From the civil war to now, poverty endures | Letters

Samantha Brennan responds to an article by playwright Beth Steel and voices concern over the Dickensian conditions in her home town

Re Beth Steel’s article (I’m from an English working-class town. When will society stop looking at us through the rearview mirror?, 6 September), I too have been concerned about my home town. I live about half a mile outside it and I am regularly shocked by the Dickensian (sometimes more Hardy-esque) conditions that former acquaintances live in.

The deprivation is alarmingly similar to what I saw as a child. I don’t understand how the inequalities in our society haven’t declined in the past 40 years. So much else has changed.