The class quiz
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Creator of the Rumpole of the Bailey series, British novelist John Mortimer (b. 1923) was a barrister for over 30 years. This brought him into contact with a wide variety of people, as he noted in his autobiography Clinging to the Wreckage (1986): ‘middle-aged women, businessmen and suburban housewives ready to pour out all the secrets of their lives … murderers, con men, contract killers, politicians with unrevealed scandals and, on one horrible occasion, an assistant hangman’. While it is certainly true that many working-class people believe that their lot will never change, in the past 50 years, there has been more social mobility in Britain than in previous centuries. Some sociologists have even spoken of the ‘embourgeoisement’ of the working class, as more and more people have shed their working-class origins and become middle class. It has been claimed that it was the upwardly mobile working class – the 1980s’ so-called ‘Essex man’ – that made electoral success possible for the Conservatives. But despite achieving success and mobility themselves, many people still exult in an inverse snobbery about their working-class origins. For example, Guardian columnist Julie Burchill wrote in 2002, ‘To me, wanting to be middle class makes about as much sense as wanting to be constipated.’
