Most people give very little thought to the phenomenon of snobbery. It may even be considered that snobbery is dying out, that snobs are an endangered species, and that meeting a snob socially nowadays is merely an occasion for mild interest and amusement. Snobs are sometimes featured in television situation comedies because they provide a rich seam for writers to work, exploring the ludicrous and absurd. Some caricature snobs in British television have achieved cult status. If Hyacinth Bucket (apparently pronounced Bouquet) and Margo Leadbetter are monsters, they are at least harmless, lovable, and even admirable in their determination to adhere to whatever social norms they cherish.
It is only if and when you realise you have been harmed, in a personal way, by snobbery, that the phenomenon seems less amusing. Most people, perhaps the majority of us, never realise we have been harmed by snobbery. That has become the way snobbery works. In an earlier age, snobbery was much more blatant, self-confident, and overtly proud of itself, than it is now. Snobbery wasn’t always in hiding. You could argue that the strident snobbery of yesteryear was more honest because it did not pretend to be something else. But, like any other form of prejudice, be it racial prejudice, xenophobia, misogyny, prejudice against minority groups, even religious sectarianism, snobbery, real snobbery, now feels obliged to operate deeply under cover. The need for snobbery to remain clandestine is perhaps illustrated by an incident said to have occurred at the gates to Downing Street in September, 2012. On that occasion, the then Conservative Chief Whip was riding his bicycle from, as it happened, No. 9, towards Whitehall. He asked the attending police to open the gates, and was requested to proceed through a side gate. He duly complied, but not without, it is alleged, a bit of effing and blinding directed towards a bunch of “plebs”. Whether or not this incident, or something like it, really occurred may never be known. But the “pleb” word was enough to force a resignation. The incident was referred to as “plebgate”, or, even more bizarrely, “gategate”. One thing was made clear. A proud affirmation of snobbery was no longer viable.
Snobbery often works by constructing and maintaining a “glass ceiling”. The expression “glass ceiling” has recently become rather hackneyed in its almost exclusive application to the phenomenon of prejudice against professional women, who are striving to reach the top of a hierarchy in a given walk of life. If “glass ceiling” is a cliché, at least it has retained some of its original appositeness. The ceiling is made of glass in order that it be invisible. People on the social ascent are therefore unaware that the ceiling is there. They are only aware of a vague sense of frustration that their social or professional ascent has been inexplicably halted. Because no outward impediment is evident, the fault must lie within the makeup of the frustrated individual. Such an individual may lose self-esteem and develop a sense of personal inadequacy. “I must be to blame.” The inculcation of this state of mind perpetrated by the Snobbery Gestalt – if I may – is perfectly deliberate, and may be described as “gaslighting”. “Gaslighting”, like the “glass ceiling”, is another frequently used, sometimes abused, term. Its origin is to be found within a 1938 play by Patrick Hamilton, Gaslight. It became a UK film in 1940 and, most famously, a US film in 1944, starring Charles Boyer, Ingrid Bergman, and Joseph Cotten. Gaslighting is a technique of undermining somebody’s confidence, and indeed sanity, by convincing them, while apparently offering psychological support, that they are indeed going mad. Similar themes, of moral ambiguity, are explored in the 1941 film Suspicion, starring Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine. Cary Grant was the past master when it came to playing a character simultaneously charming and devious, and, just possibly, wicked. What to make of it? Perhaps it is we, the audience, who are going mad. The director Alfred Hitchcock recognised a quality in Grant behind the charm, the fooling and the wit; a sinister quality of threat. Snobbery similarly poses, and operates, under a guise of charm. We may not realise that behind its cloak of absurdity and farce, there lies a dagger.
But what exactly is snobbery? One is tempted to say, “I can’t define what snobbery is; but I know it when I see it.” Accordingly, I offer three examples.
- Our letters about the Beveridge Report crossed. I fear I am an instinctive Tory. I sincerely hope that it gets whittled away like an artichoke. I am all for educating the people into being less awful, less limited, less silly, and for spending lots of money on (1) extended education; (2) better-paid teachers, but not for giving them everything for nothing, which they don’t appreciate anyhow. Health, yes. Education, yes. Old age pensions, yes, I suppose so, in default of euthanasia which I should prefer, as also for the mental deficient. But not this form of charity which will make people fold their arms and feel that they need have no enterprise since everything will be provided for them. It is surely a psychological error.
