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Respectable: The Experience of Class Hardcover – 21 Apr 2016

by Lynsey Hanley (Author)
3.4 out of 5 stars 20 customer reviews
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Frequently Bought Together

  • Respectable: The Experience of Class
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  • Estates: An Intimate History
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  • The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life (Penguin Modern Classics)
Total price: £30.87
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Product details

  • Hardcover: 256 pages
  • Publisher: Allen Lane (21 April 2016)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1846142067
  • ISBN-13: 978-1846142062
  • Product Dimensions: 14.4 x 2.6 x 22.2 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 18,099 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Product Description

Review

Why is class still so central to the experience of living in Britain? It is an urgent question, evaded through a kind of collective shame, but Lynsey Hanley approaches it with wit and passion. Respectable is pithy and provoking, spiced with the personal but solidly grounded in a lifetime's experience of analysing the world around her. It is one of those valuable books that enables the reader to re-think her past and re-experience her own life. (Hilary Mantel)

Honest, brave and moving, Respectable opens up the emotional experience of navigating across class boundaries in an unequal world. (Kate Pickett, co-author of THE SPIRIT LEVEL)

Ambitious, impressive... There is fury contained within the pages and between the lines of Respectable... an intelligent and important book that deserves to be widely read. (Colin Grant Guardian)

Hanley vividly describes the "risky, lonely journey" she undertook from one class to another... She is tremendous at detailing her personal transition (Craig Brown Mail on Sunday)

About the Author

Lynsey Hanley was born in Birmingham and lives in Liverpool. She is the author of Estates: An Intimate History, and she is a regular contributor to the Guardian and the New Statesman.

Customer Reviews

Top Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 starsTo experience it is to know it.
By Annie on 31 May 2016
Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
I couldn't put this book down, I thought it was a fascinating structural analysis of British society written by someone with intelligence and self awareness and using her own experience to illustrate the case she makes for the continuing existence of a glass ceiling between working and middle class Britain.
Richard Hoggett's The Uses of Literacy is the intellectual backbone of the book but Hanley doesn't stop there and the thesis of her book is supported by a wide range of sources as indicated by the extensive notes at the end. The book is a clever and thoughtful examination of 'respectability' and the meaning of, and roots of, self respect through the changing social landscape of the late 20th century UK. The kind of family and environment you are born into sets up the circumstances of your life, even the kindliest, most supportive family may not be able to help you advance your social status significantly. A large measure of luck is involved, a good and free state school education, wise and supportive teachers along with personal insight and determination and bravery to make the leap from the community that one knows and that at least feels psychologically safe. This latter point is not to be underestimated.
The book is set within the context of the political changes of the 1980s and 1990s and traces the ways in which government policy and the world economy have changed the face of the labour market, especially the destruction and disappearance of traditional working class employment. We are said to be a socially mobile society now but as the author points out, we still live in a context of educational, cultural and social inequality.Read more ›
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3.0 out of 5 starsAimless but sometimes interesting
By Plastic Mars on 1 Jun. 2016
Format: Hardcover
I really wanted to like this book. On the positive side, it did have its moments and delivers the odd thought-provoking observation that makes it worth the read. I found particularly interesting Hanley's interpretation of what might cause working class kids to reject attempts to change their behaviour or step outside a narrowly defined comfort zone of existing cultural experience, because these are perceived as an attack upon the self. This makes for more constrained life choices even when choices do exist. I also liked Hanley's use of Hoggart as a spiritual backbone to the whole, although I would argue that her choice to focus most strongly on politico-cultural analysis and less on emotive experience makes it much less compelling than it might otherwise have been.

For me the trouble is that the book doesn't often succeed in getting anywhere by melding ruminations on cultural theory to Hanley's own (past) observed reality. It is all too evident that she is writing primarily to and for herself. As a work of theory, it is frequently woolly and even self-contradictory. She jumps between an indirectly articulated scaffold of intellectual influences to elliptical snippets of remembrances of adolescence, and neither is particularly satisfying or convincing, much of the time.

