“Each decade we declare that we have buried class ... each decade the coffin stays empty.” That was Richard Hoggart in 1989, in his introduction to George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. It’s quoted by cultural commentator and academic Lynsey Hanley in her introduction to this book, which is, for my money, the most trenchant, observant and intelligent work to have emerged about this country’s class system in modern times. It’s the story of how, basically, she started calling dinner “lunch”, and tea “dinner”; she uses it to analyse the nation’s deep divisions with an almost academic rigour.
“Modern times? Who are we trying to kid?” is what you feel like asking after reading it. Class divisions persist horribly in the UK; this book makes it depressingly clear that they are here for the foreseeable future. People talk about the class ladder when they talk about social mobility; as Hanley points out, ladders also imply walls.
She grew up in Chelmsley Wood, a large Birmingham estate she wrote about in her first book, Estates: An Intimate History, published in 2007. Nothing has really changed there since then, it seems. Meanwhile Hanley, who now lives in Liverpool, is more comfortable in her acquired middle-classness, albeit with many reservations. She shops at Aldi, but puts her purchases – which now include cold-pressed rapeseed oil and pinot noir, she wryly notes – in a reusable jute bag.
The personal journey she describes, from the resourcelessness of her childhood to a position of confidence and articulacy, was not easy or without its sadnesses. She reveals the gulf that grew between her past and present lives; the fact it’s hard to go back without self-consciousness, or the feeling of having committed a kind of betrayal.
I haven’t read a book that is so careful in the way it weighs its words for some time. Every sentence has the force of deep, critical thought behind it. Hanley was always keen to learn, but she notes that the phrase “a pleasure to teach” in her reports “sounded suspiciously like ‘makes my job easier’.” That was depressing to read because it looked almost cynical, reminiscent of the cynicism she recognised in the unteachable pupils at her secondary school; it’s a kind of despair, an awareness that even the kind words of a teacher are part of a large and hostile system.
She looks at uncomfortable truths squarely, and woe betide you if her gaze finds you wanting. By the time you get to her story of the Cambridge don who sniggered when she started reading out a Wordsworth poem, you almost feel sorry for him, so clear is her underlying contempt – but then you realise just how small he made her feel. A similar disdain is reserved for Chris Woodhead, the schools inspector who said middle-class children do better because of “better genes”: “The possessors of such opinions, defending personal success by farming out failure to others, reveal a lot about themselves in the process,” she writes.
The book doesn’t offer any solutions beyond a call to destroy the entrenched political narrative that has everything boil down to individual responsibility; but it is essential reading. I wish I’d done so when it first came out, for then I would have been less baffled by Brexit, Trump and the whole revolt against a failing consensus.
The key phrase, coined by the US psychotherapist and social activist Michael Lerner, which she quotes early on here, is “surplus powerlessness” – which, as Hanley puts it, “crushes out of all proportion our sense of what is worthwhile and possible”. Reading and grasping that is for the middle-class reader an education.
• Respectable: Crossing the Class Divide is published by Penguin. To order a copy for £7.99 (RRP £9.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
