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Lower-Middle-Class
Nation The
White-Collar Worker in British Popular Culture
Nicola Bishop
London: Bloomsbury
Academic, 2021 Hardcover.
ix+243 p. ISBN 978-1350064355 £85
Reviewed by Pat Thane Birkbeck
College London
The author is a
Senior Lecturer in English, Film and Television and this book is primarily
concerned with representations of white-collar workers on TV, especially in
comedy shows, and in films and novels – the Grossmiths’ Diary of a Nobody, novels of Dickens and Orwell among others – throughout
the time since the lower middle class began to expand in the late nineteenth
century. It focuses less on the reality than on representations of their work
and lives including their travel to work – the ‘commute’ – and places of
residence, stated to be predominantly suburbs of semi-detached houses. Overwhelmingly
it equates the white-collar worker with office-based clerks, predominantly male,
who, although the title refers to ‘British’ popular culture, live and work in England,
a practice still too common in works claiming to study ‘Britain’. London gets
particular attention, not Glasgow or Cardiff. The lower middle class
indeed expanded throughout Britain from around the 1870s as the extent and range
of activities of central and local government and of private business grew.
This created a continuously growing range of ‘respectable’ ‘white-collar’ (or for
women ‘white blouse’) employment. It included a variety of clerical office employment,
also school teaching and school inspection, social and public health work, nurses,
the police and keepers and administrators of shops and businesses of all sizes.
These opportunities were especially attractive to the increasing numbers of
educated working-class school-leavers because they were clean and safe compared
with much manual work and more secure, often with the additional allure of
offering a pension on retirement as manual work did not, and, increasingly between
the wars, paid holidays and other benefits. But Bishop does not discuss these
key details or mention pensions even in her brief, generalised discussion of
retirement from the office. The work attracted many women, not only
those already from the lower middle class, as Bishop suggests, but better-off
middle-class women dubious about their chances of marriage when women were a
majority of the population, seeking employment but with opportunities effectively
limited to teaching, nursing, social work and office work. Lower-middle-class work,
and most other work, in all sectors was strictly gender-divided, with women deemed
especially suited to ‘caring’ roles such as nursing and teaching, and to work with
new technologies, initially the typewriter and the telephone, which provided routine
work with little prospect of promotion. As Bishop does not point out, men
protected themselves against the danger of female competition for promotion by
banning employment of married women in most white-collar jobs – the ‘marriage
bar’ as it was known. Such work expanded further during and after World War 1
and, despite the limitations, gave young women unprecedented opportunities for
independence and enjoyment of leisure pursuits, even ‘going out’ with young
men. Remarkably little of
this diversity comes across in Bishop’s account. Women’s office work is only
briefly and inadequately discussed since it appears to have received little serious
attention in the media she surveys, which represented working women, if at all,
just as sexual objects, decorative rather than functional contributors to
office work. Male workers are represented
solely as office-based clerks, perceived in the media sources as weak,
subservient, demasculinised and powerless to achieve change, working at
endlessly boring tasks, which Bishop presents as the reality of white-collar
working life. She concludes that the popularity of their satirisation in TV
comedies suggests that audiences have identified with this negative image, which
in consequence has come to represent ‘Britishness itself’. But there is a
striking absence of evidence of audience responses or attempts to compare media
representations with the reality of lower-middle-class work. Was office work
really so uniform? Were accountants indistinguishable from administrators of
the BBC, which was unusual in lacking a marriage bar until the late 1930s and in
promoting women, as described by Kate Murphy, Behind the Wireless : A History of Early Women at the BBC (Palgrave
2016)? Would people identify with negative representations of office work even
if they found them entertaining? A contented office worker who enjoyed his/her
work and the collegiality of office life offers little potential to the
satirist, though it is likely that many of them have existed, and, of course, many
lower-middle-class workers were not office workers. The motives for
dismissive, condescending representations of white-collar workers are not explored.
Middle-class snobbery directed at those who aspired to emulate or join its
ranks may be part of the explanation. There is certainly abundant evidence,
overlooked by Bishop, that the reality was different. Office workers, male and
female, were less docile and powerless than her sources suggest. Civil servants
were early to form very active trade unions to defend their work conditions and
public sector unions with a large white-collar presence were among the largest
through the twentieth century. There is no reference to Helen Glew’s excellent Gender, Rhetoric and Regulation :
Women’s Work in the Civil Service and the London County Council, 1900-55 (Manchester
University Press, 2016) which clearly shows how women in these two important
areas of employment were anything but docile and browbeaten. They were highly active
in mixed-sex trade unions, including campaigning for equal pay (achieved in the
public sector in 1955, 15 years before the private sector, largely due to women
workers’ campaigns) and against the ‘marriage bar’, which effectively died out during World War 2 except in the
financial sector and the diplomatic service (where it survived to 1973). Again,
the variety of lower-middle-class work experience, and of responses to it, is
understated. After the office, Bishop
discusses the commute to work and the suburbs where many lower-middle-class workers
lived. Again she describes dismissive, negative satirisation of both,
presenting media images of the clerk commuting between domination by his boss
at work and by his wife at home, in suburbs dominated by assertive, non-working
housewives. But she is more disposed than with office work to contrast these
negative representations with more diverse realities. Perhaps because there are
more studies by historians and social scientists to draw upon, also novelists,
including Virginia Woolf, who recognised that commuters could be individuals,
not just stereotyped members of a herd with little control over their travel or
other aspects of their lives. The English suburbs
of semi-detached houses with gardens have indeed throughout their existence
since the 1920s, when they began to provide affordable, comfortable, owner-occupied
housing for white-collar and skilled manual workers, been snobbishly disparaged
as inelegant, culturally arid, homes of dull nuclear families. They were indeed
English, less commonplace in the other countries of Britain. Scotland in
particular has a distinctive architectural tradition, and Bishop rightly points
out that no country in the world adopted the semi-detached suburb like the
English. She draws on historians such as Mark Clapson (including his Suburban Century : Social Change and
Urban Growth in England and the USA, Berg, 2003) to present a more positive
image of the suburb as more socially diverse than just homes to white
conformists, increasingly including Black and Asian residents, places where
workers in offices and elsewhere could develop their individuality, where strong
communities encouraged leisure pursuits, sporting and artistic skills, places
of security for bringing up and educating children. Bishop believes that
‘most people now work in offices, commute, live in suburbia’, which is doubtful
and for which she does not provide evidence. This leads her to conclude that
‘Britain is, at heart, a lower-middle-class nation’, more so now than ever. She
argues that, despite the country being increasingly fractured by class as she
describes [also by race, income, gender, region] the book describes ‘what we
[the ‘British’] have in common’, the ‘universality with which we view certain
aspects of our lives’. She suggests that this was evident in the recent
arguments for Brexit which presented the nation as ‘unrealistically
aspirational, desperate to keep up with the Joneses overseas’, in keeping with
stereotypes of the lower middle class, though this sits oddly with Brexit
claims about ‘global Britain’ and its prominent place in the world. And,
leaving aside the failure to discuss the distinctive cultures of two of the
three countries of which Britain is composed, she provides no convincing evidence
of the existence of clear lower-middle-class values that are widely shared by
British people. The lower middle class
has indeed long been an important component of British society but the argument
for its cultural dominance is not convincing.
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