Feature: Englishness and the Class System

Features

Exploring Englishness, Part 3

This is the third in a series of articles in which we attempt to pin down and dissect various aspects of the English character.

Englishness and the Class System

Whenever one tries to examine Englishness, particularly its expression in English culture, the class system invariably comes up. To say that class has been a central fact of the English experience is almost an understatement; class resentment or class privilege have informed and driven a great deal of English culture, particularly literature and film. The class system has also produced deep, almost unbridgeable schisms within English society itself, so deep that the difficulty of pinning down Englishness largely stems from these divisions. This is because the classes have historically been very different from one another, with radically divergent mores, attitudes and lifestyles, so that when you factor in regional differences as well, it is very difficult to look at the English as a single people. And as English society has been characterised by rigid social divides for most of its history, ever since the Norman Conquest, in fact, it is impossible to look back on a time when the nation was not so split.

Why has our class system, in comparison with similar systems on the Continent, been especially rigid, and the attitudes produced by it so durable and long lasting? The answer lies in fairly ancient history. Like Continental countries, England has had an aristocracy based not simply on wealth and influence, but on pretensions to superiority to the rest of the population. In many Continental countries, however, the fact that these aristocracies often originally came from the same ethnic group as the rest of the population made it hard to make such a fallacious notion stick over time, and Continental history, because of geography, has also made things more fluid. Things in England were very different.

Before the Norman invasion in 1066 there was a Saxon aristocracy of the same stock as the people it governed, so that the barriers between the aristocracy and the common people were somewhat more porous and allowed for more mutual influence than was possible after the invasion. Furthermore, unlike in Europe, feudalism had not yet taken hold. The situation changed dramatically after 1066. I’m sure many people have been fed a line about the Normans’ affection for their new country and eagerness to assimilate and govern the rest of the population fairly, a stereotype that is expanded on by Kipling in the Puck books in the character of the kindly Sir Richard Dalyngridge. However, just as the archaeological finds at Sutton Hoo blew apart the Norman-perpetuated myth of Saxon cultural underdevelopment, so improved research in the twentieth century showed that the reality of the Conquest was very different. After William the Conqueror had defeated Harold Godwinson one of the first things he did was to carry out a systematic genocide of the Saxon ruling class, so that he could then replace them with Norman nobles. Within a few years, about two Saxon members of the aristocracy were left. (William also devastated the rebellious north of England, possibly sowing the first seeds of the North–South divide in the process.) There was very little intermarriage between the Normans and the Saxon population, and because the Normans had imported feudalism, a government based on the rigid rule of an ethnically different aristocracy emerged, with people organised into different gradations of status according to their roles in the feudal network. Even so, this wouldn’t have been so bad but for the fact that the Normans turned their ethnic difference into a virtue, justifying their power with the idea that they because they were racially different to the rest of the population of England they were racially superior, and therefore had a natural right to rule. Did you ever wonder where snobbish phrases such as “Blood will tell,” and (used of the upper classes) “the quality” come from? They stem from this idea of the ethnic superiority of the upper classes. When Tennyson in the high Victorian age proclaimed defiantly that “Kind hearts are more than coronets/ And simple faith than Norman blood”, it was his challenge to the idea of “Norman blood” that was key. The notion of the racial superiority of the upper classes was so powerful that later infusions of new people into the aristocracy (the Hanoverians and a few business people who worked their way up during the era of the Industrial Revolution) generally bought unquestioningly into the idea, in spite of the fact that if it left them “superior” to the bulk of the population, it also rendered them inferior to the “old” families who came over with the Conqueror.

Thus, in England, a snobbishness founded on a racialist ideology was fostered and perpetuated amongst the upper classes and those of the middle classes who aspired to be upwardly mobile (which usually meant most of them). The racialist taint to the class system is one of the main reasons why the system has been so hard to shake, and why we are still suffering its effects. (On a side note, it is useful to make a comparison between our class system and the recently-abolished Indian caste system: both were established by an invading group, which, claiming to be ethnically superior to the rest of the population, managed to get a firm grip on power and maintain control for centuries. The main difference is that our class system lacked a comparable class to the Untouchables and did not have a component of discrimination on the basis of the shade of one’s skin, as opposed to India where social status was directly linked to how dark one was. However, when Jamaican and Asian immigrants first arrived and were absorbed into the working classes, it was for a time easy for the middle and upper classes to place anyone non-white as working class.) How foolish it is, therefore, for any working class person to be racist, when their own families were victims of institutionalised snobbishness bolstered by notions of racial superiority for centuries. Whatever their colour, all working class people have experienced the effects of class-based discrimination.

