I’ve written a Jane Austen spinoff for my 80th birthday. Help me sell a million copies

It is unwise for an author to plan their success ahead of publication. But I’m excited about the novella I have just written and the chance that it might sell millions. A million would suit me fine. Digital, so that people can read it on their phone. I will also get some copies printed and go on a road tour in order to sell more and make more money. Half of what I make will go to Big Issue.  

Next year is my 80th birthday and I’m fascinated with the idea of making a lot of noise about it, and selling a million copies of Dirty Austen, my novella. I’m also fascinated as to why a poorly raised slum boy who often ate nothing managed to survive. My 80th, to me, is a celebration of 80 years of Big Issue. But, you might point out, it’s only been going 34 years.

Well, look at it this way: if I hadn’t been through all that lived experience stuff – poverty, homelessness, rough sleeping, wrongdoing and incarceration – and if I hadn’t inherited poverty I wouldn’t have had the drive to start Big Issue. And also the dispassionate drive to do something completely different from what the 501 other homeless groups were doing when we started in 1991.

Gordon Roddick, co-founder of The Body Shop, would not have asked me to start a street paper if I wasn’t, to him, someone who had been part of the problem and wanted to become part of the solution.  

Read more:

• Jane Austen has become my shelter against a confusing world
• I’ve written over a million words about poverty – here’s what I’ve learned
• What our world leaders could learn from George Eliot’s Middlemarch

Back to the million copies of Dirty Austen I want to sell and give Big Issue half the money. Why? Because the general public are turning our vendors back into beggars. They are giving money out and not taking the paper. The model of bringing homeless people to the marketplace to earn their own money, ‘trade not aid’, has been punctured by only about one in 20 people taking the paper when they give money to the vendors. So we have to reinvent the model and that’s going to take money.

If I can make a shedload of money selling a shedload of books, I can then underwrite the transformation of Big Issue.  

As its founder I feel obliged to pull my finger out of my arse and do all I can to help with this reinvention. And hopefully along the way, educate the public into returning the magazine to ‘a hand up not a handout’.  

Dirty Austen involves two minor characters from Pride and Prejudice who I bring centre stage and who go through a lot of the type of experiences that Jane Austen left out of her books. It’s a spinoff. I put the dirty bits in that she deliberately left out. ‘Dirty’ meaning reality, hunger, suffering – and sex. Not a lot of it, but enough to make it seem real.  

Yet I would not change a word of Austen’s work; she was brilliant and her ability to set readers alight is awesome. My ex-mother-in-law, who knew me from my early 20s, was always petitioning me to read Austen. I tried but I found it was not my world. It was too posh and sweet to me. I tried in my 20s and 30s, my 40s and 50s. Until one day in my 60s I was in a remaindered bookshop and picked up a collection of Austen’s novels in a badly printed version. It was either that or Tanks of the Second World War, or some such book.

I picked it up and started reading. I had a spare half-hour before a meeting. Half an hour later I had been captured and was late for my meeting.  

I also fell in love with the minor characters that I have brought main stage. And in the process, I’ve made the accepted hero of Pride and Prejudice the villain – and the villain the hero. In Jane Austen’s time – 1775 to 1817 – there were incredible developments in politics and society. The American Revolution, the French Revolution, the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution. The Napoleonic wars that led to an almost end of the British Empire, with Napoleon almost beating Great Britain.  

It was all touch and go. That they pul-led it off and in the last years of Austen’s life beat Napoleon was nothing to do with superior military skills, but mistakes that the Emperor had made. Don’t believe all the imperial bull that it was a superiority of the British strategy and equipment that caused the end of Napoleon. It was because, like a later Hitler, he was stymied by his own ineptitude.

Anyway, what a deep and lasting trauma Britain experienced, creating the first working class that had no relationship with nature, bereft of what their fore-fathers experienced. A class of people so alienated from life that it was passed down the generations – to my generation that lived in a poverty that had no natural relationships with nature. No beauty but the emptiness of the slums and a broken life. Austen lived through this modern dystopia. Yet she never registered it.  

And my book addresses that, in a light and interesting way, I hope. No sledgehammers and bitter history lessons in Dirty Austen. Just joy, hopefully. When you see me on the road kicking arse for Big Issue please join me. Or buy from the digital platform and enjoy my take on history.  

That I could sell a million copies so I can give a few million to Big Issue for its reinvention is highly unlikely. But equally, when I created it 34 years ago, it seemed highly unlikely that it would survive more than a few months. 

John Bird is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Big Issue. Read more of his words from our archive.

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