- My Manifesto: I hate democracy. I hate la populace. I wish education had never been introduced. I don’t like tyranny, but I like an intelligent oligarchy. I wish la populace had never been encouraged to emerge from its rightful place. I should like to see them as well fed and well housed as T.T. cows, but no more articulate than that. (It’s rather what most men feel about most women!)
Letters, Vita Sackville-West to her husband Harold Nicolson, December 3rd, 1942, and February 7th, 1945, Diaries and Letters 1939 – 45, Harold Nicolson (Collins, 1967).
- The intellectual nullity is what constitutes any difficulty there may be in dealing with Snow’s panoptic pseudocogencies… Snow is, of course, a – no, I can’t say that; he isn’t; Snow thinks of himself as a novelist… The seriousness with which he takes himself as a novelist is complete – if seriousness can be so ineffably blank, so unaware… For as a novelist he doesn’t exist; he doesn’t begin to exist. He can’t be said to know what a novel is. The nonentity is apparent in every page of his fictions…
The Richmond Lecture, Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow, in response to The Rede Lecture, The Two Cultures, 1959 (Chatto and Windus, 1962).
These examples appear to suggest that there may be two types of snobbery. The letters from the author Vita Sackville-West to her husband are blatant examples of class snobbery. On the other hand, if we are to accuse F. R. Leavis on this occasion of being a snob, then his is snobbery within a specific sphere; he is a literary snob. The extract from Dr Leavis’ Richmond Lecture requires a little explanation. The polymath Charles Snow – scientist, academic, civil servant, and author – had in his Rede Lecture made the assertion that the arts and the sciences had developed into two independent modes of human activity that had become estranged from one another, and that this evident failure of communication was harmful to society. F. R. Leavis took exception to this point of view, which of course he was perfectly entitled to do. But it is not clear why his argument had to involve an attack on Snow’s literary endeavours, other than that he wished to voice an emotional response of utter contempt. As a critic, he clearly exerted his considerable powers to carry out a demolition job. Why? Snow’s central thesis really had nothing to do with his abilities, or otherwise, as a novelist. He was merely voicing the opinion that people of his time in positions of power and influence were by and large scientifically uneducated, a point which it would have been hard to contest. That Snow might be a bad writer, and indeed Leavis’ assertion that D. H. Lawrence might be a great one, seems to be quite irrelevant. But Leavis’ personal attack was ferocious; one assumes that Snow must have touched a nerve, and that Leavis felt in some sense under threat. Snow was, according to Leavis, a “portent”. Leavis’ diatribe was an argument ad hominem, which may paradoxically have weakened his case, and indeed bolstered Snow’s, by virtue of displaying the precise gulf that Snow posited. The distinguished American critic Lionel Trilling summed it up: “There can be no two opinions about the tone in which Dr Leavis deals with Sir Charles. It is a bad tone, an impermissible tone.”
But my intention here is not, at least initially, to cast aspersions on snobs, nor to make value judgements concerning snobbery in its various manifestations; rather it is to make some tentative suggestions as to what snobbery actually is. If we can take some steps towards defining it, then we may recognise it more readily when we come up against it. We may conclude that while Sackville-West is preoccupied with matters of social class, Dr Leavis is concerned primarily with matters of taste within a particular field of human activity. There is social snobbery, or class snobbery, and there is “single issue snobbery”. The Oxford Dictionary of English supports this dichotomy.
Snob – noun a person with an exaggerated respect for high social position or wealth who seeks to associate with social superiors and looks down on those regarded as socially inferior.
(with adj. or noun modifier) a person who believes that their tastes in a particular area are superior to those of other people: a musical snob.
The snob’s respect for high social position is “exaggerated”. This would suggest that there may be a level of respect, in this regard, which is in some sense “appropriate”, but the definition does not attempt to delineate the point at which the snob’s deference becomes, in some sense, pathological. With regard to the latter definition, relating to a specific area of human activity such as music, the Oxford definition also seems to fall short. If the attribute of “taste” has any validity at all, then there will be people whose tastes in any given field of human endeavour are truly superior to those of the rest of us. There is good taste and there is bad taste. An art connoisseur, for example, may well have a self-conscious, refined appreciation that is based on sound knowledge and many years of experience. For this consciousness of superiority to cross the line into snobbery, there must be in addition an attitude of mind, be it perhaps smugness, complacency, or self-satisfaction. Lionel Trilling did not object to F. R. Leavis’ viewpoint that D. H. Lawrence as a novelist is superior to C. P. Snow. He objected to Leavis’ tone. It is a tone of disdain. The Bloomsbury Concise English Dictionary, while maintaining the dichotomy of the social snob and the single issue snob, emphasises this quality of disdain.
