British Working Class Research Articles

Common people: Breaking the class ceiling in UK publishing

The United Kingdom has just one percent of the world’s population but is the largest exporter of books in the world. As a thriving creative industry, UK publishing also makes a significant indirect economic contribution to the British economy via immediately adjacent sectors including retail, printing and marketing. However, the under-representation of British working class writers in UK publishing has been identified as a major social and economic challenge by both the publishing industry and the British government. In 2018, Arts Council England funded the first ever writing development programme for British working class writers that aimed to address this imbalance. This article assesses for the first time the impact of this unique initiative on both creatives and the creative industry in the UK, as well as on wider awareness of the presence and impact of the class ceiling in UK publishing.

Of greengrocers, sports commentators, estate agents and television presenters: who’s in a usage guide and why

ABSTRACT Weiner (1988. “On Editing a Usage Guide.” In Words for Robert Burchfield’s Sixty-Fifth Birthday, edited by E. G. Stanley, and T. F. Hoad, 171–183. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 173) describes usage guides as being ‘as broad as the English language, covering spelling, punctuation, phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexis, and involving sociolinguistic considerations’. This paper focusses on these ‘sociolinguistic considerations’, to try and answer the question of why people like greengrocers, sports commentators, estate agents and television presenters are stigmatised for certain perceived linguistic errors. The greengrocer’s apostrophe is well known (Beal, Joan C. 2010. “The Grocer’s Apostrophe: Popular Prescriptivism in the Twenty-First Century.” English Today 26 (2): 57–64), but the other three categories, the sports commentators’ adverb (the flat adverb), the estate agent’s pronoun (yourselves for you) and the television presenter’s demonstrative pronoun (these/those ones), I first encountered in Caroline Taggart’s Her Ladyship’s Guide to the Queen’s English (2010), one of the three most recent and most prescriptive publications in the HUGE database of usage guides and usage problems. Discussing Taggart’s usage guide as a case study, I will go into the question of why certain groups of speakers are made into the object of prescriptivism and will argue that the British class system plays an important role in this. As a case study, this article highlights the need for more linguists to view usage guides as a genre that needs to be treated critically rather than be ignored, as is generally the case at present.

Chatham House, the Council on Foreign Relations, and China policy during the Korean war, 1950–1953

In late 1950, with pervasive disharmony over the recognition of China, the Korean War, broader Asian policy, and British rearmament seriously threatening relations between Great Britain and the United States (USA), the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the British Royal Institute of International Affairs established a collaborative study group project. These two organizations, each the leading foreign policy think tank in its respective state, undertook a comprehensive examination of conflicts within their relationship, that ultimately, in early 1953, produced a book-length joint report. The issue of future policy towards China featured significantly in their collaborative discussions. These deliberations, which proceeded at the ambiguous interface where officialdom and private thinking overlapped, were undertaken by individuals brought together by two non-governmental organizations, at the prompting of the Rockefeller Foundation, which provided its funding. Neither side succeeded immediately in altering the official policies of the other, but the enterprise facilitated communication on politically sensitive issues at an ostensibly private level among British and American elites with close connections to government, thereby mitigating potentially corrosive tensions between the two states. In the longer run, on the American side, this enterprise may well have cleared the way intellectually for a series of influential CFR publications on China that appeared during the 1950s and 1960s and helped to prepare the ground for the reopening of relations with China during the 1970s.

The role of ethnic change in the closing of rent gaps through buy-to-let gentrification

ABSTRACT This article analyses the interrelation of ethnicity, class and tenure in the gentrification trajectories that have taken place in England in the most recent intercensal period (2001–2011). It argues that the return of the Private Rented Sector has made possible the extension of social change to areas not favored by White British (majority ethnic) middle-class owner-occupiers. This has seen the inflow of White British private renters into White British working-class areas and the arrival of private renting Not White British middle classes – primarily migrants – in working-class areas with a significant proportion of Not White British individuals. There is thus an ethnic dimension to the geographical spread of buy-to-let gentrification and the movement toward property wealth re-concentration it feeds. The middle-class individuals entering gentrifying areas as private renters are however not classical gentrifiers as the closing of rent gaps starts with the supply of private rented units by property investors.

