Literary Review
Mobility issues
Underdogs: The Truth about Britain’s White Working Class
Joel Budd
(Picador, £20)
BOOKS about working-class British life have been a publishers’ staple for upwards of a century and a half. They tend to fall into three categories.
In the first category lie autobiographical – or quasi-autobiographical – accounts of poverty and privation such as Stephen Reynolds’ A Poor Man’s House (1909), or Kerry Hudson’s Lowborn (2019). Then there are the autobiographers who use their upbringing to illuminate vast areas of a submerged demographic – Richard Hoggart’s immortal The Uses of Literacy (1957), say, or Michael Collins’s The Likes of Us (2004). Limping in the rear come the sociological surveys, in which statistics win out over lived experience.