THE NEW BOOK OF SNOBS
A Definitive Guide to Modern Snobbery
By D.J. Taylor
Illustrated. 275 pages. Constable.
The New Book of Snobs by DJ Taylor review – what is the new
snobbery?
There are film snobs, garden snobs and inverse snobs, not
just people who send their children to elite private schools. Snobbery is in
all classes and is a very human failing
Bee Wilson
Thu 27 Oct 2016 06.59 BST Last modified on Wed 29 Nov 2017
10.11 GMT
“I’m afraid we’ve
become terrible salt snobs,” joked the late food writer Alan Davidson when he
and his wife Jane had me round for lunch one day in the early 2000s. On the
table were a panoply of special salts, from pink Himalayan to damp, grey fleur
de sel from France. Announcing himself as a salt snob was a form of gentle
self-mockery, something Alan was good at. He knew how absurd it was to have all
these salts, when he could have made do with a cheap tub of Saxa. But it was
also a modest kind of boastfulness. Alan wanted me to notice how superior his
salt collection was, which I duly did.
The concept of snobbery is deeply complex, as the literary
critic and biographer DJ Taylor cleverly explores in his “definitive guide” to
snobs. Snobbery is a form of social superiority, but it can also be a moral
failing. Snobs may laud it over others, but we, in turn, despise and punish
them for it. Taylor starts his book with the “Plebgate” affair of 2012, in
which the government chief whip Andrew Mitchell was forced to resign his
official post, and later pay substantial damages, after it emerged that he had
rebuked a police officer who asked him not to cycle through the gates of 10
Downing Street with the words: “Best you learn your fucking place … You’re
fucking plebs.” As Taylor notes, Mitchell’s sin was not to swear, but his use
of the word “plebs”, which, in ancient Rome, simply meant the common people.
In modern times, very few snobs are snobs all the time. To
be a salt snob does not necessarily mean that you will be a snob in any other
area of your life. Taylor confesses that he becomes a snob whenever he hears
Adele on the radio or hears a Channel 4 presenter “tumbling over her glottal
stops”, but hopes that he is not a snob per se. He is the son of a grammar
school boy from a council estate and feels that he knew “all about petty social
distinctions from an early age”. He is fascinated by the many forms snobbery
takes, from the garden snobs who despise hanging baskets and patios (the
correct word, apparently, is terrace) to the inverse snobs who feel superior to
anything that smacks too much of “middle-class” behaviour. Taylor also
identifies the film snob, a perverse individual who may consider Brian de
Palma’s Body Double wildly underrated and sees no point in Meryl Streep.
In his The Book of Snobs (1846-7), the novelist WM Thackeray
noted that some people were snobs “only in certain circumstances and relations
of life”. Others, however, were what Thackeray called positive snobs, who were
“snobs everywhere, in all companies, from morning to night, from youth to
grave”. Thackeray argued that in the Victorian society in which he lived, many
people could not help being positive snobs, because the whole of British
national life was founded on the principle of hereditary privilege. The true
snob, in Thackeray’s book, would find, as Taylor explains, that “his entire
existence is governed by its logic: wife, house, career, recreations”. The
Victorian snobs depicted by Thackeray might ruin themselves to pay for a
fashionable hat or a pianoforte in the back parlour or an absurdly expensive
truffle-laden dinner. This was because they felt it was social death to dine
with people of the wrong class, such as doctors or lawyers, instead of “the
country families”.
Maybe I move in the wrong circles (or do I mean the right
circles?), but I wonder how many people in modern Britain, even posh people,
still think or act like this. Taylor, the author of a biography of Thackeray,
aspires to update The Book of Snobs to modern Britain. But for much of the
book, it feels as if he has hardly updated it at all, writing as if all snobs
were people who necessarily went to elite public schools and who insist, like
Nancy Mitford, on being “U” and not “non-U”. Taylor anatomises many varieties
of current snob: school snobs, country snobs, property snobs and so on, in
novelistic sketches. But many of his different snobs end up sounding rather
similar, and I don’t recognise much of contemporary society in his book.