In-service teachers’ practice of learning to teach, the theory of practice architectures and further education-based teacher education classes in England

ABSTRACT This paper uses the theories of practice architectures and learning to teach to study in-service teachers’ practice of learning to teaching within a further education (FE)-based initial teacher education (ITE) classes at one further education college (FEC) in England. It seeks to answer two research questions: How do in-service teachers learn how to teach within a teacher education classes at a general FE college in England? What site-based factors shape the in-service teachers’ practice of learning to teach? Using an action research methodology, the researcher, a university-based teacher educator, worked with a team of six FE-based teacher educators and their 35 in-service teachers to answer these questions. Drawing on data from six ‘teacher talk’ meetings with the teacher educators and three focus groups with the in-service teachers, the paper builds on and adds to international maps of existing research and knowledge of their practice of learning to teach.

Work: What is Political Economy by Bruce Pietrykowski

Reviewed by: Work: What is Political Economy by Bruce Pietrykowski Daniel James Joseph Bruce Pietrykowski, Work: What is Political Economy (New York: Polity Books 2019) This review of Bruce Pietrykowski's very insightful Work took much longer than I had planned because work got [End Page 219] in the way. The first was that I moved across the Atlantic, far from my home in Toronto, for work. I had no alternatives, really. I was out of Employment Insurance following my postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto and my savings were drying up. The Canadian academic job market had been a dead end for me. When I finally had my feet on the ground at my new job, the covid-19 pandemic struck and I suddenly found myself locked (along with everyone else) inside, far from most of my friends and family. I had a lot of work to do, under unprecedented conditions. While the lockdown kicked into full gear here in England I watched the stock market crash, the price of a barrel of oil drop to less than zero, and economists of all stripes warn of the worst recession since the Great Depression. This had me reflecting on why I was so far from home for work, and how what has pushed this system over the edge was the cessation of work for billions of people. With friends on Zoom, I started reading Marx's Capital again and started reading E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class. A few months into these dense tomes I returned to Pietrykowski's Work and found myself enjoying it immensely. Informed by recent reading I found myself nodding along with the clear lines drawn between classic examples of political economy and history and contemporary issues. In this way the book functions as Cliff Notes of sorts for the classics and gives interested readers a wealth of citations and material on contemporary debates. Key is that Work does not endeavour to offer ground-breaking new theoretical terrain, but instead situate the reader within the existing political economic literature. It begins with an introduction covering the origins of the field of political economy (in its Marxist, feminist, and post-Keynesian forms). There is a short history of the transition from feudal to capitalist modes of production. Here are also the first of what will be numerous break-out text boxes that deal with some disagreements and discussions within the field. For example, here they concern the status of animals as workers and how political economists have come to understand slavery contra wage labour. These text boxes quickly communicate that while Work is less didactic than many academic course textbooks, it's still written as an introduction for readers new to the field. The next chapter, "Inequality at Work: Skills, Wages and Productivity" builds on this core by starting with the problem of inequality and then working through a variety of apologia for, and criticisms of, inequality. I particularly enjoyed the discussion and criticism of human capital theory, something that I think about every time I enter a classroom filled with students who are told by politicians and universities that they are paying for valuable upskilling. Here Pietrykowski walks the reader through the arguments that neoclassical economists have made for decades about the unequal distribution of income in the economy as a function of skill acquisition. Pietrykowski then engages in a thorough critique showing how race, gender, and technology play an outsized role in determining wage inequality, while summarizing different political economic explanations of crisis and inequality. Chapter 3, "Gender at Work: Caring Labor" covers a considerable amount of material concerning feminist political economy, beginning with the foundational discussions and debates concerning "productive" and "unproductive" labour, and the gaps in Marxist political economy that sprang from this. From here the concept of social reproduction is introduced and the basics of global housework are discussed. The lack of bargaining [End Page 220] power in a non-waged home-bound relationship is stressed alongside varying ways in which gender is performed and understood, and exploited economically, in different cultures. There is a discussion of feminist political economy's focus on caring and...

Haru Takiuchi, British Working-Class Writing for Children: Scholarship Boys in the Mid-Twentieth Century

Haru Takiuchi, British Working-Class Writing for Children: Scholarship Boys in the Mid-Twentieth Century

Еволюція образу України у Великій Британії під час Першої світової війни

Every nation needs an external assistance if it hopes to gain and build its own state. However, such support is not possible without some well-formed image of this country or territory in the intellectual and political circles of the state that demonstrates nation fighting for independence. Therefore, it seems important to trace the evolution of Ukraine’s image in the intellectual discourse of one of the most powerful countries in the world, namely the United Kingdom. The article deals with the evolution of the image of Ukraine in the intellectual discourse of the British Empire during the First World War. The analysis is based upon a wide range of English-language sources, primarily scientific works of English-speaking intellectuals of the British Empire of that time, who tried to analyse the current situation in Cental and Eastern Europe (J. Raffalovich, A. Toynbee, R. Seton-Watson) and also Ukrainian emigrants, who wanted to inform British public with the Ukrainian vision of events (V. Stepankivsky). All this happened against the backdrop of the attempts of the representatives of the Ukrainian national liberation movement to convey their position to the world, as well as the competition of other states and politically ideological concepts for the right to control Ukrainian lands. Changes in the perceptions of the British intellectuals about Ukraine are influenced by various geopolitical factors, and a general assessment of the awareness of the British elites about the Ukrainian issue is made.

