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"How, across a long time span and from a broad geographical perspective, can we recover the ways in which Britons saw and understood the manifestly unequal society in which they lived? For a suggestive answer, we might usefully turn to Montpellier in 1768, when a bourgeois citizen set out to "put his world in order" by describing the social structure of his town. He concluded that there was no single comprehensive or authoritative way in which this could be done. Instead, he offered three very different yet equally plausible accounts of the same contemporary ,social world. The first was Montpellier as a procession: as a hierarchy on parade, a carefully graded ordering of rank and dignity, in which each layer melded and merged almost imperceptibly into the next. The second was Montpellier divided into three collective categories of modified estates: the nobility, the bourgeoisie, and the common people. And the third was a more basic division: between those who were patricians and those who were plebeians. Clearly, these were very different ways of characterizing and categorizing the same population. The first stressed the prestige ranking of individuals and the integrated nature of Montpellier society. The second placed people in discrete collective groups that owed more to wealth and occupation and gave particular attention to the bourgeoisie. And the third emphasized the adversarial nature of the social order by drawing one great divide on the basis of culture, style of life, and politics. Thus Montpellier in 1768, and thus Britain during the last three hundred years. That, in essence, is the argument that I advance and unfold in the following pages. When Britons have tried to make sense of the unequal social worlds they have inhabited, settled, and conquered, across the centuries and around the globe, they have most usually come up with versions or variants of these same three basic and enduring models: the hierarchical view of society as a seamless web; the triadic version with upper, middle, and lower collective groups; and the dichotomous, adversarial picture, where society is sundered between "us" and "them." These were, and still are, the conventional, vernacular models of British social description used by ordinary people, by pundits and commentators, and by politicians, and it is with the history of these three models that this book is primarily concerned. Strictly speaking, they were mutually exclusive, using different criteria to describe the same unequal society in very different ways and often (though diminishingly) using their own specific languages. Thus regarded, these three depictions of society do not amount to what the sociologist Gordon Marshall would call "a rigorously consistent interpretation of the world. Far from it; indeed, quite the opposite. But in practice and like the Montpellier bourgeois, most people move easily and effortlessly from one model to another, recasting their vision of British society to suit their particular purpose or perspective. And one of the reasons they were able to do so was that they gradually came to use the same language, regardless of the particular model they were employing. Often it was the vocabulary of ranks and orders. But it was also, and increasingly, the language of class that was most commonly used for describing all three models of contemporary British society: class as hierarchy; class as "upper," "middle," and "lower"; and class as just "upper" and "lower." Thus regarded, the history of class is not the master key that unlocks the entire historical process: the history of class struggle as classes come into being and do battle with each other. Nor is it the history of innumerable subjective social identities exclusively constituted by language. Rather, it is the history of the three different ways in which, across the centuries, most Britons have visualized their society: the history of three models of social description that are often but not always expressed in the language of class. Redefined and understood in this way, the history of "class" should properly be regarded as the answer to the following question: how did (and do) Britons understand and describe their social worlds? It is that answer, and that history, that this book aims to provide. "All societies," George Watson has rightly noted, "are unequal; ... but they describe their own inequalities variously." In the British case, it is these three idealized models, not always but often articulated in the language of class, that have lain behind most popular perceptions and descriptions of social structure since the early eighteenth century. Like all such popular perceptions, they were the jumbled product of custom and habit, history and experience, politics and inquiry, information and misinformation, ignorance and prejudice; then, as now, there were limits to what Britons knew about the social worlds in which they lived. None of these three idealized models constitute what Ernest Gellner recently called "real social knowledge." All of them are ignorant oversimplifications of the complexity of society. Yet they have remained remarkably enduring, and they are still in existence in Britain today. Indeed, it is precisely because of their continued existence that Britain cannot possibly be described as a "classless society" and that historians are mistaken in dismissing class from their current agenda. For if we are to understand class historically, we need to understand how it is over time that these three models of society have coexisted and why it is that for different people, and at different times, one or another of these models has been the preferred account of how things are." |
