544114

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ECS0010.1177/1367549414544114European Journal of Cultural Studies X(X)Lawler

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Article

European Journal of Cultural Studies

2014, Vol. 17(6) 701­–720
Heroic workers and angry © The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/1367549414544114
of class in England ecs.sagepub.com

Stephanie Lawler
University of York, UK

Abstract
This article discusses nostalgic images of white working-class life through the twin
figures of ‘the heroic worker’ and ‘the angry young man’. Using a case study of
a discussion of Roy Williams’ play Vultures, I consider the ways in which nostalgic
figures are used to position a contemporary white working class as lacking value. I
argue that these nostalgic figures provide anchor points in decline narratives which,
I argue, have come to define the ways in which the English white working class
are represented. Hence, I argue that some forms of nostalgic class representations
may be one means through which continued disparagement of contemporary white
working-class people is rendered respectable.

Keywords
Benjamin, Bourdieu, nostalgia, social class, time

Nostalgia is akin to unrequited love, only we are not sure about the
identity of our lost beloved.

(Svetlana Boym, 2001: 174)

Introduction
Expressions of disgust, contempt and disapproval levelled at the English working class
have been widely discussed and documented.1 The forms they take are remarkably
similar: working-class people are characterized as lacking in the ‘right’ knowledges,

Corresponding author:
Stephanie Lawler, Department of Sociology, Wentworth College, University of York,
Heslington, York YO10 5DD, UK.
Email: steph.lawler@york.ac.uk
702 European Journal of Cultural Studies 17(6) 

tastes, values and dispositions. Moreover, this lack is cast as intrinsic to their persons:
‘culture’ becomes turned into (faulty) ‘nature’. In short, and although most working-
class people are poor relative to the middle classes, it is not their poverty that attracts
contempt, but their alleged ignorance of the ‘right ways of being and doing’ (Bourdieu,
1986: 511). Indeed, in some recent versions, this alleged ignorance is held to lead to
their poverty.2
An important element in this continued disparagement of the working class is the use
of a ‘decline’ narrative (Lawler, 2005) in which past generations of working-class people
are narrated as having more of the correct (usually progressive) dispositions, and hence
more value, than their contemporary counterparts. This article is my attempt to consider
the ways in which certain forms of classed nostalgia may work to legitimate characteri-
zations of contemporary working-class people in terms of lack. Through the use of a case
study, I will consider how working-class existence may be represented through a com-
plex narrative in which value is located in past generations of working-class people,
while being conceptually stripped from their counterparts in the present. I also want to
think about how masculinity may work to carry value within these nostalgic narratives
– and concomitantly, how value is removed from working-class femininities. In this
context, the article engages with recent important work on nostalgia that considers nos-
talgia’s twin potentials: for both a reactionary recuperation of, and a radical re-working
of, the past. However, ultimately, I emphasize some of the ways in which nostalgia may
work, not as a critique, but as a justification of the present. This is not because of any-
thing intrinsic to nostalgia (and indeed I would argue that nostalgia is an open-ended
phenomenon) but because in the type of case I discuss here – in which middle-class
people evaluate working-class lives – this is the form that classed nostalgia takes. I
should emphasize that I am not claiming that working-class people automatically have
some unsullied, more accurate view of the past. However, I do want to claim that work-
ing-class history has always been evaluated by outsiders, and according to the political
persuasions of those outsiders (Todd, 2014).
In this respect, I want to attempt to temper some of the more celebratory accounts of
nostalgia (see, for example, Bonnett, 2010; Eagleton, 2009) by suggesting that, while
nostalgia is not necessarily bad, it is dangerous.3 In all of this, I consider the questions
that Wendy Brown casts as, ‘What is “history’s” bearing on the present?’ And, ‘How do
… histories constrain, produce, or occupy the present?’ (Brown, 2001: 140, 141). I do
this, not through tracing the historical effects of the past, but through looking at the ways
in which the past may be mobilized as a critique of the present.

Nostalgic narratives
When the progress narratives of modernity have been shown to be bankrupt, what is left?
When political commentators and politicians of all stripes cast the past as something to
be forgotten, what is being erased, and what kind of world is heralded? Recent attention
to memory, memorializing and loss, speaks to certain anxieties around these matters. For
some authors, a rehabilitation of nostalgia provides a conceptual and political alternative
to the brutalism of a present that would wipe out the past (see, for example, Bonnett,
2010; Eagleton, 2009, 2011; Pickering and Keightley, 2006, 2012). These writers argue
Lawler 703

that, in the face of modernity’s relentless supersession, nostalgia can stand as an acknowl-
edgement of the loss that is an inevitable accompaniment to change.
It seems incontrovertible that modernity’s progress narratives, with their repression of
loss and grief, exact a high price, both personally and politically. Yet, is it really the case,
as Eagleton claims, that ‘nostalgia is now nearly as taboo as racism’? (Eagleton, 2009).
Certainly, Eagleton (2009) is right to note that ‘Our politicians speak of drawing a line
under the past and turning our back on ancient quarrels’. Certainly, too, it would be
politically controversial for anyone, at least on the Left, to express nostalgia for a time
when women were confined to the kitchen or when nations like Britain could more easily
be cast as Christian and white. Yet, the contemporary English landscape (both conceptual
and physical) is littered with evocations of its industrial past, often shot through with
nostalgia for its ‘heroic workers’ (Dicks, 1999; Goulding, 2001; Stephenson and Wray,
2005; Strangleman, 2004, 2007). And narratives about working-class people, from both
Left and Right, frequently involve the past’s reappearance as a positive counterpoint to
the present. Perhaps here we need to note modernity’s paradoxical character (Chaney,
2002; Pickering and Keightley, 2006): for all its discarding of the past, ‘mementoes and
survivals mark a widespread concern for, and treasuring of, the past’ (Chaney, 2002: 52).
Nostalgia is one form this treasuring of the past can take. Originally a medical diag-
nosis referring to a longing for place, nostalgia is now our longing for a lost time: but
unlike places which continue to exist even when we are gone from them, lost time is
gone, and can only be made present through a re-imagining, a re-working of the past in
which the present, too, becomes altered. This is why Boym argues,

