Does Forster champion the lower classes in chapters 6 and 7? | Target | Satisfactory | Achieved | Concise Introduction | | | | Humanistic rational voice | | | | Collective Pronouns | | | | Exchange with Mr Cunningham | | | | Motifs | | | | Leonards Inauthenticity in language | | | |

In Chapters six and seven of E M Forster’s novel ‘Howards End’, Forster uses his humanistic and authorial voice to convey his messages about class prejudices and social injustice. Forster’s humanism, which is shared by the other members of the Bloomsbury Set, can be summed up in the following statement: “one's prime objects in life are love, the creation and enjoyment of aesthetic experience and the pursuit of knowledge”. With this in mind, Forster uses Leonard in Chapter 6 and Margaret in Chapter 7 as his mouthpieces to promulgate his opinions on the socio-political atmosphere of the early 20th Century by contrasting the lives of the Upper classes and the Lower classes.
The opening sentence of Chapter 6 begins with ‘We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.’ Forster uses the collective pronoun of ‘We’ to assume with the audience a shared upbringing of upper class and therefore a mutual attitude to the members of the lower classes. This is another example of Forster’s urbane narrative voice which he uses to introduce a concept or idea like he does in the opening to the novel; ‘One may as well begin with Helen’s letter to her sister.’ The description of the ‘very poor’ as being ‘unthinkable’, is either Forster registering his aversion to the poor or his sympathy for them as being in a society in which were he to be immersed would be to his mind, unthinkable. It is this question which I will be exploring in this essay; does Forster sympathise with the lower classes or