In her engaging and readable Lower-Middle-Class Nation: The White-Collar Worker in British Popular Culture, Nicola Bishop explores the place of the white-collar, lower-middle class in British popular culture from the later nineteenth century to the present day. Her principal sources are novels, especially those from the first half of the period, and television situation comedy from the 1970 on, along with some nonfiction and film. Her proposition is that “we have become a lower-middle-class nation—not only that we are a nation of office workers but because our dominant cultural identity is a ‘clerkly’ one” (26).

In her introduction, Bishop positions her work a little awkwardly within the wider historical literature on the lower middle class, claiming that white-collar workers might stand for the whole of a lower middle class that included shopkeepers, small manufacturers, and minor professionals. She then takes flight, however, and the reader enters the world in which Bishop has immersed herself and which she clearly enjoys: the representation of white-collar workers in novels and sitcoms. Successive chapters take the reader through the sites most classically associated with these employees and which, she argues, were once evocative of the clerk but have become “emblematic of . . . ‘everyday’ life” (23). She starts with a chapter on the office, depicted from the 1880s as a place of dreary uniformity, where often mindless and usually repetitive tasks diminish those who work there. The next site is called the desk but is really about how people work, feminization and mechanization, and the psychological consequences of bureaucratic processes. The passage of time is a recurrent theme, with the clock marking the day and redundancy and retirement the career. Bishop then leaves the confines of the workplace and, through a series of chapters on the commute, the suburbs, and the home, takes the reader to what might be called the wider world but, as represented through fiction and sitcoms, is a world trapped within its own narrowness.

Bishop knows that these representational continuities involve stereotyping, and she points to the ways that educational aspiration and creative leisure serve to undermine the assumption of mundane lives that dominate her sources, but those exceptions (most effectively in the chapter on the home) are mostly drawn from the same sources and do little to subvert the underlying sense of homogeneity. She does note that many of her writers came from lower-middle-class backgrounds, often starting their careers in white-collar work before escaping. A more lively heterogeneity of culture might have been made visible by looking elsewhere, for example the presence of young male and female clerical workers in the socialist Clarion cycling clubs from the 1890s, or their role in civic associations, amateur dramatics, and other social organizations from the 1950s. It is not Bishop's fault that they rarely appear in her sources, but it might have provided some triangulation on those sources had discordant voices such as these been allowed to speak.

The subtitle announces what the book is about: the place of the white-collar worker in popular culture. The attempt to fit the research and the argument into the title itself is less persuasive. The issue of “nation” is never addressed, though the construction and expression of national identity has a large research literature of its own. Even the territorial space is misleading. The book is about England, not Britain—Scotland gets just a couple of mentions while Wales is ignored (except for Gwen's little terrace house in Barry in Gavin and Stacey). And, despite a few references to Manchester, the book is about London. The literature is overwhelmingly about London, while the sitcoms are mostly implicitly, if not explicitly, so. Bishop knows this, but she does not draw out the implications for her claims about a lower-middle-class nation.

In each chapter, Bishop draws on historical studies of workplace, occupation, suburbs, and the like and relates them to the themes emerging from the popular cultural sources. In doing so, however, Bishop understates what is for me most important about the book. She occasionally acknowledges that it is representations of white-collar workers that she is studying, but if this is to be connected to the overall argument that Britain has become a lower-middle-class nation, then the reader needs a much stronger interrogation of how these striking continuities of representation were maintained. Cultural products such as fiction and sitcoms are distinctive sources that raise methodological questions that are not really considered. Bishop is struck by the continuity of tropes and conventions, but she does not foreground it as a key question for the book: How do we account for these continuities over 150 years or, within a single genre, 50 years of sitcoms? Novels and sitcoms are products, and we need to think about how they were commissioned and produced, and by whom, and the pressures that asked for originality—but only within very limiting constraints.

We also need to think about how these products are consumed. Audience studies have stopped us from assuming that what appears on a stage or screen is what the audience experiences, and reader response theory has stopped us from seeing texts (literary, but the same applies to performance) as objects to be analyzed on their own. That is especially the case if we are asked to fit the novels and sitcoms to the construction of a broader social or cultural identity. Did the same kind of people read Wells and Bennett as read Shan Bullock and Pett Ridge? And what about the polemical nonfiction of W. H. Crossland and C. F. G. Masterman? The fact that the sitcom Men Behaving Badly might have been intended as a critique of laddish culture—and was seen as such by many women—but also served as an affectionate validation of behaving badly is one of the few occasions when Bishop draws such ambiguities to the reader's attention. Audiences and reception needed sustained attention if Bishop's overall argument is to be sustained.

Bishop has written an engaging and enjoyable book from which I learned a good deal about the fascinating continuities in how the white-collar lower middle class has been represented in fiction and on screen. She may not have persuaded me that the result is a lower-middle-class nation, but that is no more than claimed through the book. It would have needed a different research project to define what that means and show how it came into being and was maintained.