Nostalgic reconstructions are based on mimicry; the past is remade in the image of the present
or of a desired future, collective designs are made to resemble personal aspirations and vice
versa. … Nostalgia, like irony, is not a property of the object itself but a result of an interaction
between subjects and objects, between actual landscapes and landscapes of the mind. (Svetlana
Boym, 2001: 354)

I am concerned here neither to defend nor to decry nostalgia as such, but to think about
who and what are its figures, how they are used and what all this might tell us about
imaginings of time, progress and value. For Boym, nostalgia is Janus-faced: ‘Nostalgia
can be both a social disease and a creative emotion, a poison and a cure’ (Boym, 2001:
354). It is important to note that nostalgic articulations of the past can be used to claim
value for working-class existence in the now (Loveday, 2011; Todd, 2014). However,
they can also, in attributing value only to the workers of the past, render their present
counterparts value-less (for examples, see Hudson, 1994; Orr, 2003; O’Hagan, 2009).
Indeed, nostalgia, as well as subverting modernity’s progress narratives, may work to
entrench them. As Keith Tester argues, ‘[N]ostalgia also … operates as a hermeneutic
justification of modernity. Nostalgia posits a past which is comforting precisely because
it is, and can be, no more’ (Tester, 1993: 65).
When it happens that groups of people become personae in a narrative in which value
can only be ascribed to their ancestors, when they are characterized through a lack of
value, then they are not recognized as competent, valued social actors. In these cases,
narratives of progress – claimed as their own by the middle classes – are not undermined,
704 European Journal of Cultural Studies 17(6) 

but entrenched, when working-class existence is characterized by decline and retrogres-

sion, while middle-class existence silently occupies a ‘progressive’ position. As such,
who will listen to the demands of working-class people when they have been marked in
this way – demands for equality, freedom, for a sense of their own worth, a stake in the
world? This, I would suggest, is the position in which working-class people in England
find themselves at the present time.
I will turn now to the case study I am using as a focus for the discussion. I use this
case study, not to generalize from it but use it as an indicative study to show how cer-
tain themes of time and of progress work to strip value from contemporary working-
class life.

‘Don’t pick at us like a pack of vultures’

In November 2010, as part of its ‘Free Thinking’ festival, BBC Radio 3 recorded Roy
Williams’ play, Vultures, in front of a live audience at the Baltic Gallery, Gateshead. The
play centres on a dispute between Sean Bishop, a white working-class man, and Yvette
Mullins, a successful black author (the play is set in a theatre, where she is reading from
her work). Sean and Yvette had, in their youth, been friends and lovers: their paths had
diverged because Yvette ‘got out’, and Sean did not. The book from which she is reading
is an autobiographical account of her working-class youth, tellingly entitled, Fuck the
White Working Class. The recording was followed by a discussion of the play by Matthew
Sweet, Rebecca Jenkins, Katrina Porteous, Jonathan Sawday and Frank Cottrell Boyce.4
While the focus of my analysis is on the post-play discussion, I briefly outline the play
here so as to provide the context for the discussion.5 It is important to note that Vultures
was performed as a radio play, so its performative elements are largely limited to speech.
The play represents white working-class anger in the face of liberal, middle-class
disparagement. The character of Sean demands recognition of his own and his class’
value as he counters common assumptions – assumptions that they are ignorant, they
are stupid, they are universally and unfailingly racist. It is an ambiguous piece: Sean is
violent – he has a gun; we learn he once hit Yvette; there is a discussion of the racism
suffered by Yvette and tolerated by Sean; and Sean, for all his praise of working-class
life, expresses sadness at Yvette’s failure to ask him to accompany her on her ‘escape’.
In all this, Sean bears stereotypical markers attached to white working-class masculin-
ity. Yet, the play is also an explicitly didactic one that challenges easy characterizations
of the white working class as ignorant, feckless, tasteless, their way of life as the degree
zero of culture. Sean instructs the audience that all may not be what it appears when it
comes to working-class existence: that it may exceed and evade middle-class defini-
tions of it as lack. The following lines, seemingly deliberately set up to jar, indicate the
character’s ownership of legitimated cultural capital:

Sean:  Now, is it me, Helen [audience member], or is [Mozart’s] violin concerto

number 3 simply the finest piece of music ever written? [pause] You look
surprised Helen.
Yvette: 
she’s scared to death
Sean: No, she didn’t expect me to know that.
Lawler 705

And in the following passage, Sean neatly challenges a view of value as defined by occu-
pation, and refuses definitions of the working classes as lacking and ignorant:

Sean: 
You know ladies and gents, there are people out there who don’t mind having
the shit end of the stick, the crappy job, the minimum wage. They don’t mind,
because that is not all they are. My dad read a book every day of his life. My
mum loved classical music. I love classical music. Fat Shelley from [Yvette’s]
book – Cassie Davies – she can speak two languages. Don’t make us ashamed,
don’t make us feel lower than we already are, don’t pick at us like a pack of
vultures.

