The Underprivileged
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This was the interesting first work of urban anthropology by a British writer who went on to write a large number of books on similar themes, but with a more global, and increasingly
denunciatory, viewpoint: works like ‘City Close-Up’, ‘In the Cities of the South: Scenes from a Developing World’, and more recently, ‘Travels in the Skin Trade (Tourism and the Sex Industry)’, ‘Children of Other Worlds: Exploitation in the Global Market’, and No-Nonsense Guide to Class, Caste and Hierarchies’.
This first work by Seabrook is a painstaking and compassionate transposition into print form of
the oral history of the author’s northern English working-class family over a hundred years. (The sub-title states this more succinctly: ‘A hundred years of family life and tradition in a working
class street.’)
Although the author’s meritocratic rise into other social spheres released him from the drudgery and limited worldview of the denizens of those streets, his lifelong work has been steadfastly dedicated to representing underprivileged people all over the world.
Spanning the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, the ‘story’
shows how working-class people lived in UK before the post-WWII material progress dispersed them and weakened their close bonds.
[For younger Bookcrossers, WWII = World War Two, i.e. 1939-1945.]
The observation of important detail is impressive and greatly adds to the value of this book as historical archival material about real people. The reader is shown the harshness of their life,
with their beliefs, superstitions, their reliance on simple principles (encapsulated in proverbs as
philosophies of living), the need for conformity and solidarity within the class, ignorance, taboo topics within the group. The material squalor of their daily existence is highlighted by the
importance of the local pub as a social meeting place, to which they turned for relaxation and temporary refuge, especially at weekends.
This whole account, unlike some other sociological writing, comes poignantly alive with excellently recorded snatches of dialogue which will be familiar to those who have “been there,
done that”, as well as those who are still in contact with this social group in its contemporary metamorphosis: the underclass (proportionally smaller, perhaps, but no less disadvantaged;
simply the product of a different social dynamic).
***
denunciatory, viewpoint: works like ‘City Close-Up’, ‘In the Cities of the South: Scenes from a Developing World’, and more recently, ‘Travels in the Skin Trade (Tourism and the Sex Industry)’, ‘Children of Other Worlds: Exploitation in the Global Market’, and No-Nonsense Guide to Class, Caste and Hierarchies’.
This first work by Seabrook is a painstaking and compassionate transposition into print form of
the oral history of the author’s northern English working-class family over a hundred years. (The sub-title states this more succinctly: ‘A hundred years of family life and tradition in a working
class street.’)
Although the author’s meritocratic rise into other social spheres released him from the drudgery and limited worldview of the denizens of those streets, his lifelong work has been steadfastly dedicated to representing underprivileged people all over the world.
Spanning the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, the ‘story’
shows how working-class people lived in UK before the post-WWII material progress dispersed them and weakened their close bonds.
[For younger Bookcrossers, WWII = World War Two, i.e. 1939-1945.]
The observation of important detail is impressive and greatly adds to the value of this book as historical archival material about real people. The reader is shown the harshness of their life,
with their beliefs, superstitions, their reliance on simple principles (encapsulated in proverbs as
philosophies of living), the need for conformity and solidarity within the class, ignorance, taboo topics within the group. The material squalor of their daily existence is highlighted by the
importance of the local pub as a social meeting place, to which they turned for relaxation and temporary refuge, especially at weekends.
This whole account, unlike some other sociological writing, comes poignantly alive with excellently recorded snatches of dialogue which will be familiar to those who have “been there,
done that”, as well as those who are still in contact with this social group in its contemporary metamorphosis: the underclass (proportionally smaller, perhaps, but no less disadvantaged;
simply the product of a different social dynamic).
***