By the end, Taylor’s snob seems to have become a very
specific class of person, one who keeps labradors, eats potted shrimps and
cares about whether someone went to Winchester or Eton. Such a snob is rather
like the Sloane Ranger of the 1980s (his acknowledgments cite Ann Barr and
Peter York’s The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook, on which he seems to have
modelled some of his style). Snobs, Taylor writes, are “fond of mangling or
truncating personal pronouns”. The “diehard snob doesn’t have a bath, he ‘takes
his tub’”. Late middle-age snobs “talk artlessly of having ‘made a bish’”. The
snob, Taylor airily claims, “is a person who uses a title ostentatiously”.
Yet we can all think of plenty of snobs, of one kind or
another, who base their snobbery neither on title nor ostentation. And so can
Taylor. What makes this book a missed opportunity is that he has taken what
could have been a panoramic meditation on the place of snobbery in British
society and crammed it into a needlessly narrow and archaic framework, giving the
impression that snobs only belong to that class of people who are found on the
grouse moor or in Debrett’s.
Taylor is an intelligent writer, however, and the best parts
of this uneven book suggest that snobbery is far from limited to the upper
classes. “Snobbery is universal,” he argues at one point. ‘“No social class,
intellectual category or art form is immune to the snob virus.” The essence of
all snobbery, Taylor says, is the making of arbitrary distinctions. It consists
of “imposing yourself on a social situation, pulling rank, indicating, with
varying degrees of subtlety, your own detachment from the people in whose
presence you find yourself”. As such, it is both an unlikable characteristic
and a very human one. Whether we are eating salt or deciding where our child
goes to school, the person has not yet been born who never once secretly felt
that his or her way of doing things was better. The snob is someone who hasn’t
yet realised when to keep these feelings to himself.
‘The New Book of Snobs’ Updates the Shifting Science of
Social Cues
By Dwight Garner
April 18, 2017
The English writer William Golding (“Lord of the Flies”) had
a longstanding sense of social inadequacy. When he applied to Oxford
University, the admissions interviewer noted that he was “N.T.S.” — not top
shelf.
Golding wrote that he would like to sneak up on Eton, the
elite private school, as if he were a cartoon villain, “with a mile or two of
wire, a few hundred tons of TNT and one of those plunger-detonating machines
which makes the user feel like Jehovah.”
There’s no sting like a class sting. There’s a bit of
Golding, an imagined status-anarchist, in most of us. Who doesn’t hate snobs?
Yet we’re all snobs about some things.
It’s among the contentions of D. J. Taylor’s clever and
timely “The New Book of Snobs” that the world would be a poorer place without a
bit of insolence and ostentation. “The cultivation of an arbitrary
superiority,” he writes — whether we are in a refugee camp or a manor house —
“is a vital part of the curious behavioral compound that makes us who we are.”
Often enough, you’d need a hydraulic rescue tool, a Jaws of
Life, to pry apart snobbery from a simple human desire to get ahead. As Taylor
puts it, “not all social aspiration is snobbish” and “to want to succeed and to
delight in your success is not necessarily to betray a moral failing.”
Taylor’s book takes its title and inspiration from William
Makepeace Thackeray’s “The Book of Snobs” (1848), in which that Victorian
novelist defined a snob as one “who meanly admires mean things.”
Snobbery is no longer so easy to define. As in a string of
binary code, the ones and zeros keep flipping. In a world in which reverse
snobbery is often the cruelest sort, it can be hard for the tyro to keep up.
This is where Taylor’s book comes in. “The New Book of
Snobs” will not help you navigate the American status system. It’s a very
British book; so British that there are currently no plans to publish it in the
United States. (I’m reviewing it because it’s new and interesting, and because
copies can be easily found online.)
To understand Taylor fully, it will help to be conversant
with the humor magazine Viz, as well as with the humor magazine Punch; with the
reality-TV star Katie Price as well as with the writer Nancy Mitford; and with
the Kray twins and the rapper Tinie Tempah, as well as with Evelyn Waugh and
Beau Brummell.
Writing is hard because thinking is hard. Writing about
class and snobbery, in particular, is so hard that doing it well bumps you a
rung up the class ladder. In America, no one has made a serious attempt to
unpick the multiple meanings of status cues since Paul Fussell did in his
wicked book “Class” (1983).