The staging of the play itself can be seen as an indication of the significance of the cat-
egory ‘white working class’ in the English national imaginary at the present time. Class
has moved in and out of public discussion in England for several decades, but has main-
tained a presence in the English public imagination even when it is denied.6 The recent
addition of ‘white’ in public discourse is not a simple act of description: indeed ‘white’
never functions as a simple act of description. ‘Whiteness’ in this context is better seen
as a resource through which value can be conferred or denied: it is not an essential attrib-
ute but is mobilized within specific social, political and historical contexts (Bonnett,
2000; Dyer, 1997; Hage, 1998).7 Historically, the English white working-class, along
with other groups such as Irish immigrants, were not considered properly ‘white’ at all.
Today, however, it is in the context of this group that whiteness has come to be seen as
newly problematic. In large part, as Chris Haylett (2001) has argued, this whitening
stems from renewed cultural anxieties about ‘Englishness’ (especially in the context of
regional devolution), about multiculturalism and about modernity and progress. In some
contexts it is also a means of hyper-whitening the working class so that they are seen as
emblematically white, owning a problematic whiteness, understood as retrogressive and
un-modern, thus enabling continuing disparagement from Left-Liberal observers and
conceptually stripping white privilege from the white middle classes (Hunter, 2010;
Lawler, 2012). The inclusion of ‘white’ also enables an easier expression of disparage-
ment, for those on the Left, apparently avoiding as it does the stain of racism (Reay et al.,
2007) attached to expressions of opprobrium.
So, Sean’s story comes hard on the heels of a wider set of cultural representations
about white working-class people, either defending or (more frequently) decrying this
group. Yet, the play is distinctive in its explicit refusal of the attribution of worthlessness.
It can be seen as an attempt to deal with some of the complexities and anxieties surround-
ing representations of the white working class. However, I will concentrate, in the rest of
the article, on the post-play discussion, since it seems to me to offer some intriguing
insights into what happens – what the response is – when the contemporary white work-
ing class is represented ‘against the grain’, as they are in Vultures. The discussion is
important because it crystallizes so many of the tropes by which contemporary white
working-class people are ‘known’. Within the play, they are characterized as valuable, as
owners of cultural capital, as having valued attributes such as loyalty. The character of
Sean, like that of the participants in Skeggs and Loveday’s (2012) article, claims value in
working-class life, attempting to publicly legitimate it in the face of alternative,
706 European Journal of Cultural Studies 17(6) 

dismissive, readings. In this way, the character is made to ‘break frame’ (Goffman, 1974).
One effect is that his story seems to become literally incoherent to the panellists: with the
possible exception of Katrina Porteous, they seem unable to make sense of it. Within the
discussion, the value claimed by Sean has been stripped away and is found only in a his-
tory peopled with characters more compatible with doxic narratives of working-class
life: narratives of decline in which working-class people are characterized as having
fallen from grace.

Heroic workers and angry young men

Both the Free Thinking festival and the BBC’s Radio 3 cater to ‘minority’ tastes and
neither could be said to attract a mass audience. It would be tempting, therefore, to dis-
miss their framing of class as sui generis, were it not for the fact that the post-play discus-
sion chimes with so many other narratives of class in the social imaginary, some of which
I have outlined above. Hence, I am using the discussion as illustrative of far wider
themes. I see it as a condensation of broader public anxieties around class in England at
the present time. In particular, the discussion mobilizes a narrative of decline (in the
value of working-class people) that has long been in circulation.
One thing that is striking is the way in which the discussion systematically refuses the
premises of the play itself, which centre on the inadequacy of representations of the
white working-class as worthless, stupid and backward (reflecting, the play suggests,
bourgeois fantasies rather than the actuality of working-class life). The subsequent dis-
cussion did not pick up on the theme of value at all, except for one early intervention
which took the form of a refusal:

Rebecca Johnson: 
I think the only thing I was a little uncertain about was that in the
play concern is expressed about people categorizing him. In fact
as he expresses with great force, he is quite a cultured person
who listens to all this lovely music and all the rest of it. And that
is where I sort of parted company, ’cause I felt in a way that the
kinds of expressions of anger and frustration he was expressing
didn’t actually match with that.

Johnson locates Sean’s anger and frustration within him: they become a property of his
person, rather than a response to having the ‘shit end of the stick’, and being picked at
‘like a pack of vultures’. As such, his anger and frustration are deemed to be incompati-
ble with the ‘culture’, which is also generally glossed as naturally belonging within the
person (Bourdieu, 1993). The refusal of the terms of the play continues through the rest
of the discussion, which centres entirely on a narrative of classed decline, and in which
Sean’s character is considered only in terms of his ‘difference’ from a past time. This is
most starkly marked in the following early exchange:

Matthew Sweet: 
I suppose that the last time that the working-class white man
as a character really came in to focus was in the industrial
age, in the late 50s, the early 60s, like Arthur Seaton from
Lawler 707

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. He was a very differ-

ent kind of man to the figures who’ve emerged more
recently.
Frank Cottrell Boyce: 
yeah, I was in the cathedral in Newcastle this morning and
there’s an amazing, beautiful stained glass window as a trib-
ute to shipyard workers, and it’s like this line of incredibly
dignified men with their flat caps and their trousers tied
together and their snap bags, walking in a column – fantas-
tic solidarity and uniformity, and dignity …

‘The industrial age’ is seen here as giving rise to two sets of figures. One is summed
up as ‘Arthur Seaton’ – the hero of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, one of the
British ‘new wave’ novels and plays (later films) of the 1950s and 1960s that gave rise to
the so-called ‘angry young men’: the other is represented through the dignified shipyard
workers – the familiar image of the heroic worker, in whom the very meaning of ‘the
working class’ has become condensed.
These two sets of figures – the ‘angry young man’ and the ‘heroic worker’ – work
throughout the rest of the discussion to form contrasts with characters like that of Sean.
I want to consider these two sets of figures – and their contrast with the contemporary
white working class – as a way to consider how class is done through invoking progress
and value. Both sets of representations are historically distant, and both also invoke spe-
cifically classed landscapes. So the valued working-class figures are fixed in a past time
and either stay in place (the heroic workers) or move out of their place (the angry young
man). In these ways, the panellists’ discussion carries and crystallizes political and moral
evaluations of the contemporary white working class. Although the discussion is osten-
sibly sympathetic towards the group in question (‘the white working class’) and although
some at least of the discussants are situated on the political Left,8 contemporary working-
class people are afforded no value, no dignity and little recognition.