Snob 1 an admirer and cultivator of people with high social status who disdains those considered inferior 2 a person who disdains people considered to have inferior knowledge or tastes
The Bloomsbury definitions offer, with the disdain concept, an essential aspect of snobbery which is missing from the Oxford definitions – namely the fact that the attribute of snobbery is always assigned pejoratively.
The question arises as to whether the two entities of class snobbery and single issue snobbery represent a continuum, the class snob being a sum total of all the available snobberies across the spectrum of human activity, a kind of Grand Integral of the Snobberies; or whether they represent two entirely separate phenomena. Chambers Dictionary does not allude to the single issue snob – the music snob, the literary snob, the art snob, the wine snob, and so on. But the sense that snobbery is a pejorative attribute comes through most strongly here:
Snob … one who makes himself ridiculous or odious by the value he sets on social standing or rank, by his fear of being ranked too low, and by his different behaviour towards different classes.
Chambers also offers a number of definitions that can be seen to be more or less obsolete. Hence:
Snob n. a shoemaker, shoemaker’s apprentice, cobbler (coll.; Scot. snab): a townsman (Cambridge slang): a person of ordinary or low rank (obs): an ostentatious vulgarian (Obs): a blackleg (obs)
Such definitions may not be completely irrelevant and may shed some light on the evolution of the word’s current meaning. There is an implication that a snob, for all his aspiration to rank, is lowly. This idea persists in the notion that, for example, the chauffeur is a much bigger snob than his Lordship sitting in the back of the Rolls Royce. It turns out that the man in the back is a perfectly straightforward individual with no airs and graces at all. The implication is that if you are in some sense “truly” superior, you are not a snob. This seems to me to be a dangerous misapprehension, to which I will return.
It is because snobbery has evolved, has become difficult to spot, that it may be worthwhile spending some time exploring its anatomy. Then we may more readily recognise snobbery when it confronts us. A preliminary exploration of single issue snobbery might be a way in, as examples may represent snobbery in its simplest form. We may, so to speak, construct a “Special Theory” of snobbery, with regard to any single issue, to account for this. But once we start to construct a “General Theory” of social or class snobbery, we may need to embark on the enormous task of integrating the sum of all the snobberies, to see why a person should consider himself superior across the whole compass of society, or the whole spectrum of human interaction. The mysterious metaphysical paradox of social snobbery is that snobs consider themselves superior, because they are superior. That is what makes snobbery such an incomprehensible phenomenon, and why it is worthwhile to give it close scrutiny.
A Special Theory of Snobbery
As has been said, the “single issue” snob is generally preoccupied with matters of taste. There is nothing inherently snobbish about having taste – or discernment – or striving to cultivate it. Taste can be complex. Consider “taste” in its literal sense. People attend wine-tasting classes run by wine connoisseurs, in order to learn how to appreciate fine wines. There are premier marques, and there is plonk. There’s nothing inherently snobbish about being able to tell the difference. One may or may not consider that vin ordinaire has its place. The person who drinks only the finest vintages may not necessarily be a wine snob. Merely, he may have taste. On matters of taste, I have selected “from my cellar” (actually from my fridge) a bottle of wine more or less at random, and I read this note on the label:
This Viognier has lovely aromas of orange blossom and honeysuckle, with fresh pineapple and dried figs on the palate and a silky textural finish.
Contrast that with a spoof tasting note composed by the American humourist James Thurber in 1946.
It’s a naïve domestic Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you’ll be amused by its presumption.
Here we have illustrated another essential component of snobbery. Can a wine be “naïve”, or “presumptuous”? Hardly. This writing is a lampoon of the pretentious. Snobbery is always characterised by an element of pretence. We come across the same phenomenon in haute cuisine. Consider the following entrée à la carte, another spoof:
Embattered cheek of halibut festooned in a lavish coulis imbroglio, besmirched with a rock salt vinaigrette, chaperoned by seared pommes frittes enjambements. 45
You may recognise the dish as fish and chips, with salt and vinegar. The number 45 states the price. The currency is not stated, and there is no small change. “45” invites the diner to be indifferent to cost. It is taken for granted that he has deep pockets. To suggest otherwise would be an embarrassing impertinence. Some diners may feel soothed by this, but would you pay £45.00 for fish and chips? Caveat emptor.
