Abstract
John Braine’s Room at the Top1 was published in March 1957 and was immediately exceptionally successful for a first novel by a largely unknown author. It sold 35,000 copies in the first year of publication (as opposed to an average for first novels of about 5000). It was serialised (drastically abridged) in the Daily Express and by the end of 1958 Braine was reported to have earned between £ 12,000 and £ 15,000 from the book.2 During 1959 the potential market was greatly extended by the Penguin paperback edition and Jack Clayton’s cinema film. These two proved mutually reinforcing and the Penguin edition was reprinted eight times in the first year and nineteen times by 1970. From the mid-1960s Penguin were proclaiming Room at the Top (alongside such texts as The Odyssey and Lady Chatterley’s Lover) as one of their million-sellers. The edition continued in print through the 1970s and by 1981 was in its thirtieth reprint.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
John Braine, Room at the Top (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1957 ). Page references given below are to the subsequent paperback edition.
Kenneth Allsop, The Angry Decade (London: Peter Owen, 1958), pp. 23, 90.
Graham Turner, The North Country ( London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1967 ), p. 401.
John Braine, Writing a Novel ( London: Eyre Methuen, 1974 ), p. 16.
P. Berger and T. Luckman, The Social Construction of Reality ( London: Allen Lane, 1967 ).
H. G. Nicholas, The British General Election of 1950 ( London: Macmillan, 1950 ), p. 116.
G. Worswick and P. Ady, The British Economy in the 1950s ( London: Oxford University Press, 1962 ).
D. Butler, The British General Election of 1955 ( London: Macmillan, 1955 ), p. 18.
Anthony Sampson, Macmillan ( Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968 ), p. 159.
D. Butler and R. Rose, The British General Election of 1959 (London: Macmillan, 1959), p. 136 (facing).
George Orwell, ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Volume 2 ( Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971 ), pp. 74–99.
Antony Crosland, ‘The Transition from Capitalism’ in R. Crossman (ed.), New Fabian Essays ( London: Turnstile Press, 1952 ), p. 37.
R. Miller, The New Classes ( London: Longman, 1967 ), p. 19.
R. Lewis and A. Maude, The English Middle Classes ( Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953 ), p. 17.
Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965, p. 349; originally published London: Chatto and Windus, 1961).
Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (London, Chatto and Windus, 1957), pp. 24, 277.
Frank Parkin, Middle Class Radicalism (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1968), pp. 2, 36.
Christopher Driver, The Disarmers ( London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1964 ), p. 115.
Lucien Goldmann, ‘Criticism and Dogmatism in Literature’, in David Cooper (ed.), The Dialectics of Liberation ( Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967 ), p. 145.
Raymond Williams, The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence ( London: Chatto and Windus, 1970 ), pp. 73–4.
John Lennon, ‘Working-Class Hero’ (1970).
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1984 Rosalind Brunt, Bridget Fowler, David Glover, Jerry Palmer, Martin Jordin, Stuart Laing, Adrian Mellor, Christopher Pawling
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Laing, S. (1984). Room at the Top: The Morality of Affluence. In: Pawling, C. (eds) Popular Fiction and Social Change. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-15856-0_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-15856-0_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-34320-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-15856-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave Social & Cultural Studies CollectionSocial Sciences (R0)