Fixed in time
Nearly all the discussion centres on a contrast between ‘then’ and ‘now’, in which the
working class of the ‘now’ exists as a negative image of the ‘then’. This historical pair-
ing is interesting, for a number of reasons: first, it locates the contemporary white work-
ing class within the nostalgic narrative of decline I mentioned earlier and that itself has
a long history; second, and related to this, it preserves the notion of a ‘good working-
class’ (located at historical distance) while denigrating contemporary working-class
people; and third, it uses the past as a conceptual device. It locates the white working
class as only having value through progressiveness in a past time. Time is mobilized as
a way to strip value from the working class in the present, while phantasmically retain-
ing it in the past.
The window referred to by Cottrell Boyce is the Tyneside industrial heritage window
in Newcastle’s Cathedral Church of St Mary. Designed by Joseph Nuttgens, it is a trip-
tych that depicts a miner, a welder, a lathe worker, a ceramics painter and shipyard work-
ers, as well as inventors from the north-east of England. The central pane shows the
708 European Journal of Cultural Studies 17(6) 

procession of working men described by Cottrell Boyce; they are men leaving the ship-
yards at the end of the shift, the frame of a ship literally hanging over them within the
image.9
The figures are familiar, apparently embodying the nobility and value of male manual
labour. The periodization is ambiguous, but the clothing suggests a time between the
1920s and 1950s. We see here the metonymic linking of ‘working-class’ with male man-
ual labour, together with the heroization of this labour. It is worth considering this image
and its articulations. George Orwell in 1937 noted the ‘fetishistic identification of man-
ual labour with working-class experience’ (Orwell, 1937, quoted in Roberts, 1998: 66).
The figure of the ‘heroic worker’, charged with bringing about the revolution and valued
for his role in production, has been an important motif in Left representations.
Romanticized as ‘the hope for the future’ by the British New Left of the late 1950s
(Raphael Samuel, quoted in Brooke, 2001), he has now become, in some settings, a nos-
talgic articulation of a (better) past (p.789).
Yet, this figure never stood for the totality of working-class experience. Even during
the golden age of industrialization, most workers did not engage in heavy industry, and
as several feminist class theorists have pointed out, there is little that has ever been seen
as ‘heroic’ in the kinds of work carried out by working-class women (Skeggs, 1997;
Steedman, 1986). Furthermore, and as Carolyn Steedman (1986) has pointed out, despite
the Marxist emphasis on the proletarian as a male industrial labourer, the majority of
working people even at the time Marx was writing were domestic servants.10
Cottrell Boyce may be expressing nostalgia in his praising reference to the Tyneside
Heritage window: but the window is itself a work of nostalgia, representing a time at least
60 years earlier than its production. It was unveiled and blessed in 2006, when the kinds
of industry depicted had all but gone from the region. The heroic worker, dignified and
showing solidarity and uniformity, is a figure produced at a safe distance both from the
flesh and blood people who did such work, and from his contemporary counterparts.
Nevertheless, the counterposition of these ‘heroic workers’ with the ‘very different’
figure of Sean speaks into a widespread ‘decline’ narrative in which the working class is
repeatedly represented as having fallen from grace. Hence, nostalgic figures of the past
haunt the contemporary classed landscape. These decline narratives are documented in,
for example, Strangleman (2004) and Lawler (2005). Strangleman (2004) quotes the
Guardian journalist, Jonathan Glancey in his 1999 piece on rail workers. Here Glancey
is comparing contemporary workers with past generations of train drivers:

Such men were like champion jockeys in charge of mechanical racehorses looked up to by
even the most expensively educated British schoolboy … More importantly, they were well-
read, dedicated union men who learned their craft, as well as the ideas of Ruskin, Morris and
Marx, in evening classes and oily depots. They were truly the aristocracy of labour. Not today.
Those working for the privatised transport companies run by former supermarket managers
and second-hand car salesmen have become little more than the ‘lump’. (Glancey, cited in
Strangleman, 2004: 167)

The sentimentality of this piece, together with the fetishizing of dirt, and the counterposi-
tion of a heroic masculinity with relatively ‘feminized’ jobs, is striking. A valued and
valuable – and abstract – ‘working class’ in the past is used as a means to legitimate a
Lawler 709

devaluing of what they were seen to have become. If working-class people are found
wanting by middle-class observers, narratives like this suggest, that is because the work-
ing classes themselves are just not as good as they used to be. Part of this devaluation lies
in a heightened association of the feminine with the contemporary working class. We are
now more likely to see the poor and the dispossessed characterized as poor teenage
mothers than as progressive labour aristocrats. There are numerous problems with this,
not least that there is scant evidence that there was ever any widespread admiration of
actual embodied working-class people on the part of the middle classes. Indeed, work-
ing-class life has always been characterized by unflattering comparisons with a past
‘golden age’ (Bonnett, 2010; Strangleman, 2007; Williams, 1973). Working-class people
are continually represented as having fallen from grace. I want to suggest that such nar-
ratives have little to do with working-class people themselves, but betray hopes, fanta-
sies and anxieties on the part of middle-class observers, especially those on the political
Left – who have, as Valerie Walkerdine (1997) notes, rarely found ‘The Working Class’
they are looking for.

