reflections are marked by a sense of ironic detachment, revealing how his childhood experiences shaped the emotionally charged characters in his plays, such as the discontented Jimmy Porter. The narrative is structured into nineteen chapters, with earlier sections detailing his family life and schooling, and later chapters focusing on his entry into the theater and personal relationships. Throughout the memoir, Osborne intertwines quotations from his plays, illustrating how he transformed personal struggles into artistic expression. This autobiography not only serves as a significant document in theatrical history but also provides a revealing look at the foundational experiences that fueled his creative output.
A Better Class of Person by John Osborne
First published: 1981
Type of work: Autobiography
Time of work: 1929-1956
Locale: Great Britain and France
Principal Personages:
John Osborne , an English playwrightNellie Beatrice Grove Osborne , his mother, a barmaidThomas Godfrey Osborne , his father, an advertising copywriterAnnie Osborne , his paternal grandmotherAdelina Rowena Grove , his maternal grandmotherQueenie Grove Bates , his auntPamela Lane Osborne , his first wife, an actressStella Linden , his first mistress, an actressPatrick Desmond , Stella’s husband, a theatrical producer
Form and Content
Along with Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, and David Hare, John Osborne is one of the most influential English playwrights of the period following World War II. With Look Back in Anger (1956), he is credited with revolutionizing the English theater. Jimmy Porter, the play’s antihero, spews out an endless torrent of venom against his wife, her family and friends, and society in general. The success of Look Back in Anger is said to have rudely awakened a somnolent British stage dominated by tepid drawing-room dramas and paved the way for a new realism and a series of working-class protagonists in English plays, novels, and films. Osborne is often described as the leader of the “angry young men” who created these works. His other major plays include The Entertainer (1957), dealing with the life of Archie Rice, a failing music-hall comedian; Luther (1961), a biographical treatment of Martin Luther, a different variety of angry young man; and Inadmissible Evidence (1964), a portrait of self-destructive attorney Bill Maitland. Osborne has also written plays for television and won an Academy Award for his screenplay for Tom Jones (1963), based on Henry Fielding’s 1749 novel. His career has been the most controversial of any playwright of his generation, primarily because of the vituperation expressed by his characters.
A Better Class of Person explains the sources of much of Osborne’s anger. He recounts growing up in several unfashionable London suburbs with an often-absent father, an advertising copywriter and frequent invalid, a barmaid mother, and assorted ignorant, repellent relatives. He describes his childhood in detail, including his enjoyment of the adventure of being bombed during World War II—much as John Boorman presents this experience in his autobiographical film Hope and Glory (1987)—and his hatred of all of his schools, especially St. Michael’s, a mediocre public school. After leaving school, Osborne became first a journalist and then an actor before beginning to write plays. He deals with his love life and a failed marriage, breaking off his memoir with the completion of Look Back in Anger, his first successful play.
Osborne discusses his emotionally deprived upbringing, romantic problems, and career travails with ironic detachment and little self-pity, almost as if this life had happened to someone else or as if his protagonist were a fictional character. He is more amused by than angry about the people and events that shaped his early life. His goal is not revenge but to illustrate the sources for much of the emotional content of his plays.
The 285 pages of A Better Class of Person are divided into nineteen chapters. The first ten deal with his life at home and school, one chronicles his brief period in journalism, and the rest treat his life in the theater and his romances. Quotations from his plays are scattered throughout to show how he transformed the raw material of his life into art. The book’s index contains a few errors.
Critical Context
Osborne’s autobiography is an important document in theatrical history for displaying the sources of many of the characters, situations, themes, and attitudes in his plays, revealing them to be more personal than political or literary. The anger, disillusionment, failure, and despair of Jimmy Porter, Archie Rice, and Bill Maitland clearly result from their creator’s chaotic upbringing.
A Better Class of Person is perhaps the most significant autobiography of a playwright in illuminating his art. According to John Lahr, the biographer of Joe Orton, “as a dissection of English life and the origins of his own volatile temperament, the book surpasses Coward’s Present Indicative [1937] as the most vivid chronicle of the making of an English playwright.” It also fulfills Osborne’s unrealized ambitions as an actor since it allows him to perform center stage. It is a fitting memoir for the creator of obnoxious Jimmy Porter, because it displays, in the words of David Hare, “the pleasures of Being Rude.” A familiarity with Osborne’s plays is not necessary to find fascinating this account of growing up unloved in working-class Great Britain.
Sources for Further Study
Economist. CCLXXXI, November 14, 1981, p. 114.
Ferrar, H. John Osborne, 1973.
Goldstone, Herbert. Coping with Vulnerability: The Achievement of John Osborne, 1982.
Guardian Weekly. CXXV, October 25, 1981, p. 22.
Hare, David. “Opportunities for Blasting Off,” in New Statesman. CII (October 16, 1981), pp. 23-24.
Hinchliffe, Arnold P. John Osborne, 1984.
Lahr, John. “The Dramatic Lives of Two Playwrights,” in The New York Times Book Review. LXXXVI (November 8, 1981), pp. 1, 30, 32.
Library Journal. CVI, November 1, 1981, p. 2151.
Observer. October 11, 1981, p. 32.
Times Literary Supplement. October 16, 1981, p. 1190.