Antoinette Burton and Stephanie Fortado, eds. Histories of a Radical Book: E. P. Thompson and “The Making of the English Working Class”. New York: Berghahn Books, 2020. Pp. 128. $120.00 (cloth).

Abstract

issue of "nation" is never addressed, though the construction and expression of national identity has a large research literature of its own. Even the territorial space is misleading. The book is about England, not Britain-Scotland gets just a couple of mentions while Wales is ignored (except for Gwen's little terrace house in Barry in Gavin and Stacey). And, despite a few references to Manchester, the book is about London. The literature is overwhelmingly about London, while the sitcoms are mostly implicitly, if not explicitly, so. Bishop knows this, but she does not draw out the implications for her claims about a lower-middle-class nation.In each chapter, Bishop draws on historical studies of workplace, occupation, suburbs, and the like and relates them to the themes emerging from the popular cultural sources. In doing so, however, Bishop understates what is for me most important about the book. She occasionally acknowledges that it is representations of white-collar workers that she is studying, but if this is to be connected to the overall argument that Britain has become a lower-middle-class nation, then the reader needs a much stronger interrogation of how these striking continuities of representation were maintained. Cultural products such as fiction and sitcoms are distinctive sources that raise methodological questions that are not really considered. Bishop is struck by the continuity of tropes and conventions, but she does not foreground it as a key question for the book: How do we account for these continuities over 150 years or, within a single genre, 50 years of sitcoms? Novels and sitcoms are products, and we need to think about how they were commissioned and produced, and by whom, and the pressures that asked for originality -but only within very limiting constraints.We also need to think about how these products are consumed. Audience studies have stopped us from assuming that what appears on a stage or screen is what the audience experiences, and reader response theory has stopped us from seeing texts (literary, but the same applies to performance) as objects to be analyzed on their own. That is especially the case if we are asked to fit the novels and sitcoms to the construction of a broader social or cultural identity. Did the same kind of people read Wells and Bennett as read Shan Bullock and Pett Ridge? And what about the polemical nonfiction of W. H. Crossland and C. F. G. Masterman? The fact that the sitcom Men Behaving Badly might have been intended as a critique of laddish culture-and was seen as such by many women-but also served as an affectionate validation of behaving badly is one of the few occasions when Bishop draws such ambiguities to the reader's attention. Audiences and reception needed sustained attention if Bishop's overall argument is to be sustained.Bishop has written an engaging and enjoyable book from which I learned a good deal about the fascinating continuities in how the white-collar lower middle class has been represented in fiction and on screen. She may not have per...