Gender, Civic Culture and Consumerism: Middle-Class Identity in Britain, 1800–1940, Alan Kidd and David Nicholls

Why do people from privileged class backgrounds often misidentify their origins as working class? We address this question by drawing on 175 interviews with those working in professional and managerial occupations, 36 of whom are from middle-class backgrounds but identify as working class or long-range upwardly mobile. Our findings indicate that this misidentification is rooted in a self-understanding built on particular ‘origin stories’ which act to downplay interviewees’ own, fairly privileged, upbringings and instead forge affinities to working-class extended family histories. Yet while this ‘intergenerational self’ partially reflects the lived experience of multigenerational upward mobility, it also acts – we argue – as a means of deflecting and obscuring class privilege. By positioning themselves as ascending from humble origins, we show how these interviewees are able to tell an upward story of career success ‘against the odds’ that simultaneously casts their progression as unusually meritocratically legitimate while erasing the structural privileges that have shaped key moments in their trajectory.

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‘Below English Line’: An ethnographic exploration of class and the English language in post-liberalization India

Modern Asian Studies ◽

10.1017/s0026749x16000639 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 52 (2) ◽

pp. 576-608 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

SAZANA JAYADEVA

Keyword(s):

Middle Class ◽

Cultural Capital ◽

English Language ◽

Critical Element ◽

Class Identity ◽

Middle Classes ◽

Spoken English ◽

And Performance ◽

English Training

AbstractAnthropological studies of India's post-liberalization middle classes have tended to focus mainly on the role of consumption behaviour in the constitution of this class group. Building on these studies, and taking class as an object of ethnographic enquiry, I argue that, over the last 20 years, class dynamics in the country have been significantly altered by the unprecedentedly important and complex role that the English language has come to play in the production and reproduction of class. Based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork—conducted at commercial spoken-English training centres, schools, and corporate organizations in Bangalore—I analyse the processes by which this change in class dynamics has occurred, and how it is experienced on the ground. I demonstrate how, apart from being a valuable type of class cultural capital in its own right, proficiency in English has come to play a key role in the acquisition and performance of other important forms of capital associated with middle-class identity. As a result, being able to demonstrate proficiency in English has come to be experienced as a critical element in claiming and maintaining a space in the middle class, regardless of the other types of class cultural capital a person possesses.

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Approaching the invisible centre: middle-class identity and documentary film

Watching the World ◽

10.7228/manchester/9780719076893.003.0018 ◽

2011 ◽

pp. 109-118

Author(s):

Thomas Austin

Keyword(s):

Middle Class ◽

Documentary Film ◽

Class Identity ◽

The Invisible

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The City Sketch

Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874 ◽

10.1093/oso/9780192894557.003.0003 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 69-104

Author(s):

John Evelev

Keyword(s):

Middle Class ◽

Edgar Allan Poe ◽

Dominant Mode ◽

Lydia Maria Child ◽

Margaret Fuller ◽

Class Identity ◽

Urban Populations ◽

Working Classes ◽

City Life ◽

The City

Although the picturesque sketch genre is primarily associated with rural subjects, it was also applied to city life during the mid-nineteenth century, when urban populations were undergoing unprecedented growth. Chapter 2 argues that the newly popular picturesque city sketch helped the emergent middle class to establish its identity as it attained a distinctive position between the wealthy and the working classes. Walking the streets, the middle-class picturesque city sketcher turned the class-divided city into picturesque tableaux that were far less antagonistic to city life than the sensationalist characterizations that were central to the dominant mode of city writing in midcentury. The chapter examines city sketches and fiction derived from the genre, written by Edgar Allan Poe, Lydia Maria Child, George “Gaslight” Foster, Margaret Fuller, Cornelius Mathews, and others. Although city sketchers helped articulate a middle-class identity, the picturesque at times tended to give way to a sublime mode in which the city crowd threatened to absorb the middle class into its undifferentiated mass.

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