Fixed in place
The second contrastive pair is between figures like Sean and those of the ‘angry young
men’ made famous in British novels, plays, and in British new wave cinema of the 1950s
and 1960s:11

Matthew Sweet:  o what’s the difference then between those figures from,
S
from that period – the Arthur Seatons, Billy Liar, the heroes
of the work of Alan Plater –
Frank Cottrell Boyce: 
Well they were very aspirational. Their stories all end with
getting on the train to London – or not getting on the train
to London, but a decision about whether to go forward or
not.
Jonathan Sawday:  And their stories, they’re also stories about living in an age
where affluence is becoming a possibility, where there is a
sense of, y’know, I’m in on it, or I’m not in on it. … The
idea of getting on the train, the going down to a better life,
which is just there on the horizon.

In fact, neither Arthur Seaton nor Billy Liar got on a train. Seaton, hero of Saturday Night
and Sunday Morning, stays in the same town, and by the end of the book (later a film) is
tied ever more closely to it by imminent marriage and fatherhood. The ‘decision about
whether to go forward or not’ is represented as out of his hands. Billy Liar fails to join his
girlfriend on the train to London and returns to his parents’ house. Yet, my concern here is
not with whether the discussants have got the characters (and their ilk) right, but with the
discursive work done by the invocation of such representations. I suggest that there are
two kinds of work being done here: first, the invocation provides a critique of a contem-
porary world in which the claimed ‘aspiration’ of the early 1960s has gone; and second,
through the motif of ‘getting on the train’, notions of ‘escape’ are invoked: leaving the
710 European Journal of Cultural Studies 17(6) 

place, leaving the class. Here, the metonymic linking between ‘working-class’ and male
manual labour remains, but the emphasis shifts in important ways. If the heroic workers
are admired for their dignity and collectivity, the angry young men are admired for their
desire to escape. While the heroic worker stays in place (in the shipyards, in the mines),
the angry young men leave their place, though in fact they mostly do not, in the texts. It is
left to Katrina Porteous, the one dissenting voice throughout, to challenge the emphasis on
‘getting out’:

Katrina Porteous:  But why should one have to leave in order to have a better
life? I mean that’s really the point, and that’s why people
feel disaffected. I mean why should Billy Elliott have to go
to London to make his fortune? Why can’t he stay in the
north east? Why can’t he stay here on the banks of the Tyne
where his – you know – his father was a pitman or his father
was a shipyard worker or whatever it is? Why should he
have to leave?
[…]
Frank Cottrell Boyce: [coming back to KP’s question] I think – I come across a lot
of children in schools that I go to, who don’t want to go,
who’ve got no aspiration to get on the train, because they’ve
got no aspiration of any kind whatsoever. And I see kids in
little market towns or in suburbs of big cities who never
leave their suburb. I don’t mean they don’t leave their town,
I mean they don’t leave their patch.
Jonathan Sawday: That’s curious –
Frank Cottrell Boyce: That’s a really really common thing now. And I mean in an
age of globalization, you can go to Bootle and meet kids
who never leave Bootle.12
[…]
Jonathan Sawday:  yeah, but that also means there’s a kind of straitening of the
imagination in some sense – the feeling that there might be
horizons that you could move towards, that you could jour-
ney towards.

This ‘straitening of the imagination’ is ascribed to generic ‘children’ or ‘kids’ but given
the context and the framing of the discussion, it seems clear that the reference is to
working-class young people. Instead of replying to Porteous’ question (why should peo-
ple have to leave?), Cottrell Boyce highlights a ‘lack of aspiration’ which means, he
believes, that people don’t want to leave (implying that they should). The contrast here is
between working-class people in the past – with aspiration – who did leave, and their
contemporary equivalents – with no aspiration – who stay fixed, away from the global
flows that characterize progress. The past here is described in terms of spatial mobility,
onto which is implicitly mapped social mobility, implicitly leaving those who do not
manage social mobility as being at fault: class inequality can be turned into individual
lack of aspiration. As Skeggs (2004) has argued, spatial fixity has come to signify a lack
Lawler 711

of class value through unmodernity. ‘Progress’ – claimed as its own by an emergent 19th-
century middle class and still represented as a middle-class property (Gunn, 2005) – is
marked through mobility, and in this discussion the contemporary working class is
marked as both less aspirational and less progressive than their forebears. In a sense, the
progress narrative of modernity has been disrupted – but only for some people – the
white working class who, it is suggested, were somehow better in the past, part of this
being ‘better’ articulated through their alleged willingness to move through social and
geographical space.
Yet, like the ‘noble worker’, the angry young man can hardly sum up the totality of
working-class experience, even in his own time. When these figures come to stand for a
positive evaluation of working-class existence, all of those others who might populate
the scene become obliterated.

Where are the women? And what are they doing?

It will be clear that these nostalgic imaginings cast the working class of the past, as
embedded within the discussion so far, as if they were all male. Yet, women do come into
the discussion, albeit briefly, when Frank Cottrell Boyce talks about Coronation Street, a
British soap opera, set in the north-west of England and first aired 50 years ago (and on
which Cottrell Boyce used to be a writer):

Frank Cottrell Boyce: and the other thing we’re talking about apart from class is
masculinity. And Coronation Street was always incredibly
matriarchal … the men characters were always weak … and
it was the women who got things done.
Rebecca Johnson: How d’you know that’s not the reality?
Frank Cottrell Boyce: well it was

So when women do appear on the scene, it as the competent, Northern English matriarch,
characterized (and later ironicized) as ‘our Mam’. We see little that is either heroic or
angry in this figure. Indeed the figure of ‘our Mam’, according to Stephen Brooke,
became, in the 1950s, the pivotal figure for a nostalgia-laden ‘elegy to an older class
identity’ (Brooke, 2001: 775).
For Brooke, the 1950s saw a mounting uncertainty about the meanings of British
working-class life. The emerging welfare state meant unprecedented levels of (relative)
financial security for working-class people; the economy was robust, and gender roles
were changing. The old tropes of male breadwinner and female home-maker no longer
quite held. Brooke shows how male writers during this period tended to sanctify the
asexual figure of the working-class mother, while casting women who were younger,
more overtly sexual or interested in consumption in horrified terms. Brooke (2001)
argues,