Then there is the purple language. Why is the coulis an imbroglio? And why are the chips enjambements? Poetic language indeed. Some people believe language can exert a magic quite independent of its meaning. When the language of the menu is highly perfumed, mind your wallet.
The same may be said for real estate:
Garden Flat in the heart of Edinburgh’s historic New Town. Original Adam appointments. Offers over £1,399,000
A Garden Flat is, of course, a basement. It’s only bricks and mortar. But it’s all about location location location.
And one comes across the same phenomenon in the fashion industry. There is currently a vogue among young women, occasionally young men, and even occasionally older men and women who would prefer to stay young, to wear jeans with extravagant slashes usually cut across the knees. I call this “Waif Couture”, or “Gamine Chic”. These garments may be marketed, as new, in this state, for, say, £140, which rather suggests that with the right pitch, and the right hype, you can sell anything to anybody. I have a notion that, a generation from now, young women will look at old photographs and say to their mothers, “Did you really dress like that?”
Women who choose to dress in rags will often offset the gamine chic look with bling, and fashion accessories, the expensive watch, the expensive bag, even the expensive car. These are statements. They are status symbols, signals indicating social standing within a particular echelon. A watch that costs £10,000 will not necessarily tell the time more accurately than a watch that costs £10. But it is a signal of affluence; where there’s Schmuck, there’s brass.
Single issue snobbery, therefore, can serve a function as an integral part of a commercial enterprise. The sommelier, the restauranteur, the real estate agent, and the couturier utilise the evidently seductive attraction of snobbery in order to make money. In addition to the commodity on sale, there is the “label”. The label affords the buyer prestige. Prestige, rather than the commodity itself, is really what the buyer is prepared to pay an inflated amount of money for, in order to ensure its acquisition. But if the prestige is at heart a pretence, then snobbery is essentially the modus operandi of a scam.
This raises the question, whether the person who buys the naïve, presumptuous Burgundy, or the torn jeans, or the hugely inflated real estate, knows he is being duped? Is he aware that the prestige by association that he seeks has no sound basis? Does he buy something vapid, fully aware he is investing in emperor’s clothes? It is clear that the snobbery of materialism relies heavily on the allure of conspicuous consumption.
We tend to use the expression “emperor’s clothes” in an off-hand way to denote something which is grossly overvalued. The expression comes from the story by Hans Christian Andersen, The Emperor’s New Clothes, and it is worth considering this story in more detail.
The emperor of an ancient realm is obsessed with fashion. His wardrobe is his entire preoccupation. A couple of con-men, seeing their chance, move into town, set up a loom, and promise to make the emperor a suit of clothes of unparalleled richness and beauty. A special feature of this suit is that only the discerning will see it. If you happen to be stupid and therefore unfit to hold office, it will remain invisible to you.
The fraudsters accept payment in advance as well as the finest textile raw materials, and appear to work away at their empty loom. The Emperor sends a trusted official, then a second one, to admire work in progress. The officials see nothing, conclude they are stupid and unworthy, and tell the emperor the suit is magnificent. Eventually the emperor goes to see for himself, and draws the same conclusion. When at last the suit is completed, the emperor dons it, and displays himself before his populace. It is only a child who says, “But he’s got nothing on!” Of course it is a child who sees, literally, through it all. When the child says, “But he’s got nothing on!” then the eyes of the populace dislimn. The child, as it were, permits them all to wake from an hypnotic trance. But the participants in the procession remain in a state of hysteria because they have too much dignity to lose. And the chamberlains hold on tighter than ever, and carry the train which does not exist at all.
Yet single issue snobs are not always in it for the money. It would be quite wrong to level the same charge upon F. R. Leavis that he himself levelled upon C. P. Snow – that of being vapid. He genuinely thought Snow was as dodgy as a used car salesman trying to sell him a malfunctioning jalopy. And in no sense was Leavis being venal. Yet there remains a parallel with the pretensions evident in various commercial enterprises. Snobbery is about power, and its retention. In his Richmond lecture, Leavis took pains to emphasise the importance to Cambridge University of Scrutiny, a literary periodical with which he was deeply involved for twenty years. “We were, and knew we were, Cambridge – the essential Cambridge in spite of Cambridge.” Is this not somewhat parochial? This was Cambridge at the height of its scientific and mathematical glory. What on earth would Rutherford, or J. J. Thomson, or Hardy, or Ramanujan have made of it?
