A review by paulataua
Know Your Place by Nathan Connolly

3.0

I really don't know what to think about this book. In trying to get over 'the Road to Wigan Pier' image of the working class, it puts together several essays by articulate intellectuals with 'working class' roots who are now making their livings as writers or in education or media, and who still consider themselves as working class. I guess it wants to change people's view about what it means to be working class, and there is a sense in which that is admirable, but it might have been more forceful had it looked at the people who have not 'escaped' through education, but the vast number of ordinary working people who remain in the blue collar belt but in no way resemble the characters Orwell describes in 'The Road to Wigan Pier'. I have working class roots and was a first generation university goer, and my experience of the working people i grew up with was one of people with wit, and art, and practical wisdom, and an intelligence that transcended the education that never captured it. Maybe that is one project Nathan Connolly might look to undertake in the future.