At a moment when such [gender] stereotypes might have had less resonance in lived experience,
nostalgia for traditional, more certain and more fixed stereotypes of femininity (such as the
working class mother) became more intense. Such nostalgia not only evoked the loss of
712 European Journal of Cultural Studies 17(6) 

particular gender identities, but also represented an elegy to an older class identity, the
foundation of which comprised established ideas of masculine and feminine roles. (p.775)

As Walkerdine and Lucey (1989) have pointed out, post-war representations of class fre-
quently centred on either a praising or a blaming of women. The asexual figure of ‘our
Mam’ could be seen to embody all that was good about a working class that was believed
to be disappearing. Against ‘our Mam’, women who were concerned with consumption,
and women who were coded as sexual, could be positioned as responsible for this disap-
pearance. Aggressive or contemptuous masculinity becomes mobilized as a means of rail-
ing against a perception of a disappointing feminization. We can see this in the figures of
the ‘angry young men’ themselves, but also in the pronouncements of commentators like
Hoggart, who characterizes young women (definitely not ‘our Mam’) as ‘flighty, careless
and inane – [e]verything they choose to do seems urban and trivial’ (Hoggart, 1957: 45,
46). As Brooke (2001) notes, Hoggart makes teenage girls ‘ciphers for the rootlessness and
cheapness of the age of affluence’ (p.788) just as, earlier, John Sommerfield (1984 [1936]),
in his utopian novel, May Day has the narrator decrying the female factory workers as

These silly girls with their synthetic Hollywood dreams, their pathetic silk stockings and
lipsticks, their foolish strivings to escape the cramped monotony of their lives. (Sommerfield,
1984 [1936]: 30)

Their strivings are depicted as foolish, not because Sommerfield believes the conditions
of their lives to be either desirable or inevitable, but because the ‘pathetic silk stockings’
represent a distraction from the real business of social change. These women are failing
to realize their revolutionary purpose. There are complex associations being made
between femininity, consumption, sexuality and the decline of all that was seen to be
good about working-class life. Anxieties about increasing affluence were, and are, anxi-
eties about a decline in an ‘authentic’ working-class existence. It is as if the working
class, to be valuable, must remain, in Rita Felski’s words, ‘poor but pure, untainted by
consumer culture and social aspirations’ (Felski, 2000: 44). In this, women themselves
are made to carry the blame for the perceived rot that set in. So not only Hoggart, but
writers like Jeremy Seabrook (1978, 1982) and Dennis and Erdos (1993) later start to
cast working-class women as feckless, as bad mothers, as bearers of all the stigmatized
markers of working-class life – in all of this assisted by consumer culture and a welfare
state that (it is claimed) gives them a new independence.
So my point here is that these nostalgic reclamations of a lost, paradisiacal time,
involve narratives not only of class but of gender, as men’s heroism, or their authentic
anger, is built on this refusal of the feminine.13 If the figure of the noble worker relied on
the self-sacrificing maternal figure, working tirelessly and uncomplainingly (as in
Hoggart), the figure of the angry young man is often railing against working-class (and
sometimes middle-class) femininity cast as horrific: as itself undermining an authentic
working-class culture. Within the ‘new wave’ texts, while there are a few positive explo-
rations of women’s lives,14 women are more usually coded in terms of links with inau-
thentic consumption, and older men drawn into the (feminine) home or emasculated
through consumption (Lay, 2002).
Lawler 713

Once the English working class achieved some level of post-war affluence, then, they
became disappointing to the middle class for their participation in a ‘new consumerist
world’ (Richards, 1992), linked with femininity, rather than masculinity (p.177). Paid
labour is erroneously linked with masculinity, and consumption with femininity. Then as
now, it is as if the working class, to have any value, must be all (male, industrial) produc-
tion and no consumption. ‘The Working Class’ have long existed as the crystallization of
sets of fantasies. For commentators on the political Right, they represent disorder and
threat, and, as Valerie Walkerdine (1997) has pointed out, these fantasies, for commenta-
tors on the political Left, have been about a historic mission to bring about social change,
and in this they have become cast as a disappointment. The middle-class Left has required
working-class people to bring about change – that has been their place in the scheme of
things, and dreams of silk stockings can only work to impede this change. But they have
also been required (for example, in the early documentary movement) to exhibit signs of
authenticity and elemental simplicity.
Working-class women keep troubling this image, represented as they are in terms of
a concern with consumption, with the domestic and with the everyday. Indeed, working-
class women represent a problem for a working class that has to be either heroic or
angrily rebellious if it is to have any value. As both Mike Featherstone (1992) and Rita
Felski (1999) have argued, heroism is conventionally conceptually opposed to the femi-
nine. Featherstone writes, ‘The heroic life is the sphere of danger, violence, and the
courting of risk, whereas everyday life is the sphere of women, reproduction and care’
(Featherstone, 1992: 165), while for Felski (1999), ‘women become the primary emblem
of an inauthentic everyday life marked by the empty homogeneous time of mass con-
sumption’ (p.17).
If the (desirable) working class is understood as emblematically white, male and
working in heavy industry, it is no wonder that contemporary members of the working
class are found wanting: they remain the working-class rabble, unable to become The
Working Class changers of the world. If, alternatively, the desirable working class are
those who show aspiration and ‘get on a train’ (leaving, presumably the class behind),
then their contemporary counterparts who stay where they are can equally be blamed.
The feminine has long been the repressed other of both the heroic male worker and the
angry young man. Now that both are seen to be gone, the space is filled by a return of this
repressed, with working-class women and men linked with consumption15 and the white
working class emblematically represented through feminine and feminized characters: a
move from the heroic worker to the teenage mother.

