Volume 13, Number 12 · January 1, 1970
Village Voices
By D.A.N. Jones
Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village
by Ronald Blythe
Pantheon, 287 pp., $6.95
Working Class Community
by Brian Jackson
Praeger, 190 pp., $4.50
It seems a pity that, in common speech, the people of England are so vaguely categorized as 'middle class' and 'working class' (the expression 'upper class' being almost obsolete). If the word 'class' were reserved for defining groups of people according to their property and production, we could agree on a definition of the working class: all those people (white-collar or blue-collar) who produce the bulk of a nation's wealth by selling their labor power to the lucky few who own and control the means of production. But in fact we are generally talking about rank. There is a universally recognized division in British society between the upper and the lower ranks: the upper call themselves 'middle class' and, when they talk of the working class, they mean 'everybody else, everybody except us.' It is hard to generalize about such a loosely defined majority, this large number of outsiders—what Hazlitt called 'that body of individuals which usually goes by the name of the People!' They call themselves 'ordinary working people,' when obliged to label themselves.
Review, 3359 words
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