A General Theory of Snobbery
If snobbery is about power, then class snobbery is about the concentration of power within an elite. You cannot have class snobbery without entertaining the idea of an Establishment. Chambers, again:
Establishment: The class in a community or in a field of activity who hold power, usually because they are linked socially, and who are usually considered to have conservative opinions and conventional values.
In some respects the British Establishment has changed very little over the last 300 years. We see this in the way that the prestigious English private schools (bizarrely known as public schools), and the elite universities have produced alumni proceeding to fill prominent positions of leadership in society. It is salutary to consider the provenance of British Prime Ministers, regarding in particular their education, since that high office first evolved in the early 18th century. Sir Robert Walpole is widely regarded as Britain’s first Prime Minister. He occupied the position between 1721 and 1742. Since 1721 the role has been filled 80 times by, to date, 58 individuals. The precise figures: University education: Oxbridge – 43 Prime ministers (Oxford educated 31 PMs, Cambridge educated 12.) Some of the public schools: Eton: 20 PMs, Harrow: 7, Westminster: 5. Winchester: 2. (Incidentally, Glasgow High School has to date produced 2 PMs – Henry Campbell-Bannerman and Andrew Bonar Law. I remember the golden age of musical education in the Glasgow of the 1960s. The summer residential course of Glasgow Schools’ First Orchestra was held in Castle Toward by Dunoon. The High School boys had their own exclusive dormitory. I suppose their masters did not wish them mixing with the hoi polloi. And whilst on the subject of Prime Ministers, it might be recalled that when John Major, son of a music hall performer, and his wife Norma, entered 10 Downing Street, it was remarked by a Downing Street member of staff that, a generation ago they could only have gained access through the back door, as the help.)
The disinterested observer might be forgiven for concluding that this concentration of future leadership within a narrow confine represents something of a stitch-up. Of course elite education provides pupils and students with what Jane Austen called “useful acquaintance”. There is a lot of common heritage, and shared traditions of custom and usage, as manifest in language, accent, modes of dressing and modes of behaviour. It’s a kind of freemasonry. In Geoffrey Household’s pre-war thriller Rogue Male, the protagonist-without-a-name tries to define, or at least give a sense of, this complex network.
Who belongs to Class X? I don’t know till I talk to him and then I know at once. It is not, I think, a question of accent, but rather of the gentle voice. It is certainly not a question of clothes. It may be a question of bearing. I am not talking, of course, of provincial society in which the division between gentry and non-gentry is purely and simply a question of education.
What are the attributes necessary and sufficient to define somebody as a class snob? I put forward three:
- Disdain
- Exclusivity
- Pride & Prejudice
Snobbery is as old as the hills, and doubtless evident in all cultures. The gospels, for example, are full of snobs. First among them are the Pharisees. They felt themselves to be elite, and exclusive. They were proud of themselves, and prejudiced against outsiders, whom they regarded with disdain. Early on in Luke’s Gospel, in chapter IV, Jesus preached in the synagogue of his home town of Nazareth. At first, the Pharisees were rather impressed, if in a slightly condescending way. Is not this Joseph’s son? In Scotland we would say, “I kent his faither.” Jesus said a few words which on the surface appear rather innocuous:
Many widows were in Israel in the days of Elias, when the heaven was shut up for three years and six months, when great famine was throughout all the land;
But unto none of them was Elias sent, save unto Sarepta, a city of Sidon, unto a woman that was a widow.
And many lepers were in Israel in the time of Eliseus the prophet, and none of them was cleansed, saving Naaman the Syrian.
And all they in the synagogue, when they heard these things, were filled with wrath,
And rose up, and thrust him out of the city, and led him unto the brow of the hill, wherein their city was built, that they might cast him down headlong.
But he passing through the midst of them went his way.
Well, Jesus meant to turn the world upside down. He sided with the meek and lowly, and the outsiders. That was why the Pharisees took against him. He wasn’t buying into their world view. So they started plotting his demise from very early on.
Disdain has been examined already in the context of the single issue snob. It is also readily apparent in the extracts from Vita Sackville-West’s letters, where indeed its presence is so stark as to require little further comment. But it is worth noting that disdain always goes hand in hand with ignorance. Sackville-West is apparently completely unaware that the classes she so brutally despises are responsible for the output of Gross Domestic Product upon which she survives and thrives.
