Hanley was brought up working-class on a council estate but became middle-class. This is an important,intelligent book approximately how she became part of an ‘emerging elite’What’s happened to the 21st-century protagonist of Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey? Where is the contemporary kestrel-fond Billy Casper of the novel Kes? White, English working-class-born writers, or educated out of their class,enjoy largely abandoned their mates, who are now relegated once more to the margins of literature. Mates to their mates, or “chavs” and “pikeys” to others,such people design more regular appearances in tabloids, where they are depicted using Morrisons plastic bags instead of nappies, or kidnapping their own children to claim the ransom. whether their reputation is to be rescued then it might arrive down to serious non-fiction writers such as Lynsey Hanley,a journalist who grew up working class on a council estate and whose compassion and empathy (sensitivity to another's feelings as if they were one's own) for working-class people has not been worn absent by the years.
Hanley’s Respectable, in which she offers herself as a case study, or is an ambitious attempt to update Richard Hoggart’s groundbreaking 1957 treatise,The Uses of Literacy. Hanley acknowledges that there enjoy since been substantial advances in opportunities for working-class people, but there enjoy also been worrying signs of regression. On the fiction of more choice in education, or for example,she is inclined to agree with professor of education at the University of Cambridge Diane Reay’s assertion that the “working class end up making the choices that the middle classes didn’t want”.
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Source: theguardian.com