A book that purports to be a piece of sociology. In fact it's a piece of polemic with its heart in the right place but starting from false premises. The author, I feel, is somewhat disingenuous; the plain, if not 'ordinary', name masks the fact that he is Sir Ferdinand Mount, third baronet and a one-time political commentator on The Times. He argues from a patrician point of view as a journalist and takes an idealised view of the working class, carefully cherry-picking his sources to confirm his prejudices and taking a sour view of those primary sources and more recent academic writers like EP Thompson who don't confirm his view. There is no bibliography to show he has done his homework.

His tone is rather condescending too. I don't feel he would have let his idealised working-class folk into his own exalted circles but would be happy to let them have their own chapels – he's big on religion even though Dickens and others record the workers staying away from God in droves – and mutually-funded schools. His solutions, predictably, are those of the old "one-nation" patrician Tory; more grammar schools to allow hand-picked individuals who can be trusted to behave to "rise above" their roots (as with most grammar school proponents there's no critique of the secondary modern schools in which 80% of children were taught to know their place.

The author means well but he misses the point. He shows little awareness of the struggles of the working-classes to find a place in a post-industrial economy. It's readable enough thouigh.
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A book that purports to be a piece of sociology. In fact it's a piece of polemic with its heart in the right place but starting from false premises. The author, I feel, is somewhat disingenuous; the plain, if not 'ordinary', name masks the fact that he is Sir Ferdinand Mount, third baronet and a one-time political commentator on The Times. He argues from a patrician point of view as a journalist and takes an idealised view of the working class, carefully cherry-picking his sources to confirm his prejudices and taking a sour view of those primary sources and more recent academic writers like EP Thompson who don't confirm his view. There is no bibliography to show he has done his homework.

His tone is rather condescending too. I don't feel he would have let his idealised working-class folk into his own exalted circles but would be happy to let them have their own chapels – he's big on religion even though Dickens and others record the workers staying away from God in droves – and mutually-funded schools. His solutions, predictably, are those of the old "one-nation" patrician Tory; more grammar schools to allow hand-picked individuals who can be trusted to behave to "rise above" their roots (as with most grammar school proponents there's no critique of the secondary modern schools in which 80% of children were taught to know their place.

The author means well but he misses the point. He shows little awareness of the struggles of the working-classes to find a place in a post-industrial economy. It's readable enough thouigh.
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