ABSTRACT
For the British working class before the last war that over-arching element was poverty, poverty with varying degrees of severity. The word 'underclass', is generally rejected as patronising, belittling. That refusal is regrettable; the word accurately pinpoints the position of those who have replaced the pre-war working class, who are indeed and in fact belittled; it recognises a truth many of us do not wish fully to acknowledge. The dance of historic cheering-up idioms went on nimbly, too, though, through some sentences uttered occasionally even by the most hopelessly poverty-stricken. Being poor bore on many of them heavily, all the time. No doubt today's prosperous 'working class' has no need to call on many of them; the underclass still does. They reflect the uniqueness of working-class experience, and in doing so they draw on the language of a larger culture, on something of a common culture, national and even international, through both space and time.