As a myriad-minded social critic, Taylor is not quite on Fussell’s
level. (Almost no human is.) But he’s astute, supremely well read and
frequently very funny. In its combination of impact with effervescence, his
book puts me in mind of a Black Velvet, that curious cocktail made from
Guinness stout and champagne.
The English class system, with its hereditary titles, is
vastly different from ours. But snobbery — class’s meddlesome twin — is a
lingua franca. There’s plenty for an attentive student to learn here.
We are in the age of Trump, and, clearly, some forms of
attempted snobbery will always take the form of conspicuous consumption. Taylor
correctly points out, however, that the wiliest snobs “pursue their craft by
stealth.”
He’s excellent on the distinctions that can be conveyed “by
an agency as subtle as an undone button, a gesture, a glance, an intonation,
the pronunciation of a certain word.” In England, it’s possible to be crushed
by the sound of an attenuated vowel.
Americans in Britain, Taylor suggests, must remain on alert.
Upper-class Brits like to ridicule American vernacular by stressing our usages,
as in (the italics are his) “I think she’s gone to the restroom,” or “We’ll
have to take a rain check on that.”
Don’t think you can escape this sort of game. “The man who
most loudly proclaims his lack of snobbishness,” Taylor writes, “is most likely
to be a snob.”
Taylor’s book is filled with small, tart taxonomies. He
lists the great snob heroes of fiction, including Lady Catherine de Bourgh in
“Pride and Prejudice.”
He offers tidy profiles of notable snobs, including the
journalist and politician Tom Driberg (1905-1976), who would write the managers
of hotels in advance, “demanding an assurance that there would be no sauce
bottles or other condiments on the dining tables during his stay.”
The author probes some of the class resentment behind
Brexit, Britain’s decision to leave the European Union. President Trump is not
mentioned in this book. But leaning on George Orwell and Charles Dickens,
Taylor discusses nationalism as “an extreme form of snobbery.”
A great deal of strong writing about class has been emerging
from Britain in recent years. I’m thinking, in particular, of Owen Jones’s book
“Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class” (2011). Taylor’s book is vastly
different from Jones’s, but, in a sense, these men are climbing the same
mountain from different sides.
To linger on the topic of class can seem like a sign of a
sick soul. The subject can make us touchy, whether we are highborn or low or
someplace in the middle. The critic Dwight Macdonald was a man of the radical
left, yet a descendant of the old Dwight family of New England. In one grouchy
1947 letter, he wrote, “We can’t all be proletarians, you know.”
With nearly all status signifiers in flux, books like Taylor’s
are more important than ever. Snobbery and immense learning, he makes plain, do
not always walk hand in hand.
But in 2017, it pays to heed the advice of Ian McEwan, who
wrote: “It is quite impossible these days to assume anything about people’s educational
level from the way they talk or dress or from their taste in music. Safest to
treat everyone you meet as a distinguished intellectual.”
Follow Dwight Garner on Twitter: @DwightGarner
Andrew Mitchell and the Plebgate affair explained for
non-Brits
Why is ‘pleb’ a toxic word? How can a judge calling you a
bit dim be a good thing? And how can two people sue each other at the same
time? A guide for non-British readers
Peter Walker
@peterwalker99
Thu 27 Nov 2014 18.33 GMT Last modified on Thu 21 Sep 2017
00.35 BST
Andrew Mitchell, who resigned as chief whip over the
'plebgate' affair
A senior British politician, Andrew Mitchell, has lost a
high-profile libel action against the publishers of the biggest-selling daily
newspaper, the Sun. That’s the easy bit.
For non-Britons, or indeed anyone who has not been following
each twist and turn in a two-year saga which takes in politics, policing, law,
the media, language, class snobbery and the intricacies of who can use which
gate at Downing Street, everything else gets a bit complex.
We’re here to help. Below is a handy guide to what happened
and what it all means.
So what did happen?
It all began on the evening of 19 September 2012 when
Mitchell, then chief whip of the government – effectively the enforcer for the
ruling party, the person who keeps discipline and makes sure ministers vote as
they are ordered – tried to cycle out of Downing Street. He was in a rush, en
route to an engagement, and wanted to ride directly out of the main vehicle
gates.
