Autobiographical Experience and Relative Deprivation: Anxiety and Pain in the Lives of the Post-war British Middle Class, 1945–1951

This article is concerned, in terms of relative deprivation, with the diminution of the middle-class style of life in Britain during the six years after the Second World War. The classic work by the eminent sociologist W. G. Runciman, Relative Deprivation and Social Justice: A Study of Attitudes to Social Inequality in Twentieth-Century England (1972), lends itself well to the theorisation of such an analysis. A useful contextual examination of the theory and such critiques can be found in M. Cherkaoui (‘Relative Deprivation’, International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences 19:3522–3526, 2001). With the utilisation of the extensive autobiographical records collected by the Mass-Observation organisation covering the period in question as well as other sources, it is possible to illuminate in personal terms a unique moment in British post-war history. The emphasis here is not on the structural forces of class conflict or of one class or another being the ‘engine of history’, but rather on how people, who were neither rich nor poor, felt hurt and often despair at finding themselves left high and dry by historical change. It was a condition that did not last, but while it did last it represented for many middle-class lives a unique and painful experience that is of considerable historical interest.