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"In the middle of the seventies when I tentatively suggested writing a book about the English class system, people drew away from me in horror. `But that's all finished,' they said nervously, `no one gives a hoot any more. Look at the young.' They sounded as if I was intending to produce a standard work on coprophilia or child-molesting. It was plain that, since the egalitarian shake-up of the 'sixties and early 'seventies, class as a subject had become the ultimate obscenity. What struck me, however, as soon as I started the book was the enormity of the task I had taken on. It was like trying to catalogue the sea. For the whole system, despite its stratification, is constantly forming and reforming like coral. `Even a small town like Swansea,' wrote Wynford Vaughan Thomas `has as many layers as an onion, and each one of them reduces you to tears.' To me the system seemed more like a huge, striped rugger shirt that had run in the wash, with each layer blurring into the next and snobbery fiercest where one stripe merged with another. I found, too, that people were incredibly difficult to pin down into classes. John went to a more famous boarding school than Thomas, who has a better job than Charles, who's got smarter friends than Harry, who lives in an older house with a bigger garden than David, who's got an uncle who's an earl, but whose children go to comprehensive school. Who is then the gentleman? A social class can perhaps be rather cumbersomely described as a group of people with certain common traits: descent, education, accent, similarity of occupation, riches, moral attitude, friends, hobbies, accomodation and with generally similar ideas and forms of behaviour, who meet each other on equal terms and regard themselves as belonging to one group. A single failure to conform would certainly not exclude you from membership. Your own class tend to be people you feel comfortable with -'one of our sort'- as you do when you are wearing old flat shoes rather than teetering round on precarious five-inch heels. `The nice thing about the House of Lords,' explained one peer, `is that you can have incredibly snobbish conversations without feeling snobbish. Yesterday I admired a chap's wife's diamonds; he said they came from Napoleon's sword, and before that from Louis XIV.' |
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"The aristocracy and upper classes are represented by The Hon HARRY STOW-CRAT. . . . He has a long-suffering wife, CAROLINE, . . . . an eldest son, GEORGIE, a daughter called FIONA, and several other children. He has numerous mistresses, but none to whom he is as devoted as to his black labrador, SNIPE. To illustrate the three main strands of the middle classes we again fall into archetypes, with GIDEON and SAMANTHA UPWARD as the upper-middle-class couple, HOWARD and EILEEN WEYBRIDGE as the middle-middles and BRYAN and JEN TEALE as the lower-middles. . . . Gideon and Samantha have two children called Zacharias and Thalia Our archetypal working-class couple are Mr and Mr: DEFINITELY-DISGUSTING. They have two children SHARON and DIVE, . . . The other couple you will meet are the NOUVEAU-RICHARDS, of working-class origin but have made a colossal amount of money. . . . children, TRACEY-DIANE and JISON "While writing this book I found that there were very much two strands in the character of the aristocrat: first the wild, delinquent, arrogant, capricious, rather more glamorous strand; and second the stuffy, `county', public-spirited, but publicity-shy strand, epitomized by the old baronet whose family were described `as old as the hills and infinitely more respectable'. Or, as a small boy writing in my son's school magazine pointed out: `Gentleman are of two types: the nose-uppish and the secluded.' The working classes divide themselves firmly into the Rough and the Respectable. The Rough get drunk fairly often, make a lot of noise at night, often engage-in prostitution, have public fights, sometimes neglect their children, swear in front of women and children, and don't give a stuff about anything---just like the upper classes, in fact. The Respectables chunter over such behaviour, and in Wales sing in Male Voice Choirs; they are pretty near the Teales. They also look down on people on the dole, the criminal classes and the blacks, who they refer to as `soap dodgers'. |
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"In his book Inequality in an Age of Decline (1980), the sociologist Paul Blumberg goes so far as to call it "America's forbidden thought." Indeed, if people often blow their tops if the subject is even broached. One woman, asked by a couple of interviewers if she thought there were social classes in this country, answered: "It's the dirtiest thing I've ever head of!" And a man, asked the same question, got so angry that he blurted out, "Social class should be exterminated." "Actually, you reveal a great deal about your social class by the amount of annoyance or fury you feel when the subject is brought up. A tendency to get very anxious suggests that you are middle class and nervous about slipping down a rung or two. On the other hand, upper-class people love to topic to come up: the more attention paid to the matter the better off they seem to be. Proletarians generally don't mind discussions of the subject because they know that can do little to alter their class identity. Thus the whole class matter is likely to seem like a joke to them - the upper classes fatuous in their empty aristocratic pretentiousness, the middles loathsome in their anxious gentility. It is the middle class that is