We may think of the establishment as a club, like a very exclusive golf club, with its opaque constitution, written and unwritten, its rules and traditions. Such institutions tend to be socially conservative, therefore constantly behind the times. Occasionally a reactionary incident of one kind or another renders the club liable to charges of anachronistic absurdity, and there is a rush to damage limitation, a PR exercise, that has been referred to as “a flurry of blazers”. Even so, such clubs are not short of aspiring would-be members, and there may be a long waiting list. Applicants may be black-balled. The black ball is the equivalent of the glass ceiling. The black ball will turn up from an anonymous source, and the applicant may never discover his own perceived apparent deficiencies. The bewildered applicant finds himself in a Kafkaesque situation. He is black-balled and he doesn’t know it. He is merely faced with endless obfuscation. Everything is very difficult. In the film The King’s Speech, King George VI who is depicted, at least by the end of the film, as a man who is not a snob, asks his Archbishop of Canterbury, who is a snob, to ensure that his speech therapist, Lionel Logue, is seated in that part of Westminster Abbey reserved for the Royal Family, for his Coronation. A look of horror comes over the Archbishop’s face. He scratches his chin, shakes his head, and says, “Well, of course I’ll see what can be done, but it’s going to be very, very difficult.”
Is it possible to have a society that does not have an Establishment? In 2016, the New Zealand high court judge Dame Lowell Goddard was appointed to head an independent inquiry into child sexual abuse in the UK. When she took up the job, she was asked if she was concerned about the reaction to her work, of the Establishment. She expressed bewilderment at the question, explaining that New Zealand does not have an Establishment.
Shortly afterwards she quit the job. Her letter of resignation was extremely short, and offered no explanation, although she did say she felt very far from home. Perhaps she found out, at last, what the Establishment was.
It may be pertinent to add that New Zealand has had a unicameral parliament since 1950. There is no upper chamber. Some politicians in the UK, even some prominent amongst the Establishment, have been trying to get rid of the House of Lords, or at least drastically modify it, for over 100 years. The charges against the House of Lords are that it is unelected, and it is bloated. There are over 800 members. It is said to be the second biggest upper chamber in the world, after China’s. It is manifestly undemocratic. This would suggest that members of the Establishment, while paying lip service to democracy, don’t really trust it. They don’t trust the democratic representatives of society to make the “right” decisions. The great and the good need to exercise the steady hand of sage restraint.
We describe the club as “exclusive”, an expression often used loosely to describe anything top of the range, aspiring to excellence, be it a club, a restaurant, a hotel, a school, and so on. But being “exclusive” predicates “exclusion”. The Establishment is a club from which most people are excluded. That is not to say that someone of lowly status cannot make application to join the club. The main criterion for membership – not, perhaps, full membership, but some kind of associate membership – is that one holds the club in high esteem, and signs up to honour, respect and adhere to the club rules. Thus the lowliest individuals may become integral to the smooth running of the club. The club doorman, for example, may never venture into the club’s interior much further than its foyer, but he becomes a crucial associate member of the club because he becomes the instrument of exclusion, barring any possible entry by the unworthy. If he does his job well, the club chairman will take some time and effort to sustain him in his task, pausing to chat briefly when the door is held open for him.
“Morning, Caruthers.”
“Sir.”
“All well?”
“Sir.”
“I hope you are managing some quality time with your family.”
“Indeed, sir.”
“Splendid! Keep up the good work!”
This vignette emphasises the reason why it is a mistake to withhold the charge of snobbery from the man at the top. If he appears not to manifest airs of exclusivity, pride, and disdain, it is because he has employed a staff to fulfil such functions. An essential feature of the membership at the summit of the Snobbery Gestalt, is hypocrisy.
With respect to pride and prejudice, the snob has a high opinion of himself. We have seen that his self-regard may or may not be ostentatious. But he is certainly delighted to be a member of the exclusive club, and his membership does not encourage humility. He often carries himself with a certain air of pomposity which has an insolent quality, so well captured by Robert Burns:
Ye see yon birkie ca’d ‘a lord,’
Wha struts, an stares, an a’ that?
These are lines from the great radical poem A Man’s a Man for a’ that, that may be read, can hardly otherwise be read, as a coruscating indictment of snobbery. Tinsel show, ribband, star, prince, marquis, duke… blah blah blah!
