Britain in 1962 was more respectable, more reserved, more uptight, more polite, more class-ridden, in a word, more genteel than it was to become by the end of the decade. It was also considerably less violent. The causal connection between attacks on gentility and expressions of violence in the cultural productions of the time, albeit largely the productions of popular culture, is cited by Stephen Pinker as a key part in the decivi-lising process by which he explains the rise in violent crime in those years and the years following. Such wider pros and cons of 1960s society and culture extend well beyond the scope of this book. Nonetheless, it is worth keeping in mind how the poetic movement chronicled here formed part of a much larger picture of progression from small pockets of anti-gentility in the society and culture of the 1950s to the much more pervasive societal shift of the 1960s and 1970s. It is also worth bearing in mind also that the attack on gentility constituted by The New Poetry and related writings was very specific in formulation, making clear a distinction between English anti-gentility in the literature of the 1950s and its own. Any reader in 1962 would have broadly understood what it meant to be contra gentility, and it is fair to say that A. Alvarez's attack upon it did entail the qualities she or he would have in mind and a delight in a brasher, American way of going about things. Yet while many readers, whether pro- or anti-American, would have been more or less opposed to such gentility themselves, they may well also have regarded the Angry Young Men, and to some extent the Movement, not as the current standard bearers for gentility but in the artistic vanguard of those against it.

The most common perception of Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim was as an affront to, rather than an endorsement of, the norms of genteel society: behaving badly, getting drunk, dropping one girl for the next, hardly the sort of behaviour one would wish to encounter at a dinner party. On that last count at least, Alvarez and the norms of genteel society would have concurred.