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>That's not quite true, I'm afraid. Protestants had a thing about books, and printers were both working-class and occupationally disposed to some kind of literacy. I think E.P.Thompson could be of assistance on that. Certainly the Corresponding Societies that people like Francis Place figured implied the existence of reading working classes. While all those Bible quoting millenarians of the 17th century civil upheavals were presumably not relying on someone to read for them. Would you consider John Bunyan middle-class? Even before Clare and Blake there are people like Stephen Duck or Anne Yeardesley or John Taylor the Water-Poet while a lot of those Elizabethan playwrighting poets came from poor backgrounds, Marlowe or Ben Jonson for instance. Even Spenser seems to have been a journeyman clothmaker's son. While others like Donne or Pope had Catholic connections which made them just as socially ambiguous as poor scholars. While I don't feel I need to go into detail about those from the upper reaches: the Sidneys, Herberts, Shelley, Byron, Wyatt, the Cavalier poets etc etc. That's all true, and I really neglected that dissenting tradition. Besides, your list makes evident that the terms of middle-class etc are dynamic through the centuries, it is not that easy to box individual poets away. But multiple exceptions as there are, I still suppose that the bulk of literature (not the good stuff, just the bulk) has tended to be produced by e.g doctors, parsons, teachers and their non-working daughters, but not by grooms and milkmaids and wet-nurses and miners. But perhaps this is partly a myth, perhaps the literature itself has often denied its more interesting origins in order to wear a coat of gentility? >In fact I feel a terrible itch to rewrite your last 'it's a reasonable assumption that the body of English poetry that's been written down exists despite the work of middle-class authors' but of course I'm not going to do that as it would be a terrible thing to do. Well, I almost wrote something like that myself. If the bulk of poetry and its readers is characterized by middle-classness, then the things that stand out often reflect some unusual imput from elsewhere. The labouring world that most writers know so little about (in my view) has been one of the great reservoirs of new vitality through the centuries. That would explain why, as Jamie says, its not often that a writer gets kudos just for being middle-class, because that's just the dull norm position. (It's now come into my mind that Chesterton wrote in praise of Browning's South London lower-middle-classness, rather in the tones of J.G. Ballard praising the exoticism of suburbia; obviously that kind of praise depended on finer distinctions than the broad triple band of Cleese Barker and Corbett.)