Pride, and prejudice, of course evoke Jane Austen’s novel of the same name. Pride and Prejudice might be interpreted as a study of the anatomy of snobbery. If the word pride describes Mr Darcy, then prejudice alludes to Miss Elizabeth Bennet. Miss Bennet identifies Mr Darcy early on as a snob. He is a man of rank and considerable wealth who has an aloof and haughty manner. Apparently taciturn, he makes little effort to put those around him at ease. You might say he lacks social skills and sees no need to acquire and cultivate them. But Miss Eliza has her own form of pride; she takes pleasure in identifying and mocking that which is pretentious and ridiculous, a characteristic she has in common with her father and which she undoubtedly shares with Jane Austen herself. There is plenty within the pages of Pride & Prejudice for her to mock. The book is riddled with snobs. Chief among them is Lady Catherine de Burgh, but there are others. Mr Bingley’s sister Caroline is a snob, although she is chiefly motivated to ridicule the Bennet family, not because of considerations of rank, but because she is jealous of Elizabeth whom she knows Darcy admires. And the parson Mr Collins is a frightful snob intent on ingratiating himself with Lady de Burgh.
But as the book proceeds, Elizabeth learns to her mortification that she has at least to some extent misjudged, prejudged, Darcy. His reserve and hauteur have blinded her to his many sterling qualities. Her mortification is in the realisation that her world view is as purblind as that of the people she chooses to criticise. She is, if you will, an inverted snob. The book might have been entitled, admittedly awkwardly but with some accuracy, Snobbery and Inverted Snobbery.
Can the word Pride be regarded as synonymous with Snobbery? Elizabeth’s younger sister, the bookish Mary, gives us a definition of Pride:
“Pride,” observed Mary, who piqued herself upon the solidity of her reflections, “is a very common failing I believe. By all that I have read, I am convinced that it is very common indeed, that human nature is particularly prone to it, and that there are very few of us who do not cherish a feeling of self-complacency on the score of some quality or other, real or imaginary. Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.”
This highly articulate utterance leads me to wonder whether Jane Austen employed a technique later adopted by Alfred Hitchcock, who would appear in front of camera for a few seconds in each of the films he directed. If the author’s wit could encompass self-parody, then perhaps Ms Austen’s cameo role is as Mary. Mary is not portrayed as an attractive personality. She is plain, bookish, and rather cheerless. She does like to perform at the fortepiano, but indifferently, and she is inclined to overstay her welcome.
Mary’s observation strikes a chord. The snob is really indifferent to the opinion of somebody whom he considers beneath him. He does not care what that person thinks because he holds his opinion as worthless and beneath contempt. One begins to see why the sin of Pride was regarded as so vile in the medieval world. Pride is chief among the seven deadly sins.
The idea that social snobbery might be a grand integral of all the single issue snobberies is of course fanciful. But it is apposite in one sense. Social snobs are attracted to, and gravitate towards, perceived excellence, as if they hope to be sprinkled with stardust. When the Beatles were awarded their MBEs in 1965, retired colonels, disgruntled from Tunbridge Wells, returned their gongs to the palace in disgust. Granted the award had been engineered by a Labour Prime Minister, but that the Beatles had already appeared in the Royal Command Performance showed how the great and the good were enchanted, like the rest of us, by the whole Beatles phenomenon. The exposure to the Establishment was all new to the Beatles. They hadn’t really come across “Hooray Henry” types. John Lennon was outraged when a toff cut off a bit of Ringo’s hair for a memento. At length there was a disillusionment. Lennon returned the gong in 1969. The Beatles had a sense they had been used, abused, and ripped off by high society. George Harrison muttered wistfully, “All that corduroy we sold for them……”
Gongs have a specific purpose within the Snobbery Gestalt. They appear to confer an honour upon an individual, but that is not their primary purpose. Their primary purpose is to absorb the talent and achievement of the recipient into the realm of the Establishment, and enhance its own sense of elitism. The Gestalt gathers excellence unto itself. Occasionally, the recipient of an honour subsequently blots his copy book in some way. He is rendered despicable, and, like some disgraced member of the clergy, defrocked. Like Dreyfus, his epaulettes are ceremoniously torn from his shoulders. The function of such a ceremony is not to further disgrace the individual, but to protect and preserve the supposedly unblemished sanctity of the elite. That person is not a knight. He was never a knight. So when it all goes wrong, disgraced individuals are obliged to return their gong. They are publicly humiliated. If they have been found guilty of a crime, it is likely that the public service broadcaster will cease to afford them even the courtesy of a “Mr” or “Ms” preceding their name, but will refer to them solely by their surname. They are outcast. Cancelled. Blot your copybook, and they will drop you like hot coals.
