What really irritates me about British fiction is that the working class is so rarely portrayed as anything beyond caricature: it’s either mindless squalor and stupidity, or the patronising myth of a poor-but-happeh social underclass.
Of course the people generally writing the books were upper-class and wouldn't know a day of manual labor if it spat on their...well, spats. I always got the impression that the idle upper-class took this grandeous, romanticized view of the working class. That "poor-but-happy" thing. Like that stupid scene in Titanic where Kate Winslet goes and dances with the 3rd Class passengers. Riiiight.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2008-07-23 08:55 pm (UTC)Of course the people generally writing the books were upper-class and wouldn't know a day of manual labor if it spat on their...well, spats. I always got the impression that the idle upper-class took this grandeous, romanticized view of the working class. That "poor-but-happy" thing. Like that stupid scene in Titanic where Kate Winslet goes and dances with the 3rd Class passengers. Riiiight.