How, though, did the system survive in practice? First of all, the upper classes ran the feudal network, the church and the law courts, and also had control of education and culture until very recent times, so that they were able to exert their power over those beneath them and condition them to accept the idea that the upper classes were ethnically superior and had a God-given right to rule. This is why we find, up until modern times, members of the working classes reported as making many pathetic pronouncements about knowing their station and not presuming to better themselves, a mindset which only began to undergo serious questioning with the later part of the Industrial Revolution and the advent of organised labour. The normally fairly placid and malleable English temperament did not help matters either; we have a much-vaunted but ultimately unfortunate ability to suffer without complaint or questioning.

The system itself was so tight that it was almost impossible for a working class person to advance socially, since there were various infallible methods of distinguishing people based on class origin. Of these, linguistic markers have always been profoundly important. Originally, since the Normans refused to learn English for quite some time, this method consisted of a basic distinction between those who could and could not speak French: the former were members of the aristocracy, while the latter were peasants. However, the most durable linguistic means of distinguishing between people has been, of course, accent, and discrimination based on it is still with us today. The tacit understanding is that one cannot have a working class accent or (usually) a strong regional accent and be socially acceptable to the middle and upper classes. This kind of mark is difficult to escape; Shaw’s Pygmalion is essentially a socialist fairy tale, as no Eliza Doolittle could have ever fully succeeded in keeping up the charade, and there was always Debrett’s to trip up anyone who attempted it. Address and occupation were also powerful indicators of class. Economic forces had the effect of segregating the working classes off into poorer areas of towns, of which London’s East End was the most famous example. This meant that they could be socially categorised according to address, just as they could be distinguished in work by the fact that they did manual labour. Having the right address is still very important, particularly when it comes to getting into various groups or societies. Discrimination on the basis of accent or address is unofficial, unadmitted to and thus very difficult to fight, but it is still common and the principle is widely applied, even (and it would be laughable if it were not so sad) in expatriate communities. Education, yet another powerful indicator of class, is still extremely important to the system, as the pernicious influence of the old school tie on getting good jobs in the Establishment and business worlds makes clear. While certain families did manage to pull themselves up from obscurity through the process of accumulating wealth, their advancement had to take place slowly, over the course of several generations. Furthermore, this option was usually not open at all to the poor, requiring, first of all, substantial capital for investment, and second of all some window of economic opportunity. There was no realistic option for an individual to climb the social ladder in his or her own lifetime.

Thus the class system has had a power to bestow or withhold opportunities and privileges, based on class origins, that is truly horrifying. This explains why, when class resentment has reared its head in England in the past century, its expression has often been marked by a vitriol and bitterness out of character with the overall working class temperament, a bitterness born of deep frustration and hatred of the myth of genetic superiority that sustains the system and which everyone tacitly understood. Thus H G Wells, who could write so pleasant and charming a book as Love and Mr Lewisham, could also advocate a violent overthrow of the governing classes. [check]The obdurate nature of the class system, the built-in social checks against people of humble birth advancing themselves, forming a veritable brick wall of subtle and not-so-subtle snubs, illusory chances and withheld privileges around those who tried to do so, also explains the bile of a John Osborne (he who famously snarled “damn you England”), and of his most famous creation, the hate-filled working class intellectual Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger. It also explains why, when adequate (although still not socially advantageous) education was finally made available to the working classes after the war, the expressions of working class experience by the generation that came of age during the fifties and sixties were frequently bitter and accusatory in nature, from Osborne and Wesker (whose Chips with Everything satirised the barriers to understanding between young people of different classes) to the Kinks’ mockery of the upper middle class hypocritical world of the Well-Respected Man, the black social comedy of Joe Orton (Entertaining Mr Sloane) and the almost uniformly bleak working-class films of Tony Richardson, Ken Loach, et al. Given this catalogue, it is perhaps a sign of a neurotically positive outlook on the part of society at the time that this outburst of grievances could possibly be absorbed into “swinging” sixties youth culture. Giving the means of self-expression through better education into the hands of the young working classes produced a new world of English music and fashion undreamt of before, but it also opened up a whole tin of worms containing inherited and experienced frustrations, anger and grudges. Few writers displayed the vitriol of an Osborne, however. His invective remains shocking because not many people allowed the system to poison them to such an extent that they would turn against the country itself. This is a testament to forgivingness in the English working classes, simultaneously preventing spontaneous social combustion and propping up the social structure that discriminated against them. When one looks at the social structure and the real hardship and misery produced by it throughout history, one merely wonders at the fact that there were not more Osbornes.