Theme of Identity: A Study of Andrea Levy’s The Long Song

The Long Song (2010) is a contemporary Caribbean neo-slave narrative written by Andrea Levy. The novel revisits the period of slavery in the early nineteenth century Jamaica depicting the experiences of a slave girl, July at Amity - a sugarcane plantation in Jamaica. Written in the background of a famous Jamaican slave rebellion, the Baptist War erupted in 1831, the abolition of slavery in 1833 and its aftermath, the novel details the life of the slaves on Jamaican plantations before and after the period of emancipation. Replete with the theme of identity, the novel explores the ethnic and cultural backgrounds of the characters on the plantations where the British class system is largely in vogue. Thus, the paper shall explore the identity of the slaves in the Caribbean which is greatly affected by the British social hierarchy. It shall also focus on how the British class system begins to lose its potential and importance in Jamaica after the Baptist War.

«Новая дипломатия» Д. Ллойд Джорджа на путях от войны к миру, 1916-1922 гг.: проблема современной интерпретации

В статье предпринимается попытка в качестве основного предмета переосмыслить британскую внешнюю политику в период пребывания у власти военного кабинета и коалиционного правительства Д. Ллойд Джорджа (1916-1922 гг.) на основе концепта «публичной («новой») дипломатии». Автор исследует международно-политические изменения и перемены в состоянии общественного мнения как в Британии, так и по всему миру, наметившиеся к концу Первой мировой войны, в также их влияние на Дэвида Ллойд Джорджа, складывание его особого политического стиля и предпочтений в пользу персональной дипломатии встреч и переговоров. В силу междисциплинарного характера исследования были использованы методы как исторического, так и политического анализа. Представлены различные точки зрения современных зарубежных историков на стиль политического лидерства и внешнюю политику Ллойд Джорджа и на основе их сопоставления сформулирована новая версия истоков публичной дипломатии. Что касается конкретной проблемы, то Ллойд Джордж, обращаясь к широкой аудитории в стране и за рубежом, умело формировал благоприятное для Великобритании общественное мнение и обеспечивал продвижение британских интересов. В результате оценки достижений и просчетов британского премьера исследователь приходит к заключению о значительном вкладе британской политической элиты в становление как публичной дипломатии, так и современной политической культуры в целом.

The British class system is in great shape

Why we should embrace working class solidarity not the gentrification of class politics

