Lynsey Hanley: how I became middle class

Governments of every stripe tend to see social mobility as a Good Thing. And so did Lynsey Hanley – but there was a psychological cost, as she recounts in this extract from her new book

• Read a Q&A with Lynsey Hanley here

I can’t remember the day I started calling dinner “lunch” and tea “dinner”, but I know that it happened, because that’s what I call them now. That must mean I’m middle-class, where once I was working-class; though, no matter how posh I get, I can’t bring myself to call (what I now call) dinner “supper”. Supper for me means (with apologies to the writer Stuart Maconie) having a Kit-Kat in your dressing gown in front of something racy on Channel 4. Social mobility has its limits: limits which, perhaps, you have to set yourself in order to stay at least halfway related to the person you started out as.

I grew up on a West Midlands council estate as part of an extended family that would once have been described as “respectable working-class”. I went to school in the 80s and early 90s on the same estate, in an educational environment that didn’t expect or prepare young people to stay on beyond 16, and progressed from there to a sixth-form college in a middle-class area full of straight-A students. I went on to the University of London, and from there, eventually, I got to here: lecturing and writing books about the anxiety induced by being socially mobile. The questions for me have always been: how did that happen? Why does it induce such anxiety? Why is it such a big deal to change social class?

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