The Class Game — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
The Class Game
The poems
What you need to know
A working-class woman from Liverpool asks the listener how they can tell her social class, listing the differences of speech, home and work that others judge her by, and ends by declaring her pride.
How Casey's dialect and phonetic spelling, repeated rhetorical questions, rhyming couplets and contrasting pairs of words turn the listener's snobbery back on them.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'How can you tell what class I'm from?', 'we live in a corpy', 'a pretty little semi', 'my hands are stained with toil', 'soft lily-white with perfume and oil', 'like a sour plum', 'A docker is me brother', 'proud of the class that I come from'.
Form: one stanza of 26 lines, mostly in rhyming couplets, in a first-person voice that speaks straight to you, built on a repeated rhetorical question and ending on a statement of pride.
Context: Mary Casey, a Liverpool housewife whose poem first appeared in 1979 in Voices, a magazine of writing by amateurs; British snobbery about accent and vocabulary, in which even the word toilet marked a speaker as lower class; Liverpool and the better-off Wirral; and high unemployment as Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979.
Compares well with: Half-caste (prejudice answered in a spoken, dialect voice), No Problem (stereotypes and pride in identity) and Cousin Kate (class and being judged by others).
