Respectable by Lynsey Hanley review – why class difference is an open wound

Hanley was brought up working-class on a council estate but became middle-class. This is an important, intelligent book about 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-loving Billy Casper of the novel Kes? White, English working-class-born writers, educated out of their class, have largely abandoned their mates, who are now relegated once more to the margins of literature. Mates to their mates, “chavs” and “pikeys” to others, such people make more regular appearances in tabloids, where they are depicted using Morrisons plastic bags instead of nappies, and kidnapping their own children to claim the ransom. If their reputation is to be rescued then it might come 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 for working-class people has not been worn away by the years.

Hanley’s Respectable, in which she offers herself as a case study, is an ambitious attempt to update Richard Hoggart’s groundbreaking 1957 treatise, The Uses of Literacy. Hanley acknowledges that there have since been substantial advances in opportunities for working-class people, but there have also been worrying signs of regression. On the fiction of more choice in education, 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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