Left melancholy and ghostly presences

To write stories concerning exclusions and invisibilities is to write ghost stories. (Gordon,
2008: 17)

Vultures presents a counter-narrative of working-class existence: one that re-writes the

common history of working-class people as being forever in decline, politically, morally
and intellectually. Sean disrupts the familiar link between low status work and a lack of
714 European Journal of Cultural Studies 17(6) 

cultural capital and in so doing claims value. Importantly, he also draws attention to class
inequality and to the ways in which working-class people are examined, ‘picked over’
and blamed. But, as I have noted, this claim is met, first with refusal, then with a dis-
placement of the character of Sean with other forms that are fictional16 (the angry young
man) or metonymically representational (the heroic worker).
There is absolutely no space within these motifs for a discussion of class as a relation-
ship, of the privileges of the middle class, or of the pernicious effects of a class system.
There is only the quiet heroism of a worker rendered aesthetically pleasing, and the
individualized rebellion – against an older generation, against women – of an angry
young man. The privileges of class-privileged groups are magically disappeared.
Avery Gordon (2008) argues that the reality of unjust and oppressive systems resists
attempts at (social) repression and is animated within everyday life by processes she
characterizes as ‘haunting’. Within such hauntings, ghostly presences become manifest:

Haunting raises specters, and it alters the experience of being in time, the way we separate the
past, the present, and the future. These specters or ghosts appear when the trouble they represent
and symptomize is no longer being contained or repressed or blocked from view. … Haunting
… is one way … we are notified that what’s been concealed is very much alive and present,
interfering precisely with those always incomplete forms of containment and repression
ceaselessly directed towards us. (Gordon, 2008: xvi)

We might ask, then, who are the ghosts here? The ghostly presences emerging in this
discussion (as elsewhere) are not heroic workers and angry young men. These figures do
not trouble the conventional narratives of decline and worthlessness attached to working-
class life. Rather, I want to suggest that it is those working-class people who cannot be
condensed into the figures of noble workers or angry young men – people who exist in
the representational form of Sean – who are the ghosts. These ordinary people were and
are no doubt disappointing to middle-class observers for their failure to represent the
looked-for solidarity, dignity or the drive to escape, or the progressiveness, or the respect-
ability, that working-class people have been required to exhibit. In newly (class) politi-
cized times, when a middle-class commentariat ‘notices’ the white working class, the
‘incomplete forms of containment and repression’ emerge in the figure of Sean. The play,
then, can be seen as a scene for haunting. Yet, the discussion dismisses the ghosts, recog-
nizing them only for what they are not.
Here I want to return to the question Brown poses, and that is embedded in Walter
Benjamin’s work: ‘what is the bearing of history on the present?’ and to suggest that
there are other ways of forging a relationship with the past, ways of not going along with
myths of transcendent, historical progress, ways of departing from the past without for-
getting the past. To consider this, I want to consider Walter Benjamin’s delineation of
different ways of memorializing.
Benjamin’s concern lies in attending to, and maintaining a relationship with, the past,
an ongoing relationship with what has been lost that does not stay with what has been lost
(Eng and Kazanjian, 2003). In this mode of memorializing – that Benjamin (in a Brechtian
move) calls historical materialism – the present becomes something other than the sim-
ple and inevitable unfolding of historical events, and exists instead in an engagement
Lawler 715

with the past. In this mode of memorializing, there is the possibility of redemptive hope
(Scribner, 2003). For Benjamin, it is important to attend to and to engage with the past,
to consider its contingent effects, to think about the ways the stories (and the events)
might be or might have been otherwise. In re-thinking and re-addressing the past, the
present, also, can be known differently. In other words, the task of the analyst is not to
wash his or her hands of the injustices of history, but to allow them to speak to the pre-
sent, rather like Gordon’s ghosts. As I read his argument, the point here is to learn to see
the present differently: precisely not to close off the past, but not to use it as an alibi for
present injustices either.
This is important because there are dangers, as Benjamin is very well aware, of fall-
ing into a kind of sentimentalized, uni-dimensional view of the past. And he suggests
those dangers are particularly acute for those of us on the Left. His term ‘historicism’
refers to an attachment to a historical ideal (even to its failure) that results in what he
disparagingly terms ‘left melancholy’ (Benjamin, 1974 [1931]), which closes off polit-
ical action in the here and now. It refers to a state of failure to see the present as it is, a
failure to understand or to acknowledge the character of memory. It is, in Wendy
Brown’s (2001) gloss

… a condition produced by an attachment to a notion of progress in which opportunities missed

or political formations lost are experienced as permanent and irrecoverable. Left melancholia
thus represents a refusal to come to terms with the particular character of the present: it is a
failure to understand history other than as ‘empty time’ or progress. It signifies as well a certain
narcissism with regard to one’s political attachments and identity that frames all contemporary
investments in political mobilization, alliance or transformation. (pp.168–169).

It speaks, also, to a specific kind of response to loss, in which certain aspects of the past
become fetishized. I would suggest that in invocations of the heroic worker, as in those
of the angry young man, a mythical working class history is being fashioned, one that
attaches progress only to an idealized past, and one that bears the hallmarks of Left
Melancholy: ‘In its tenacious self-absorption [melancholy] embraces dead objects in its
contemplation’ (Benjamin, 1977: 157). Melancholia suggests both a denial of and a
clinging to loss, and, further, an incorporation of the lost object into the ego (Freud,
1917). Is this why we see such a fetishistic clinging to the figure of the oily, dirty, male
manual worker among people who will never have to live that life? Is this why angry
young men of the 1950s and 1960s are still invoked? Is there a fetishized masculinity at
the heart of nostalgic appropriations of heroic workers and angry young men?

