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Mary Casey's The Class Game is the Conflict cluster's most direct challenge to English class snobbery. A working-class speaker addresses a middle-class listener in a series of rhetorical questions that catalogue — and defend — every social marker that the listener would use to look down on her. For Edexcel the poem pairs naturally with Cousin Kate (defiant lower-status female speaker), Half-caste (rhetorical-question-driven protest) and No Problem (dialect as dignity).
Mary Casey (born 1942 in Liverpool) wrote The Class Game in 1981. The poem appears in anthologies of working-class women's poetry and has been on UK school syllabuses for decades. It emerges from a Liverpudlian tradition of direct, performative working-class voice.
English class identity in the second half of the twentieth century was (and remains) marked by accent, vocabulary, housing, dress and postcode. The poem catalogues these markers from inside the lower-status position. The speaker refuses to disown any of them.
Exam context rule: one sentence on British class as a system of visible markers is enough.
Twenty-six lines. The speaker opens with a rhetorical question: "How can you tell what class I'm from?" She then catalogues the markers that would betray her to a class-conscious listener — her accent, her vocabulary ("ow do" rather than "how do you do"), where she lives ("a corpy house"), her clothing, her habits ("the way I eat pea wack," "eat me toast"). Each marker is presented not as a shame but as a fact the speaker claims openly. The poem ends with the direct assertion: "I'm proud of me class, I'm proud of the way I speak, / Don't judge me by this game people play."
The speaker is a working-class Liverpudlian woman. Her voice is confident, combative, witty. She uses Liverpudlian dialect ("ow do," "corpy," "pea wack," "me") openly on the page, refusing to "translate" herself into middle-class English. The voice carries the rhythms of spoken Liverpool.
The poem is a direct address to an unspecified middle-class listener ("you"). The "you" is never characterised, but the questions assume a listener who looks at the speaker's markers and sorts her. The poem turns the sorting-process back on the listener: it makes him the subject of examination rather than her.
| Feature | Detail | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Form | Free verse | Refuses the containment of traditional English metres |
| Rhyme | Irregular but present — "low / below," "too / woo" | Echoes the regularity of nursery rhyme and folk song |
| Rhetorical questions | Open the poem; drive the catalogue | Inverts the sorting-gaze back on the addressee |
| Dialect | Liverpudlian, unsoftened | Claim to linguistic dignity |
| Line lengths | Variable | Speech-like |
The free-verse structure is important. Traditional English metres carry the literary authority of Tennyson, Wordsworth and the English establishment. Casey refuses that authority and writes in a form that matches her speaking voice. The irregular rhyme that emerges is almost accidental, as in spoken Liverpudlian.
flowchart TD
A[Opening question: How can you tell what class I'm from?] --> B[Catalogue of markers: accent, vocabulary, food, housing]
B --> C[Each marker claimed proudly]
C --> D[Closing assertion: I'm proud of me class]
D --> E[Judgement of the listener: don't judge me by this game]
The structural arc runs from questioning gaze to catalogue to proud assertion to indictment of the "game" being played. The questions that open the poem become accusations by the closing lines.
"Ow do" for "how do you do." "Corpy" for council (corporation) housing. "Me" for "my." "Pea wack" for pea soup. These dialect markers are the poem's central AO2 feature. Casey does not use them for local colour; she uses them to argue that her speech has the full status of English. The poem is written in the language of its speaker, not translated into the language of its readers.
The opening questions catalogue the markers by which a middle-class listener would identify her class. "Have I a label round my neck?" "Or is it because my hands are stained with toil?" The questions are not sincere requests for information; they are exposures of the listener's assumed criteria. By naming the criteria out loud, the speaker takes their power away.
Casey's imagery is rooted in the daily materials of working-class Liverpool: "a corpy house," "pea wack," "toast," "the Sun" (the tabloid), "me bum." There is no metaphor, no simile, no elevated diction. The poem's rhetorical power comes from its refusal to dress up its subject.
The title word is reclaimed in the closing line. Class sorting is described as "this game people play." The metaphor is sharp: a game has rules, players and winners. By calling class a game, the speaker strips it of any pretension to objective measure. It is a social performance, and she declines to play it.
Both poems confront prejudice through rhetorical questioning and dialect. Casey's speaker asks "How can you tell what class I'm from?"; Agard's speaker asks "Explain yuself / wha yu mean." Both refuse the standard English of their addressee. Both catalogue the assumptions of the prejudiced listener in order to expose them. The contrast: Agard's poem uses canonical European analogies (Picasso, Tchaikovsky) to make its argument abstractly; Casey's poem uses specific local materials (pea wack, corpy houses) to make its argument concretely.
Both poems give voice to a socially marginalised woman who confronts a higher-status addressee. Rossetti's speaker uses the Victorian ballad form to contain her bitterness; Casey's speaker uses free verse to refuse containment. Both reclaim agency through voice. The contrast of form — ballad stanza versus free verse — mirrors the two centuries between them.
Both use dialect and direct address to refuse a category imposed from outside. Zephaniah rebuts racist stereotypes; Casey rebuts class stereotypes. Both proudly claim the markers that society uses against them.
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