Glimpsing the title of Lynsey Hanley’s absorbing new book as it fell out of the jiffy bag, I found myself thinking of my grandmother, Mrs Lilian Taylor. This lady, who died in 1957, spent the first part of her married life inhabiting a couple of furnished rooms on the western side of Norwich and the second part of it living in a white stucco council house on the newly built Earlham estate. She was an intensely respectable woman, implacably opposed to strong drink and strong language, but of what, materially, did her respectability consist?
On the one hand it meant goading my father through the scholarship exam to a place at the local minor public school. On the other, it meant distancing herself from those of the neighbours who took to brawling in the street on Saturday nights and whom my grandfather was occasionally brought out to pacify. It included aspiring to rent a ‘double bay front’ — a comparatively rare kind of council house with twin bay windows. And, above all, it involved supporting the Conservative prime minister Stanley Baldwin’s slogan of ‘a fair day’s work for a fair day’s wage’.
A Marxist critic of the English social system would probably mark my grandmother down as a traitor to her class or, at best, a kind of hopelessly deluded member of that very common demographic, the working-class snob. It is to Lynsey Hanley’s credit that, like her inspiration Richard Hoggart, she defines the pursuit of ‘respectability’ not as one-upmanship by another name but as an absolutely vital means of keeping your head above water, preserving your dignity in a world where a sense of self, ambition and personal integrity might not survive the tallyman’s weekly call.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in