A Better Class of Person (1981) is an autobiography written by dramatist John Osborne and published in 1981. Based on Osborne's childhood and early life, it ends with the first performance of Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court Theatre in 1956. The book emphasises his warm relationship with his father Thomas, and his antagonistic relationship with his mother Nellie Beatrice, which deepened to hatred after his father died when John was young. A sequel, Almost a Gentleman, was published in 1991.
Composition
After Watch It Come Down (1976), the latest of several plays of his to have a hostile reception, Osborne had no new work performed in the theatre for sixteen years. In the late 1970s, he had also been through an acrimonious divorce from his fourth wife, actress Jill Bennett. During this period his fifth wife, Helen Dawson, encouraged him to write an autobiography. A restraining order required Osborne to submit any autobiography to Bennett for her approval; the only explicit mention of her is Osborne's brief description of seeing her photograph displayed outside a London theatre as an adolescent.
Synopsis
Osborne spends his early childhood in the then working-class Fulham area of London, among his barmaid mother’s family. Like his tubercular father, a copywriter, Osborne has to spend a lot of time in hospitals and sanatoria. He represents his mother as heartless, judgmental and passive-aggressive.
In 1936, his parents move to Stoneleigh, a suburb in Surrey. Osborne falls in love with a Stoneleigh girl from a privileged background who "could be spitefully snobbish, correcting my pronunciation of words". He is lonely at the private school his father's benevolent society has paid for him to attend, but ultimately makes friends with an eccentric boy called Mickey Wall, a civil servant's son whose contempt for authority and subversive sense of humour Osborne enjoys.
Osborne and Wall take to calling themselves "the Viper Gang". As they get older, the pair enjoy arguing about politics, literature and religion. Meanwhile, Thomas’s health deteriorates. At the outbreak of WW2, the Osbornes move to the Isle of Wight, for safety and in the hope that he can convalesce. Thomas dies, and Osborne begins to hate his mother because of what he sees as her uncaring response. The death leaves Osborne and his mother destitute, but Thomas's society decides Osborne should go to a boarding school in Dorset. He gets in trouble at this school for falling in love with the headmaster's niece and is ultimately expelled.
Now a young adult and living with his mother, Osborne finds employment in trade journalism and gets to know an ebullient Canadian editor called Arnold Running who has literary aspirations and encourages Osborne's. Through getting involved in amateur dramatics, he meets a girl called Renee whose parents are eager for them to be engaged, though Osborne begins to get cold feet about marriage. Keen to get away from both the women in his life, Osborne enlists Arnold to persuade Nellie Beatrice that he should move into acting professionally; he secures a job with a touring repertory company and breaks off his engagement with Renee by post.
An older actress called Stella Linden joins the cast and Osborne is smitten by her. She offers him help with his writing, and eventually they become lovers. After the tour ends, he spends a period in Brighton as a kept man, working on a play with Stella, but Osborne finds her insistence on conventional subject-matter and playwriting technique constricting, and the pair drift apart. She gets a job in Kendal and Osborne has to leave the flat they have lived in rent-free.
Unwilling to live with Nellie Beatrice, he joins an acting troupe in Ilfracombe and gets to know an actor called Anthony Creighton whose unrequited crush on him Osborne tolerates. The company does several provincial tours before disbanding. While acting in Somerset, Osborne falls in love with a local actress, and they marry despite her prosperous parents' disapproval of him. At first the young couple are happy, but work drives them apart as her career thrives while his does not.
He moves in with Creighton and they collaborate on several unsuccessful plays. Creighton's mother dies, leaving a small inheritance, and Osborne persuades him to buy a river barge where they can live cheaply. He writes Look Back in Anger, based on his troubled marriage, and submits it to various agents. He is living on the Thames with Creighton when George Devine, artistic director of the English Stage Company, accepts the play and rows out to the houseboat to meet him.