class yet again

Still ploughing my way through The Uses of Literacy. A usual exercise in picking out what seems most relevant, but at the moment pp. 59-60 caught my eye. A balanced if a little romantic view of the history of violence in working class culture, and how by the 1950s it was a bygone age, to be replaced by a desire for self respect.
Were the 1950s that golden, that removed from the cut-throats and bare knuckled fighting of the Edwardian and Victorian eras? Again, usual comment here about contemporary concerns about the drunken violence of town centres being nothing new.

It's also worth listening to this stand up/documentary about growing up in the East End. Runs through similar themes as Hoggart and Hanley, but with an personally acute awareness of the lack of aspirations and poverty of the working classes compared with the facades of being bourgeois.

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