Peterloo

Peterloo Thomas Prasch Peterloo 2019 Written and directed by Mike Leigh Distributed by Amazon Studios, in association with BFI, Film 4, and LipSync. www.amazon.com 154 minutes Peterloo opens on a different -loo altogether than the one its title enshrines: the battlefield of Waterloo in 1815, the closing act of the long revolutionary and Napoleonic wars that enmeshed Britain and France for over two decades after France's revolutionary regime beheaded its king. Amid the confused carnage and wreckage of the battle's closing moments, we watch a dazed and confused young British bugler blink and bumble about the ravaged landscape, occasionally tooting out a feeble bugle call. Over the course of the film's opening exposition, sandwiched amid scenes of Parliament commemorating the Duke of Wellington's triumph (with a hefty stipend of ₤750,000), of the workaday life of Manchester's working class, and of cabinet officials and military brass worrying about seditious tendencies in the North, we then follow the bugler's long trudge back home to Manchester, where he arrives in a weepy, war-stunned near catatonia (and where we finally learn at least his first name: Joseph). He dons his redcoat uniform—by then rather the worse for wear—near the film's end as he joins his family and thousands of other reform-demanding workers as they gathered in St. Peter's Field to hear radical Henry Hunt ("Orator Hunt," as he was popularly known; played by Rory Kinnear), a peaceful demonstration violently dispersed by sword-wielding cavalry and bayonet-bearing infantry (estimates place the number killed at some dozen or more dead, including women and children, with 500-600 injured), earning its sobriquet Peterloo. Even for film viewers who have adjusted to Mike Leigh's late-career leap from darkly-limned and darkly comic) kitchen-sink-realist portraits of contemporary working-class lives (think High Hopes [1988] or Naked [1993], for example) to films about historical subjects (bringing us backstage with Gilbert and Sullivan in Topsy-Turvy [1999]; portraying an abortionist in the 1950s, before the procedure was legal, in Vera Drake [2004]; tangling to understand the visual splendor of late J. M. W. Turner paintings in Mr. Turner [2014]), Peterloo seems a surprising departure: working with the biggest budget in his career ($18 million, still awfully low by Hollywood standards, but a lot for Leigh) to create a serious, even somber epic memorialization of a dramatic tragedy in British working-class history. In interviews, Leigh has insisted that his making of Peterloo—its release timed to match the bicentennial of the massacre—intended to draw attention to a moment in working-class British history too little remembered or too quickly passed over (see, for example, Vulture, 4 April 2019, or World Socialist Web Site, 5 April 2019). The assertion will somewhat surprise historians who well recall E. P. Thompson's assertion that the event was "without question a formative experience in British political and social history" (The Making of the English Working Class [1963], 687; boldface in original), or who know Robert Reid's carefully researched Peterloo Massacre (1989). To be fair, however, Leigh's perspective coincides with the slowness with which official Manchester marked the historical ground (it was only in 2007 that a plaque marked the square with a properly complete account). A. O. Scott, in his review of the film, aptly notes that "Peterloo has the sweep of Tolstoy and the bustle of Dickens" (New York Times, 4 April 2019). The Tolstoy shows in sweep and range, the leaps from dirty streets and factory floors to royal suites and halls of Parliament, and as well in the masses of the film, the deep range of characters (some four dozen named characters in the cast list, a rich mix of fictional creations and actual historical figures) and the massed crowds of extras. But Scott continues: "It's crowded with noble, villainous and comical characters: police spies and magistrates; radical firebrands and anxious liberals; pompous officials and plain-spoken workers; servants, tradesman, gossips, thugs and children. … Everyone carries a spark of individuality. Every voice and face is something to remember." In such details, the more dominant Dickens side shows. Indeed...

What a True Princess Wears: Dress, Class, and Social Responsibility in Frances Hodgson Burnett'sA Little Princess

This article argues that while Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess appears to be a conventional ‘from riches to rags to riches’ story, idealising the British class system, a reading of sartorial images exposes a conflicted engagement with British class that is usually overlooked. References to attire not only illustrate social class in this story, they also hint at underlying moral decay within this system that arises out of an unreflective acceptance of social values and structures. Through reference to Anthony Giddens's theory of identity, this article discusses how the protagonist's changing attire mirrors her developing insights into the need to reflectively construct a morally responsible identity.

Book review: The New Politics of Class: The Political Exclusion of the British Working Class

Book review: The New Politics of Class: The Political Exclusion of the British Working Class

Branding: A Prosthesis of Identity

This article investigates the prosthesis of identity through the process of branding. It examines cross-cultural manifestations of this phenomena from sixth millennium BCE Syria to twelfth century Japan and Britain. From the Neolithic Era, humanity has sort to extend their identities using pictorial signs that were characteristically simple. Designed to be distinctive and instantly recognisable, the totemic symbols served to signal the origin of the bearer. Subsequently, the development of branding coincided with periods of increased in mobility both in respect to geography and social strata. This includes fifth millennium Mesopotamia, nineteenth century Britain, and America during the 1920s. There are fewer articles of greater influence on contemporary culture than A Theory of Human Motivation written by Abraham Maslow in 1943. Nearly seventy-five years later, his theories about the societal need for “belongingness” and “esteem” remain a mainstay of advertising campaigns (Maslow). Although the principles are used to sell a broad range of products from shampoo to breakfast cereal they are epitomised by apparel. This is with refence to garments and accessories bearing corporation logos. Whereas other purchased items, imbued with abstract products, are intended for personal consumption the public display of these symbols may be interpreted as a form of signalling. The intention of the wearers is to literally seek the fulfilment of the aforementioned social needs.

The Women’s Liberation Movement and the Politics of Class in Britain. By George Stevenson

This is an important book which breaks new ground in relation to the women’s liberation movement (WLM) and class in 1970s Britain. It takes an oral history approach, paying attention to the need for reflexivity when interpreting oral testimony. Stevenson has an extensive grasp of WLM historiography and shows tremendous skill in grappling with a range of interpretive frameworks. Stevenson argues that most women in the movement did not reject class analysis but realised the interconnected nature of class and gender and critically engaged with the latter. He acknowledges that whilst the demographic of the WLM was largely white and middle class, working class women were present throughout and that support was forthcoming for their struggles. He seeks to uncover and explore these lost voices. Historians have already made use of some of these biographical accounts of working class women in the WLM. What is original here is that Stevenson takes on board a very wide range of life histories and subjects them to forensic analysis.

