ABSTRACT
My academic, historian’s frame of mind persuades me that class consciousness means experiencing a set of shared interests; a location of self as participating in certain cultures; an appropriation of particular narratives of people, society and history as components of self-identity. If this is the case, class consciousness is something which my own social identity has never managed to get exactly right. This chapter represents a personal effort at making some sense of such things. This isn’t academic writing, though it+on an historian’s intellectual training. It draws on fragments of recuperated memory, on family papers and photos and on long phone conversations with my mother. It addresses the issues around my own on-going sense of personal oddity, of cultural outsiderness, of not quite belonging. For me, as an historian, one of the places to look to explain such discontinuities might be in the historically located ways that class intersects with gender, age and race. I’ll begin with one particular recollection.
