In the wake of the critique of social history associated with the linguistic turn, scholars have reconsidered the way class operates in modern societies. Ben Jones's study of the working class in twentieth-century Brighton argues forcefully that class remains an important framework for understanding British culture and society. Jones shifts attention from London and the industrial North, traditional foci for histories of the working class. He also de-emphasizes the workplace and labor militancy, instead focusing on the generation of working-class identity in neighborhoods and families, and the cultivation of this identity through memory, narrative, and discourse. Jones relies heavily on oral history and autobiographical accounts to construct a convincing study of the persistent strength of working-class identity amid the changing contexts of working-class life from the 1920s to the 1970s.
The central chapters of the book revolve around the shift from decaying and crowded central districts to new suburban council estates. Jones tracks the development of suburban estates in the interwar period and their transformation and expansion after World War II. The author outlines a complex dynamic of slum clearance, estate construction, and privatization (which began in Brighton in the 1950s). Jones highlights changing discourses surrounding the estates, particularly the stigmatization of estate residents that accompanied the transfer of populations from condemned slum districts into the suburban neighborhoods. Amid these material and discursive changes, residents reconstructed patterns of working-class sociability and developed narratives that fostered a powerful and persistent working-class identity.
Relocation to the new estates did bring significant material and cultural changes: more space, indoor plumbing, increased privacy, and a shortage of amenities such as pubs and shops. Accounts of these suburban streets, though, reveal significant continuities between life in the older, traditional working-class neighborhoods and on the new estates. Networks of mutual aid, as well as conflicts and rivalries, re-created well-established dynamics in working-class districts. Jones rejects scholarship that dismisses autobiographical accounts of community in working-class neighborhoods as vehicles for nostalgia. Instead, he argues that memories of working-class life on these estates forged meaningful working-class identities around the challenges facing these families and their responses. He describes the narratives as “radical reclamations of experience” (201) that rejected critical discourses around working-class culture and constructed positive working-class identities.
Jones also highlights patterns of working-class family life on the estates that resembled those in traditional working-class families. While suburbanization and declining fertility transformed some aspects of family life, households continued to depend on multiple earners, take in kin or lodgers, and stretch resources through a variety of means. Gender roles persisted, and women remained responsible for taking care of the household and making ends meet, even at the cost of their own self-denial. Though rising wages reduced the economic gap between working-class and middle-class families, Jones argues, significant material differences persisted between the classes, and new conditions “emphatically did not result in embourgeoisement” (157). In the face of middle-class criticism of working-class domestic life, Jones's sources forged narratives that countered the stigmatization of these families.
Jones takes into account the insights of the linguistic turn in shifting the focus of class analysis from the workplace and radical politics to narrative, memory, and discourse. Class identity developed both out of experiences of home and neighborhood (and workplace dynamics) and out of competing discourses of inclusion and exclusion. Residents of working-class neighborhoods embraced narratives of “ordinariness” to define themselves as respectably working class, in contrast to the wealthy and to paupers. Patterns of sociability nurtured narratives of belonging and “being known” in working-class communities. Men and women identified with these communities and defended themselves and their neighbors from external narratives that cast them as dirty, rough, and ignorant. They placed value on their working-class communities and cultures, “and set these against negative stigmatising representations of the working class” (67). Jones's understanding of the persistence of working-class identity in the middle decades of the twentieth century emphasizes these cultural foundations of class in discourse and narrative as well as in the experience of material conditions.
Though Jones discusses significant changes across the half century from the 1920s to the 1970s, he argues for continuity in working-class identity throughout the period. However, there is little sense here for how different generational cohorts thought about class and class identity. Men and women who grew up in the 1920s and the 1930s encountered narratives about class and respectability in different ways than did their children or grandchildren in the 1950s and the 1960s. Though most of Jones's interview subjects were born before 1930, his sources include some who were born after 1940, and a clearer delineation of generational patterns would help make his argument for continuity across this period more nuanced.
Jones locates the origins of class identification in experiences of home, neighborhood, and, to some extent, work and in the construction of narratives of belonging and respectability. Little attention is paid to leisure and its role in fostering working-class identity. Distinctive patterns of working-class taste in cinema and literature developed in the interwar period, and football provided a predominately working-class focus for male leisure and sociability. Hostile discourses around these and other forms of working-class leisure likely generated responses from men and women forging a positive working-class identity, but Jones only touches on leisure patterns briefly.
Even without a detailed examination of leisure and debates surrounding it, Jones presents an impressive example of how, shorn of determinist assumptions, class analysis continues to provide a valuable tool for historians. The author combines an understanding of the material circumstances of men and women's lives and how they experienced them with an immersion in the narratives and discourses through which these subjects constructed their identities. The result is a convincing argument that class remained central to the lives of English men and women in the middle decades of the twentieth century.