To “Labour with a Greater Sense of Safety”: First Aid, Civic Duty, and Risk Management in the British Working Class, 1870–1914

Abstract Much has been written about British ideals of citizenship in the face of heightened social discord, particularly in times of war. There is a lack of analysis, however, relating notions of civic duty to the risks faced by British people in their everyday lives. Further, most scholarship on civic duty as it relates to the perception and management of risk focuses on the twentieth century and, in particular, the World Wars. This article seeks to examine civic participation in an earlier time period—from 1870 to 1914—through the lens of the civilian first-aid movement. We argue that first aid presented working-class men with a way to manage novel forms of risk introduced by new and dangerous technologies in the workplace and in their daily lives. Applying first-aid training provided these men with a way to participate in a burgeoning working-class culture of self-reliance, altruism, and civic duty. This article contributes to the discussion surrounding expressions of citizenship in the civilian realm and presents a new perspective on the significance of the British first-aid movement.

Marcelo Badaró Mattos. Laborers and Enslaved Workers: Experiences in Common in the Making of Rio de Janeiro’s Working Class, 1850–1920.

The English-language version of Marcelo Badaró Mattos’s Laborers and Enslaved Workers: Experiences in Common in the Making of Rio de Janeiro’s Working Class, 1850–1920 is a distinguished example of Brazilian social history in its effort to accomplish international recognition. Addressing a specific context—the city of Rio de Janeiro between the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth—the book carries on E. P. Thompson’s stimulating proposal of breaking down the great walls that keep centuries apart and divide the history of working-class agitation from the cultural and intellectual history of the rest of the nation, as it is stated in The Making of the English Working Class (1963). As a result, Mattos endorses a characteristic momentum of Brazilian historiography, which is the focus on the coexistence of free and freed workers on one side, and enslaved and unfree workers on the other. In considering class as a process and as a relation, and not as a structural position, Mattos claims that going back in time in a search only for free workers’ experiences is fruitless.

Roy Jenkins and the Politics of Radical Moderation

AbstractIn light of the frequent contention, amidst Brexit and associated populism, that British politics needs to become both ideologically ‘bolder’, and better connected with a neglected public, the seemingly archetypally elitist centrist Roy Jenkins may seem a curiously outmoded subject. This assumption appears shared by historians, who have neglected him. However, this article suggests that if Jenkins was indeed a self‐described ‘moderate’, like many British so‐called moderates, he saw that very moderation as underpinning a progressive, and indeed in its way radical, vision. In particular, Jenkins argued that by synthesizing objectives sometimes seen as conflicting – social equality with individual freedom, the relief of poverty with the fostering of affluence – one achieved more socially transformative outcomes than through pronounced ideological conflict. He illuminates the achievements of this ‘radical centre’ in British politics, and the unresolved, yet still pertinent, dilemmas of the ideological balances it sought. The article also challenges Jenkins's status as the epitome of a disconnected British elite. He had, in fact, much to say about the importance of ordinary people in shaping political and social progress. He was also often sophisticated in perceiving the citizenry's complex mix of progressivism and conservatism, engagement and drift, a mix he displayed himself. Instead, then, of the presently fashionable narrative of elite politicians betraying a virtuous, disillusioned mass, Jenkins's case points to a more connected relationship between leaders and led, in their often shared collection of national vices, yet also virtues. Here, the country's problems, and the means to their solution, then as now, lie in a complex, collective ‘us’, not in a singular malign ‘Other’.

A decolonial reading of the Punjabi (m)other in British Asian literature

ABSTRACT This reading focuses on the mother figure in recent novels and memoirs by Punjabi-origin male writers. These texts can be seen as forms of translation into modernity, of subjects that are rarely represented in English-language literature, that cannot be recognised by the text, that exist at its margins. These texts are founded in the idea of the nation; which is unable to contain or represent these mother figures. Where is the nation for the non-English speaking Sikh and Muslim mothers in the texts if it is neither India nor Britain (where acceptance is conditional on being ‘modern’, speaking English, secular)? The ‘difference’ of these mother figures means that they don’t fit into the idea of Britain; their identities are tied up with the immediate communities in which they live and the regions from whence they hail. There is little connection to the British citizen-making project and ‘multiculturalism’. Decolonial readings of these texts through regional (Punjabi) lens can help to read the mother figures better, reading her ‘difference’. Meanwhile, resilience can be seen as a form of resistance to British hegemony – connected to rural Punjabi female resistance (resilience) to British and Indian elite hegemony under British colonialism.