In my 15 years of teaching English to hundreds of children in various parts of England, there are four books that have been on the curriculum in every school I have found myself in, with no exception: Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, Animal Farm by George Orwell, An Inspector Calls by JB Priestley and Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo.
They have each been well-known classics and perennial favourites for decades. But if you somehow managed to skip them, here’s a quick summary. Of Mice and Men: depression-era friendship strained by a world of toxic masculinity. Animal Farm: a political warning where the farm becomes an allegory for the Russian revolution. An Inspector Calls: an upper-class British family wrestles with basic morality when a working-class woman is announced dead. Private Peaceful: two brothers leave the rural idyll to face the horrors of the frontline in the first world war.
You can see why these books keep turning up. They speak of empathy and humanity, and challenging blunt authority imposed from on high. They have a liberal slant that more or less puts them on the right side of history. But they also assume default narratives that come from ideologies so wide that we can’t easily see the edges of them, default masculinity and default whiteness being two of the biggest. We can’t ignore the fact that these books were written at points in history when social narratives were mainly limited to the perspectives of straight white men.