Honours are finely graded. An unsung hero of low social caste who has been carrying out sterling work, perhaps as a carer, or a road sweeper, for a lifetime, is liable to receive the British Empire Medal, rather than to receive the Order of Merit or to become a Companion of Honour. Not that a person from the humblest background cannot rise to the highest ranks of society. The Establishment rather champions the idea of social mobility. Social mobility is not the same as “levelling up”. When, during a state opening of parliament, the late queen had to announce that her government was committed to “levelling up”, I thought I could detect, in somebody usually adept at maintaining a straight, expressionless face, a sense that she found the expression excruciating. You might think that “social mobility” and “levelling up” are synonymous, but in fact they are quite different concepts. Social mobility promises promotion to the individual; levelling up promises promotion to an entire stratum of society. Social mobility gives the possibility of moving, for example, from the working class to the middle class, but it has no interest in eroding the class system. It might better and more accurately be termed “class mobility”. “Levelling up” is altogether more radical, but given that the size of the economic cake is finite, it would be more honest to describe a redistribution of wealth as “levelling down”. I think we may be confident that, no matter the complexion of the current government, or any subsequent government, the “levelling” aspiration, be it up or down, will quietly disappear.
We cannot discuss class snobbery without mentioning Heraldry, surely manifesting the most precious and exquisitely distilled language of snobbery. We have already mentioned the highly perfumed language of the advertising of luxury products, but surely Heraldry tops the most extravagant of them. Take, for example (and purely at random) the heraldic description of the badge of the clan Maclaren:
A mermaid Proper her tail part upended Argent, holding in her dexterr hand, a spray of laurel paleways Vert and her dexter hand a looking-glass Proper, mounted Gules upon which is…
And so on.
It can hardly be surprising that Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond novels, in his later years, looking for ever more bizarre and indeed farcical themes on which to base his novels, turned to heraldry, or more broadly, to the subject of snobbery. Fleming took snobbery as a central theme in On her Majesty’s Secret Service. It is really the second novel in a trilogy about the arch villain, one Ernst Stavro Blofeld, mastermind behind the criminal organisation SPECTRE. Following Thunderball, Bond is, somewhat reluctantly, on Blofeld’s trail. He gets a lead with the discovery that Blofeld has an Achilles’ heel. He is a snob. And, as befits a snob, he desires a title, allowing Bond to go under cover as a “pursuivant”, and pretend to work on researching Blofeld’s ancestry. It is a completely absurd notion.
In the 1950s and 60s, the James Bond novels were widely marketed as books full of sex, sadism, and snobbery. Doubtless these were regarded as powerful selling points. The depiction, and the apparent accessibility of fine food, fine wines, and exotic locations were very attractive to a populace, poverty-stricken by the war and still on rationing. With respect to brand, Fleming certainly understood the power of the label. When the books came to be filmed, many people were surprised that the fictional Old Etonian (even if his tenure was rather ignominiously cut short) was to be played by a milkman from Fountainbridge, Edinburgh. Fleming had had in mind somebody like David Niven, who does get a fond mention in You Only Live Twice. No doubt it was Mssrs Saltzman and Broccoli, from the USA, who recognised the seductive and dangerous magnetism of Sean Connery. Fleming was doubtful. In turn, Connery thought Fleming was an interesting man, but a snob. But despite Eton, and Fettes, Bond comes across as rather a classless man and it was to Fleming’s credit that towards the end of his life he said, that while writing the books he had not had somebody like Connery in mind, he would have, if writing now. Indeed in Bond’s Obit in You Only Live Twice he gives a bit of back story and makes Bond half Scottish, half Swiss. And in The Man with the Golden Gun, Bond describes himself as a Scottish peasant.
So, snobbery has to evolve. If the outward manifestations of snobbery become too refined, then they become vulnerable to ridicule. BBC English as it was before the Second World War, and even beyond, sounds archaic to the modern ear. Received Pronunciation is now more subdued, flatter, almost accent-less. It may be said to be more democratic. Recently there has been a tendency for the elite to utilise the glottal stop, which a generation ago would have characterised a heavily industrial regional accent such as could be heard in Glasgow. This is an attempt by the elite to be invisible.
This raises the issue of the utility of snobbery. What is its purpose? Whom does it benefit? Does snobbery have an adaptive value?
Only to the elite. Snobbery is not beneficial to society as a whole. It only helps to widen the gulf between the rich and the poor. One thing the Pandemic taught us was to identify the people that society most depend on in order to keep functioning. They turn out to be health care workers, carers, shopkeepers, road sweepers, refuse collectors, and grave diggers. That list is not exhaustive, but I don’t think it includes Hedge Fund managers.
jamescalumcampbell 