But to Mitchell’s displeasure, he was told to dismount and
walk his bike through a pedestrian entrance. He argued with the officer on
duty, PC Toby Rowland and, according to the officer’s account of the exchange,
told him:
Best you learn your fucking place – you don’t run this fucking
government – you’re fucking plebs.
All this was gleefully recounted in the next day’s Sun
newspaper, and even though Mitchell denied using the word “plebs”, the
continued bad publicity led him to resign just over a month later.
The row has rumbled on ever since, including minute
examination of CCTV footage from the evening in question, and culminating in a
legal case which finished on Thursday that saw Mitchell sue the Sun for libel
over its story, while at the same time Mitchell was sued by PC Rowland for
calling the policeman a liar.
The judge, Mr Justice Mitting, released a complex ruling,
but one that concluded Mitchell did use “the words alleged or something so
close”, including the word pleb.
What’s the big problem with pleb?
Meaning a common, or lower-class person, pleb is a largely
outdated piece of slang in Britain, rarely heard by most in recent years before
Mitchell inadvertently brought it back to prominence.
As insults go, pleb is relatively mild, and has a
distinguished etymology, being derived from the Latin term plebeian, a member
of the lower orders in ancient Rome. However, it is a class-based slur, and
despite weekly newspaper articles decreeing the end of class, Britons remain
obsessed by social status, especially the idea a compatriot might be judging
them in connection with it.
This obsession is all the more the case in the government in
which Mitchell served, which is dominated by the products of England’s top
private schools, which are, confusingly, known as public schools. Chief among
these is Eton, attended by David Cameron. Mitchell went to the very marginally
less posh Rugby – current fees for boarders about £32,000 (just over $50,000) a
year – but was later an army officer and investment banker, which makes him
very posh.
The idea of a government minister using a class-laden insult
to demean an ordinary policeman was seen as especially toxic. It didn’t help
Mitchell’s case that he was annoyed at being held up while heading to the
Carlton Club, an old and hugely posh private members’ club.
Who did people believe?
It depends who you asked, and when you asked them. Mitchell
has something of a reputation for anger and blunt speaking – OK, for being very
rude. The just-finished libel trial heard testimony about him calling one security
officer “a little shit” and telling another, charmingly:
That’s a bit above your pay grade Mr Plod.
But there were also claims the police exaggerated the
complaints, in part as a political manoeuvre targeting a government which has
sought major restructuring of policing. The Plebgate affair, as it was
inevitably know, was used as a campaign tool in fighting police cuts.
Eventually, two officers were sacked, one for passing information to the Sun.
For about two days Mitchell was a semi-popular cause célèbre
among British leftwing Twitter users, who liked to argue that if he could be
fitted up by the police, what hope was there for young black men from the inner
city. This didn’t last long.
Why did the judge decide against Mitchell?
In what might count as a slightly mixed verdict for PC
Rowland, the judge ruled in part that he thought it unlikely the officer had
invented the “pleb” exchange because he seemingly did not have the imagination
to do so.
Karen McVeigh
@karenmcveigh1
Not only did Rowland
lack wit, inclination imagination to fabricate, neither did he inclination for
pantomime invention needed #plebgate
Is Mitchell uniquely rude among British ex-cabinet
ministers?
No. Not even this week. David Mellor, who served in
government in the early 1990s, was in the news this week for raging at a London
taxi driver he thought had taken the wrong route. Among the choice sentences
recorded by the driver on his mobile phone was this volley:
You’ve been driving a cab for 10 years, I’ve been in the
cabinet, I’m an award-winning broadcaster, I’m a Queen’s Counsel. You think
that your experiences are anything compared to mine?
What’s the lesson from all this?
Don’t be rude to the police. And be wary of trying to take
them on in the courts – the police trade union, the Police Federation, has
spent a reported £1m ($660,000) backing Rowland’s case. And if you must be rude
as a British politician – as Emily Thornberry also knows only too well – just
don’t bring class into things.
Patricia Routledge as the snob Hyacinth Bucket in Keeping Up
Appearances
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