ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by outlining a ‘working-class moment’ in British culture. In considering this ‘moment’ the chapter engages with Coronation Street, the emergence of ‘swinging London’, the success of The Beatles, and the effect this had upon contemporary working-class masculinities. Bill Naughton’s Alfie is analysed as an exemplar of a representation of an emergent working-class masculinity in the context of ‘swinging London’, but also as a text which demonstrates the emergence of the New Right’s neoliberal hegemony. The chapter also looks at the ‘underside’ of the ‘working-class moment’. Through an engagement with Barry Hines’s The Blinder and A Kestrel for a Knave, and James Barlow’s Term of Trial, it questions the impact of the tripartite education system in Britain and the scope of working-class ‘successes’ during the decade. Ultimately these texts show a contracting horizon of expectation for working-class youths and the end of the optimism that had grown out of the cessation of the Second World War.