There is also the problem of her own atypicality, and not only in comparison to other members of the class she has left behind or the one she has joined. Unlike in Hoggart's time, finding a route to social mobility has become more personally specific, driven by the vagaries of geographically determined educational opportunity, as well as a much more fragmented and diverse sense of what it is to be working class in the first place.Read more ›
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4.0 out of 5 starsInteresting reflection on the barriers imposed by class
By markr TOP 500 REVIEWER on 23 April 2016
Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
This is an interesting reflection on social class in England, based on the author's own experience of her journey through education from a 'respectable working class' upbringing ( though surrounded by all sorts of other working class attitudes including casual, endemic racism) to 'established middle class' according to the recent BBC class survey.

The book makes clear some of the costs involved in social mobility, and the crises of confidence which have to be overcome when the individual is exposed to worlds which were not so much not understood as unknown.

Much of the book reflects on the barriers imposed by education, and the low expectations placed on so many people by their families, their teachers, the overall system, and indeed by themselves - as well as the opportunities education offers to those who want a different life from the one they were born into.

All in all a very readable interesting book for those interested in education, social policy, or in people in general. All it lacks for me are solutions; there is much here about the visible and invisible barriers to social mobility, but rather less about what to do about it. Maybe that will be the author's next book...
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4.0 out of 5 starsSurprisingly Relevant for US Readers
By J. Wilson on 7 Sept. 2016
Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
I'm an American with a longtime interest in class difference and "bottom up" history. Watched all the "7 Up" films, have read Raymond Williams, have, read, watched and taught John Berger's "Ways of Seeing." Nevertheless, Hanley's book was eye-opening. More than anything else I've read it explained to me the working class attitudes that permanently shaped my parents, African Americans for whom a combination of hard work, determination and sheer historical luck made possible an eventual ascent to upper middle class economic status. This book resolved for me the cognitive dissonance between their material fortunes and their worldviews/self-conceptions. At the same time, it goes a long way toward explaining contemporary U.S. phenomena like the ressentiment of "we don't need no experts" voters, although recognizing the parallels requires some familiarity with UK institutions and social policies.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 starsclass stinks.

vitally important .not for miles and rebecca,however.

Published 26 days ago by brianbotanic
4.0 out of 5 starsit was literacy and a love of books that got me out of the stifling...

I read this at a sitting and it was especially interesting to me as I am working on my own memoirs, of growing up in a working class family in the 1950s/60s. Read more

Published 28 days ago by Liz Hodgkinson
5.0 out of 5 starsExcellent book about social class with lots of good references

Excellent book about social class with lots of good references. Many thanks, DS

Published 2 months ago by donniejoe
4.0 out of 5 starsINTERESTING

Interesting book. I recommend it .

Published 2 months ago by Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 starsInteresting and insightful book

Interesting and insightful book. It has a socialist bias but I agree with the author's assertions in the main.

Published 3 months ago by annie doherty
3.0 out of 5 starsI'd like more of her own

It was gripping at first, when the author was talking about her own experiences. But half way through she starts giving the reader a lot (too much, in my case) research and... Read more

Published 3 months ago by Brussels customer
3.0 out of 5 starsWhat then must we do?

What does the writer want? I was left completely unsure. I understood and empathised with her description of the low expectations meted out to her school class by their teachers,... Read more

Published 3 months ago by D. M. Purkiss
1.0 out of 5 starsOne Star

I liked estates but she has gone OTT with this over analysis of class and language.

Published 4 months ago by Trevor Hopper
3.0 out of 5 starsWell written but not a favourite for me--probably because I come from...

Well written but not a favourite for me--probably because I come from an industrial working class background BUT didn't have same problems with the subtle shift I made . Read more

Published 5 months ago by peepo
4.0 out of 5 starsok Not a great

ok Not a great book

Published 5 months ago by G N BATTMAN

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