Abstract
Lynsey Hanley’s Respectable: The Experience of Class is crisply relevant as Britain faces turmoil over Brexit, rise in racist hate crimes and slow economic growth. Tracing her own life account over the last three decades, Hanley astutely shows how Britain is far from being a ‘classless’ society. The book makes a contribution by relating the simultaneous material and emotional implications of social mobility. Hanley uses the figures of ‘ceilings’, ‘walls’ and ‘borders’ to describe the loneliness, anxieties and feelings of betrayal that are an intrinsic part of this class journey. She dismisses the myth that social mobility is always a ‘Good Thing’ (p. x) and argues that there is a discomfiting silence around the psychological impact of transcendence of class boundaries.
The book is divided into two parts – ‘There’ (working class) and ‘Here’ (middle class), although, throughout the various chapters, there is plenty of back and forth since the two cannot be compartmentalised. Hanley draws on the work of a number of sociologists – Bauman, Bourdieu, Reay, Skeggs, Beck – but Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (2009, first published in 1957), forms the intellectual backbone of this book. Hoggart has been an influence in Hanley’s life since she first read him and found affinity with his ‘scholarship boy’.
The ambiguous concept of ‘respectability’ is prominent throughout the book. This is very much in keeping with Skeggs’ (1997) research with young working class women enrolled in further education. Skeggs explores the co-constitution of gender and class as she shows how ‘respectability’ is a constant source of anxiety for her research participants. Hanley’s journey starts with her growing up in a ‘respectable’ family. This meant that Hanley wasn’t ‘one of them’ – she was keen and worked hard at school, she didn’t swear and was taken aback by the casual racism she witnessed in her community. She attributes ‘luck, circumstances and desperation’ (p. 48) for her journey to middle class but a more critical exploration of how exceptions emerge within certain constrained circumstances would have added value to the book.
Hanley deftly explores the various and often hidden sites of class injuries – education (both primary and higher education), language, media. The importance of education, in particular, cannot be overstated. Although this might seem obvious, Hanley’s argument that ignorance doesn’t occur naturally but is taught to working class children is not superfluous given the hierarchical classification of schools – public schools, comprehensives, academies – in the country. She speaks of her own school where there were a few exceptional students and teachers but the overriding principle was to train them for their fate – routine jobs for boys and family and children for girls. The central importance of gender, which Hanley could have explored further in her own life story, is discussed here with reference to McRobbie’s (1977) account of ‘culture of working class girls’. Even as Hanley made her way to university, she recalls the interview at Christ’s College, Cambridge where she was thrown off the social mobility ladder as the don sniggered at her reading of Wordsworth’s sonnet and ushered her out of the room. Elitism and recently hiked costs continue to keep top universities out of reach for working class students.
Besides low expectations, the lives of the working class are marred by systematic criminalisation of their lifestyles. Hanley argues that though she saw hope in New Labour after almost two decades of Tories, their agenda of individualism in the 1990s seemed like a dressed up version of the Tories’ ‘you’re on your own, mate’ in the 1980s (p. 162). As they developed early intervention programmes, New Labour fostered the idea that there were plenty of opportunities but individuals were not capable of tapping into them. These parenting, employability and individual responsibility programmes seem strikingly similar to the increasingly proliferating skills development/enhancement programmes in post-1990s India – the context of my own research – that do little to address (or even acknowledge) how capital is kept deliberately and systematically concentrated in a few hands.
Hanley visualises British society as a diamond, rather than a pyramid, observing parallels between the upper and working classes. But in doing so, I would argue, she overstates the importance of the middle class as she contends that the middle class, rather than the 1 per cent, call the shots. She also does not delve further into micro-classes or how on the social mobility ladder, the rungs might be unevenly spaced out, how it might be easier to go from upper working to lower middle class than from lower middle to upper middle class. But the primary contribution of her book lies in articulating the injuries that can be inflicted by the double-edged sword of social mobility. This is not sociology from a distance, this is sociology that is felt and impactful.