highly class-sensitive, and sometimes class-scared to death. A representative of that class left his mark on a library copy of Russell Lynes's The Tastemakers (1954). Next to a passage patronizing the insecure decorating taste of the middle class and satirically contrasting its artistic behavior to that of some more sophisticated classes, this offended reader scrawled, in large capitals, "BULL SHIT!" A hopelessly middle-class man (not a woman, surely?) if I ever saw one. "If you reveal your class by your outrage at the very topic, you reveal it also by the way that you define the thing that's outraging you. At the bottom, people tend to believe that class is defined by the amount of money you have. In the middle, people grant that money has something to do with it, but think education and the kind of work you do almost equally important. Nearer the top, people perceive that taste, values, ideas, style, and behavior are indispensable criteria of class, regardless of money or occupation or education." |
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"When this book was published this section (inspired by Susan Sontag's 'Notes On Camp') was the most controversial. Many people told me it was their favorite part of the book; some even said it was the only part worth reading. Still others found it perplexing, and stared at me with furled brows as if I were some kind of psychopath. All I can say is if you get it you will get it, and if you don't you probably never will." |
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The Patricians: The Upper, Middle, and Lower Classes |
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| The Three General Divisions |
Lower Class
Work on things, build things, move things. When in the military, is always following the dictum: "If it moves, salute it, if it doesn't move, move it, it you can't move it, paint it." The unquestioned supreme example; The Sergeant Major |
Middle Class
Run things, work on ideas, follow ideas, follow instructions related to ideas |
Upper class
Creates, refines, and runs the ideas, the companies, the areas, the countries.---But runs them. The Duvaliers and the Marcos' are middle class. Running a country does not necessarily mean having a title or holding office. |
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Upper, within each division, The High |
High Lower Particularly lead or command those who do things. "Don't call me Sir, I work for a living."; Sergeant Major |
High Middle Run ideas, work on ideas. Captain, Colonel |
High Upper Invisibly out of sight, the inhabitant of an entire privately owned complex that is on its own land. Dresses like everyone else of quality, looks just like everyone else of quality, always blends in, never stands out. Drives some basic reasonable car that works for the moment and next moments. Absolutely understated, or at most basically stated. Extreme supporter of quality, which is why opera and ballet will get attended, even while totally bored. While money is well noted, the very definite emphasis is because of money being a very useful tool that takes major work to get, However, where money is clearly and totally recognized as being only a tool, and Only just One tool of many. As always, ever, forever, without end, the main issue remains who the person is, and is the person patrician or peon, where only that person can make that decision, provide personally that which makes one a patrician. |
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Middle, within each division, The Mid |
Mid Lower Follow the lead of the Sergeant Major. |
Mid Middle Work on ideas; Lieutenant |
Mid Upper Family history of building ideas, running ideas, and family May be literal family, can also be "adopted", literally or situationally, due to being a genuine "up and comer", of genuine merit and not merely some common handful of cash or items with a label. |
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Lower, within each division, The Low |
Low Lower Lower class Work on things, build things, move things. "If it moves, salute it, if it doesn't move, move it, it you can't move it, paint it." The Private |
Low middle Follow ideas, follow instructions related to ideas. Cadet, Third Lieutenant |
Low Upper Builds ideas, countries, companies |
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Peons: The Lowest Classes
Those who pass out in a metaphoric, literal, or reality show gutter, the the poser, the classless, the destitute. The individual can and does get out of this gutter, the Actions and Indicators and Behavior do not. |
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| The destitute. |
Lower class peon
Best known as the Chav, Ned, inept criminal, Sapeur, fantasizes being a peon with more things. |
Middle class peon
Best known as the preppy/yuppy, upscale, trendy. Fantasizes getting mistaken for Being Executive, apparently also tends to want one's own "reality show". One behavior favored in the early twenty-first century is being seen talking on the phone while behind the wheel of a car in motion, instead of driving. Idealized decade being the nineteen-empties, the decade of the stylized, the superflous, the tacky, the tasteless. |
Upper Class Peon
Totally brainless. When in its worst form, the trust fund child---who then gravitates towards the lower peons. A clear and at the time ongoing example being England's King Edward VIII. At best, the UCP finally learns to just sit in the corner and not say anything: The servants will at least keep the UCP fed, watered, washed and dressed, and the UCP is too stupid to think of trouble to get into---when the UCP does get into trouble it tends to have been some other peon's idea. |