Conclusion

Abstract

Centrally, this book has been concerned with what we might call the “absent-presence” of the British working class, and how that contradictory and paradoxical condition finds articulation in a range of cultural practices over a broad historical span, from the nineteenth century to the present. It has addressed and drawn attention to the significance of historical and cultural contexts for making sense of the variable claims on working-class identity and formation and it has flagged up the importance of place and space for understanding notions of class and community. A focus on working-class expression — the language of class — in the form of oral history testimony has provided a way of mapping the lived experience of class; at the same time the book points to the area of representation, or to follow Skeggs, the symbolic, as a site/sight where working-class subjectivity might be foregrounded as abject, or lacking, or is discursively displaced altogether in an act of denial, or as a form of ideological closure. But this needs to be seen too in the light of working-class self-expression, articulated in a range of cultural forms other than oral testimony, and these include the novel, poetry and autobiography, constituting counter-hegemonic processes often seen to be speaking from the margins.