Conclusion
The opprobrium visited on members of the white working class in England is now well-
documented and analysed. I have tried to consider in this article some of the ways in
which time can be mobilized as a means of legitimating this opprobrium. Nostalgic
imaginings of a ‘good’ working class, existing in the past, can be a means of allowing
continuing disparagement of the contemporary working class, while keeping alive a faux
radicalism in the idea that ‘The Working Class’ in the abstract is valuable and admirable.
716 European Journal of Cultural Studies 17(6) 

The nostalgic motifs I discuss here were never entirely accurate reflections of real,
embodied working-class people, but the point is that their emblematic status means they
can come to stand for the idea of an authentic working class against which contemporary
working-class people can always be found wanting.
It is, I argue, the perceived inadequacies of the white working class in the present that
make their ‘past’ equivalents the objects of nostalgia. Within the post-Vultures discus-
sion, Sean’s claims about the value of white working-class life are ignored or disallowed
(how can a contemporary angry young man be ‘cultured’?). Yet Sean’s character – and
the generalized figures of the ‘white working-class man [and woman]’ – nevertheless
haunt the very nostalgic representations that attempt to displace them. In a strange rever-
sal, they become ghostly presences, bringing trouble to a conceptual schema that would
define them out of existence (Gordon, 2008). They become less real than the figures
from the past who are invoked to stand for ‘the working class’, yet their presence cannot
always be ignored. Sometimes they do not know their place, and they claim the present
time as their own. The reiteration of nostalgic narratives, then, may be a way to render
such hauntings safe, to displace the present through a past peopled with melancholic
fantasies.

Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this article were given as conference or seminar papers. My sincere thanks to
participants at the Truths and Tales Conference, University of Lapland, at the Enquire Conference,
University of Nottingham, and at the Josephine Butler College research seminar, Durham
University. Thanks also to David Chaney and to the two anonymous referees, for their incisive
comments.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or
not-for-profit sectors.

Notes
  1. See, for example, Haylett (2001), Skeggs (1997, 2004), Lawler (2005) and Tyler (2008).
  2. See, for example, Duncan Smith and Osborne (2014).
  3. Here I paraphrase Michel Foucault (1983):

My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly
the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my
position leads not to apathy but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism I think that the ethico-
political choice we have to make every day is to determine which is the main danger.
(p.343)

  4. Matthew Sweet is a BBC Radio 3 presenter, Rebecca Jenkins is a writer, Katrina Porteous
is a poet and historian, Jonathan Sawday is a cultural historian and Frank Cottrell Boyce is
a screenwriter. All extracts from the play and subsequent discussion are taken from my own
transcripts, made from the BBC’s recordings.
  5. Of course, the play is worthy of attention in its own right, but space does not permit analysis
of both the play and the discussion.
Lawler 717

  6. Class moves in and out of public discussion in Britain, but is never entirely absent. Even when
politicians deny its salience, it continues to be used as a marker of value, knowledge, among
others. See, for example, Haylett (2001) and Lawler (2005).
  7. This despised grouping of working class people had generally been discussed as if its mem-
bers were all white, but then various developments in British public life meant that by the
early 21st-century, ‘white’ started to be explicitly used as an adjective in front of ‘working
class’ (and not only in academic texts). These developments include the publication in 2009
of the Runnymede Trust’s report Who Cares about the White Working Class? and the works of
Collins (2004), Mount (2004) and Jones (2012). This attention to whiteness was also manifest
in the BBC’s own White Season, broadcast on television in 2008: a season which, despite
the promise of its name, dealt exclusively with working class whiteness (see Haylett, 2001;
Lawler, 2012).
  8. For example, Frank Cottrell Boyce used to write for Living Marxism and was the writer (with
Danny Boyle) of the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony – a ceremony seen by many
on both Left and Right as a socialist manifesto (Biressi and Nunn, 2013).
 9. The window be seen here: http://newcastlecathedral.org.uk/history_architecture/windows/
industrial_heritage.html
10. A point also acknowledged by Eagleton (2011) who claims Marx knew this very well.
11. The ‘British New Wave’ is a term used to encompass a series of realist films released between
1959 and 1963. Taylor (2006: 1) gives the full list as the following: Room at the Top (Jack
Clayton, 1959); Look Back in Anger (Tony Richardson, 1959); Saturday Night and Sunday
Morning (Karel Reisz, 1960); A Taste of Honey (Tony Richardson, 1961); A Kind of Loving
(John Schlesinger, 1962); The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (Tony Richardson,
1962); This Sporting Life (Lindsay Anderson, 1963); Billy Liar (John Schlesinger, 1963). The
films were adapted from novels and in some cases from stage plays.
12. Bootle is a town on Merseyside, effectively now a suburb of Liverpool. Since the decline of
the docks, it has been characterized by poverty and deprivation.
13. A disavowal that Sue Thornham sees as continuing until at least the 1970s. Of the Birmingham
Centre for Culture Studies (CCCS), she writes,

For the male researchers of the CCCS … as for the critics of a generalized and untheorized
‘Youth Culture’ whom they attack, ‘mass’ or ‘consumer’ culture is a feminized culture of con-
sumption and the only ‘authentic resistance is to be found in working-class male subcultures.
(Thornham, 2000: 133)

14. A Taste of Honey, for example.

15. As, for example, in the symbolic figure of ‘the chav’ in whom signs of both worklessness and
excessive and ‘tasteless’ consumption are condensed. See Tyler and Bennett (2010) and Jones
(2012) for further discussion of this figure and Collins (2004) for discussion of consumption
as a historical marker of a ‘bad’ working class.
16. Of course Sean is also fictional. But I want to draw attention to the ways in which another
fictional form is made to stand for white working-class experience, while that contained in
Vultures is disallowed.

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Biographical note
Stephanie Lawler is a Reader in Sociology at the University of York, United Kingdom.