Identities in the Big City: Will the real Keith Flett please stand up?
The post below arises from a twitter exchange with Michael Rosen about identity. I had tweeted that a union member had rung me about an issue (I’m a union officer) and asked if I was the ‘real’ Keith Flett mentioning beards, beer and history. I agreed I was but our conversation was strictly in my professional capacity. Michael Rosen’s original tweet is here:
Important to make some distinctions between the Flett who is attached to a beard, the Flett who writes letters, the Flett who supports a North London football team, the Flett who drinks craft beer, the Flett who displays hedgehogs and/or meals, the Flett who provides hegelian-m..
That does pose the question about whether these various bits of identity are separate or a whole. There is an interesting historical reference here which is discussed in Peter Bailey’s 1979 monograph (Journal of Social History) Will the Real Bill Banks Please Stand Up?’
Banks’ reference is to a story by Thomas Wright
In his 1868 story Bill Banks Day Out, Bill a London railwayman goes with his wife and friends to Hampton Court for the day (the day being a Monday, then sometimes not quite a working day known as St Monday..). They set out from a local pub and on reaching their destination they enjoy a picnic of beef, mutton, ham, rolls and bottled ale and a small cask of porter to ‘wash ‘em down’.
Banks notes that Bill Banks would have been seen an example of the respectable and self-improving working man. He borrowed books from the local Institute to supplement his own small library. The day out was to Hampton Court, made possible by his wife’s careful budgeting. The visit to Hampton Court an historic location on which Bill Banks was well read. He appeared to be the model of a late Victorian artisan.
Yet as they drank and ate he got into a dispute with a fellow member of the party. He and his wife then head off to the music hall for some popular entertainment and take a carriage home. Banks argues that this Bill Banks would have been seen as a drunken working man by middle-class commentators in the latter half of his day out.
Who was the real Bill Banks, or were they in fact just different parts of the same person?
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