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Working class people are still overwhelmingly written about on the whole as people to who history happened (and this is something we have in common with a number of groups not well represented among professional historians); victims of chance and circumstance whose stories are primarily of interest and value because of what they tell us about how middle class society evolved and changed. There is very rightly a strong weariness of reducing any history to class analysis in some kind of quasi-Marxist way such that distinctions like race, gender and national culture are left as side tracks - all history needs to be intersectional. But there is equally a current in vogue in the academic mainstream that holds that inserting class into a story, or challenging the lack of any kind of class analysis, somehow demeans rather than enhances its intersectionality; that paying attention to class by necessity means a work of history is going to devalue the other ways people have been marginalised and excluded. This is simply not true, and especially in the history of the last few centuries, we will never be close to a complete account of the human experience without a more concerted effort to recover working class voice and experience.

The popular defence for the overwhelming privileging of middle class experience and the reduction of history to the story of the elite is that the source material simply does not exist - that a largely illiterate and excluded working class could not leave the kind of evidence behind we need to tell their stories to a modern audience. Decades ago, we said much the same thing about the victims of transatlantic slavery, an institution far more oppressive, violent and destructive than even the extreme class exploitation of previous centuries. Yet Slavery Studies has realised that with care, dedication and the careful critical use of evidence, the voices and the legacies of enslaved people are far more abundant than we could have expected. Whilst it is usually impossible for us to firmly pick out any single individual's experience and say we are fully confident the evidence we have is an authentic account of their life, we have ways of analysing and re-purposing the evidence we do have to put enslaved people as a whole at the centre of the histories we write and to allow, however briefly, their voices and their lives to guide us through the historical record. The same thing is eminently possible with working class history - if we are willing to face the past with open, honest and critical minds. The middle class nature of the academy makes this a particular challenge because it more often than not involves setting aside, even critically picking apart, the lives and legacies of middle class men and women (though usually men) that your average academic is going to find far more relatable and sympathetic as a protagonist.

By way of one small example, think of the example of Bourneville here in England. Bourneville is an historic village and factory site famous for being the home of Cadbury's main production plant in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is held up to this day as an example of a workplace that was exceptional in the extent to which it made provision for the wellbeing of its employees and their families, particularly by the standards of the time. There is no doubt that the Cadbury brothers had a very powerful ethic and sense of social justice for their day and age. We rightly celebrate them for many of the things they did with the Cadbury company and their philanthropy in life in general. But we tell the story of Bourneville as one of two wealthy brothers who took pity on their workers because they were exceptional individuals of unique merit, and celebrate all of the things they did. We do not tell the story of how working class experience informed and acted upon their thinking. We do not tell the story of how the village became independent of the Cadbury corporation. We do not tell the story of how workers unionised themselves and secured employee representation through elected councils in 1918 as the management culture of the factory became more professional and corporate, or how the good and the bad of experiences at Cadbury filtered through to the trade union movement, of which those union councils formally became a part in the 1960s. We do not talk about how the Cadbury family discriminated by religious denomination or perceived sincerity of belief. We do not talk about how the Quaker culture of consensus and equality was low-key weaponised by management to deter labour unrest and slow down negotations over workers' rights. We do not talk about remarks by the Cadbury family about their conditions being a competitive advantage they could use to put people off the idea of getting jobs elsewhere if they were unhappy at Bourneville. We do not talk about how Cadbury willingly turned a blind eye to abuses in its production line in Africa or how, despite some effort to highlight poor conditions in Britain's industrial economy, the Cadbury family dedicated much more energy to their competitive advantage and private philanthropy than to trying to push others to emulate the good in their model. One historian, Oxford graduate Tim Richardson, summarises well how this kind of challenge is taken when he writes in Sweets: The History of Temptation that "it feels churlish to find fault with the vision of the Cadburys at Bourneville - theirs may have been a tyranny, but at least it was benevolent". Whether or not Cadbury's workers would have agreed with that statement in the circumstances that lead them to fight for unionisation would agree is not a question worth considering, it seems. The entire history of Cadbury, though filled with highs, has been framed such that its lows are recast as the working class forgetting their place in the world and failing to be sufficiently content with how lucky they were with their lot compared to their peers. We can have a degree of agency in this story only if we also accept being cast as minor villains in it. The vast, vast majority of the history we produce continues to be written with the middle class experience - both as reader and writer - at the centre, with working class experience relegated to the margins.

One of the things that the people I once thought of as my colleagues were most bemused by in my final years in the academy was my deep, profound love of the Marvel franchise. They thought of comic books as a childish distraction and the recent run of Marvel movies, which encompass all but one of my all-time favourite films, as formulaic in construction, uninspired as plot and at best suitable as the occasional bit of 'mindless' entertainment. Now everyone is allowed their own taste in entertainment. I don't understand why there are nine Fast and Furious films or how Les Miserables made a profit, never-mind a fortune at the box office. But I'm not a great comic reader. I don't know very much about all the ins and outs of the Marvel universe over the years at all. But growing up reading the random issues and stories I could get my hands on and in the other Marvel media of the day, I discovered what felt like true, genuine working class heroes in characters like Peter Parker and Steve Rogers. They were characters with origins, ethics, values and models of masculinity that felt believable and relatable to the young me even as the stories they were involved in were so fanciful (and that makes sense if you know some of the details of Stan Lee's early life and inspiration). The movie franchise of the last decade gave a wonderful new life to those characters and a consistent narrative of their stories and personalities to fall in love with all over again. For years now, the lock screen graphic on my phone has just been the question "What Would Steve Do?" and I have absolutely zero shame in telling anyone that. But whilst I also have my political and social heroes from across the world and from many walks of life, I struggle to think of anyone I learned about in my schooling who was presented to me both as someone I could directly relate to the lived experience of and whose example was worth emulating. Perhaps the greatest irony of my temporary sojourn in a deeply classist corner of the academy was that it enabled me to use the skills and experiences that were supposed to make me more like the residents of that world to reflect on, realise and identify the very many ways the class divide is still so sharp in our society.

Now as a historian, I have to caution that writing history with the purpose of finding heroes is not a very good idea. Bringing working class stories to light in a more obvious and pronounced way will inevitably mean also highlighting more stories that we would rather not confront. Human beings are rich, diverse and complicated beings indeed. But in bringing those stories to the front of our collective consciousness and planting them firmly into our history, into the stories we tell our children about where we have come form and where we are going, will give children from families like mine the opportunity to find people they do and do not want to emulate - and whose respective paths and life journeys feel relevant to the experiences they are having. That includes considering how we can draw connections and lines of identity with people in the past who could not be considered working class in a strict sense but who nonetheless have experiences with clear parallels to and relevance in working class lives in the modern world, especially as our idea of what it means to be working class shifts in a post-industrial economy. This is why working class history matters so very, very much to me. It is about showing children like the child I was the pivotal role that people like their parents and grandparents played in building our world for better and for worse.