J.K. Rowling's Class War

Initial reactions to J.K. Rowling’s first adult novel, The Casual Vacancy, a bleak and depressing portrait of contemporary rural British society, featuring graphic sex, violence, and drug use, and peppered with foul language, focused on its unsuitability for younger readers. But, after Erica Wagner in the right-leaning Times compared Rowling’s concern for “a world in which the poor are left to fend for themselves” to Dickens’s social conscience, while Jan Moir, in the staunchly conservative Daily Mail, attacked the book as “relentless socialist manifesto masquerading as literature crammed down your throat,” the question of whether Rowling really was the guardian of our children’s innocence became a moot point. Accusations of her “snobbishness” toward the middle classes have taken center stage instead