Britain In The Sixties: Vagrancy
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
At the margins of Britain's post-war prosperity, a hidden world of drifters, tramps, and social outcasts persisted, invisible to polite society yet utterly revealing of its failures — Philip O'Connor's Britain in the Sixties: Vagrancy chronicles this forgotten underclass with the unflinching eye of a writer who knew their world from the inside. Drawing on his own experiences as a vagrant, O'Connor presents a vivid and deeply human portrait of homelessness in 1960s Britain, mapping the spike houses, soup kitchens, and open roads that constituted life on the absolute periphery of the welfare state. Published as part of the celebrated Penguin Specials series — a line renowned for bringing urgent social commentary to a mass readership — this work sits firmly in the tradition of Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, arguing with moral clarity that vagrancy is not a personal failing but a systemic consequence. O'Connor's prose is raw, compassionate, and shot through with a poet's sensitivity, balancing sociological observation with autobiographical candour. For anyone curious about the darker undercurrents of the Swinging Sixties, this account raises questions about poverty, freedom, and social responsibility that remain stubbornly unanswered.
Author: Philip O'Connor
Format: Paperback
Genre: Society & culture
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
At the margins of Britain's post-war prosperity, a hidden world of drifters, tramps, and social outcasts persisted, invisible to polite society yet utterly revealing of its failures — Philip O'Connor's Britain in the Sixties: Vagrancy chronicles this forgotten underclass with the unflinching eye of a writer who knew their world from the inside. Drawing on his own experiences as a vagrant, O'Connor presents a vivid and deeply human portrait of homelessness in 1960s Britain, mapping the spike houses, soup kitchens, and open roads that constituted life on the absolute periphery of the welfare state. Published as part of the celebrated Penguin Specials series — a line renowned for bringing urgent social commentary to a mass readership — this work sits firmly in the tradition of Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, arguing with moral clarity that vagrancy is not a personal failing but a systemic consequence. O'Connor's prose is raw, compassionate, and shot through with a poet's sensitivity, balancing sociological observation with autobiographical candour. For anyone curious about the darker undercurrents of the Swinging Sixties, this account raises questions about poverty, freedom, and social responsibility that remain stubbornly unanswered.