Certain aspects of the interregnum

disrupting the reigning structures of historical time and order

pp. 144-179

in: Tony Blackshaw, Working-class life in northern England, 1945–2010, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

"So where were you, exactly, when the distribution of the sensible was reconfigured?" Of course, we never asked our respondents to tell us quite precisely, the way Virginia Woolf (1924) told her readers in Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, when she argued that, in or about December 1910, all human relations in English society — "those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children" — shifted, changed, dissolved, fragmented. It has been well documented how the second half of the twentieth century was experienced as a time of suddenly enlarged possibilities, when post-war austerity melted and privileges and deference finally looked like being washed away.