The class system has also been self-perpetuating in the huge differences it has created between the classes. One wonders whether even those members of the middle and upper classes who wished to understand the grievances expressed by the Angry Young Men had the means to do so, given the radically divergent worldviews and attitudes of the three groups. Hugely different mores governing family, neighbourliness, property, relationships, displayed emotion, and so on pertained to each class. Take, for example, the whole matter of children. To the upper classes they traditionally meant the perpetuation of a line, a vital thing if the aristocracy was to maintain itself and hang on to power. Thus, as people and as members of the family, they often did not have a great deal of importance, which explains why boys especially (the most important to the perpetuation of the family name) could be sent off to hideous public schools for most of their childhoods without a qualm, at least on the part of their fathers. Children undoubtedly mattered more to the consistently harassed and beleaguered buffer zone, the middle classes, but the need to get them into socially advantageous schools and find them suitable friends, in the hope of future upward mobility, tended to overshadow family life. In the working classes, by contrast, the perceived need to maintain a social position or advance one’s family was practically nil, so that children were really and truly part of the family, with all the positive and negative effects that that implies. Thus, especially in recent decades when the welfare state provided for people’s needs and poverty was not so crushing, they stood a somewhat better chance of an emotionally healthy upbringing. Attitudes to many other things also varied wildly from class to class, and the expressions of these differences in English culture are numerous and bewildering. Added to regional variations, they are the factors that make it exceptionally difficult to come up with any consistent theory of English character and culture.

Snobbishness has had a detrimental effect on the practice of English parliamentary democracy, since its fundamental principle that some people are better than others by virtue of their birth has made it extremely hard to operate a system of government which has as its basis the idea that everyone should have a say in how the country is run. The actual enshrinement in the constitution of the rights of the landed classes and established church in the form of the House of Lords, only recently reformed and still often operating in opposition to the nation’s elected representatives, has made the problem of consistently looking after the needs of the entire population almost insoluble. Furthermore, the element of class hatred that is produced by so rigid a society makes it very hard to have a civilised debate on any issue in which class interest is involved (the controversy surrounding fox-hunting, for example, is often maligned by those who support hunting with dogs as an attempt to start a “class war”, thereby introducing a red herring which conveniently allows them to ignore the often genuine concerns of the opposition). The whole Establishment, in fact, with its connections to the privileged classes, has got in the way of truly democratic government. The Norman domination of the rest of the population has thus had extraordinarily durable historical repercussions because of the ways in which the privileged classes have maintained control of the reins of government, not so much because their privileges were enshrined in law. English democracy in operation sometimes reminds one strangely of Orwell’s satire of communism, Animal Farm: “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.”

Class also has a profound effect on the personal, affecting individuals, producing (as I have already shown) arrogance in the upper classes and resentment in the working classes. However, we also need to consider what happens to people of working class extraction who manage to rise to the top. Very often, the need to deny and reject one’s working class background and values in order to rise in society seems to create people who are confused and ambivalent about their own identities. Thus John Major wanted to create a “classless society” (which, given that he was the leader of the Conservative party, showed an unrealistic optimism) but at the same time was capable of describing beggars as an “eyesore”, obviously forgetting the poverty of his own Brixton background. And the case of Thatcher herself was yet more alarming. Born to a greengrocer’s family, she went on to remodel the Conservative party and blatantly support the interests of the privileged at every available opportunity. Part of her strategy involved encouraging the electorate to blame the unemployed for their plight. To say that this shows hatred and rejection of one’s background is an understatement. These are merely two prominent examples; it is not always the case that working class or lower middle class people who rise to be powerful members of the Establishment experience a similar conflict over their own origins, but very often becoming socially respectable seems to involve having to deny a part of oneself. The only people who do not appear to experience this problem are the working class celebrities, for the simple reason that they have a status based on glamour, sex appeal, wealth and perceived talent that exists independently of class, so that they do not need to radically remake themselves in order to be respected. Very often they are cultivated by the upper classes in the hope that some of the populist charm will rub off, but they hardly ever appear to feel the need to reciprocate.

How influential is class today? It is very hard to say, since most of the effects of class go uncatalogued and unquantified. There is no doubt that it is still having its effects, but the picture is complicated by the advent of the nouveau riche and the reappearance and resurgence in the nineties of the working class celebrity. It is certainly true, however, that the Thatcher era seriously set back the cause of social equality. With its cultural elitism and middle class aspirations, sanctioning of greed and privatisation of essential services, along with neglect of the poor, degradation of the environment, and the championing of “Victorian values”, it was a singularly noxious time. It says a lot that prior to the 1980s working class culture was flourishing, whereas during the eighties films and television series which paid breathless homage to the virtues and/or lifestyle of the privileged classes were the most popular products of English film studios, with minute challenges posed only very occasionally by films such as My Beautiful Laundrette. After the drooling over posh interiors and vilification of the poor of the Thatcher years we now seem to be into a slightly kinder age, in which many people pay lip service to the idea of social welfare even if not much is being done to alleviate the plight of the disadvantaged. It is also culturally a more working class age, with the pendulum swinging, at least superficially, more to the other extreme; we have many more working class pop stars and groups, and the levelling tide of Estaury speech is sweeping through the linguistic heartlands of many of the Home Counties. The BBC has taken to featuring more presenters with regional and working class accents, in a move away from Received Pronunciation (which itself has become progressively less posh over the decades). Furthermore, the frequent vociferous demands for an English parliament by some working class people can be seen as an attempt by the non-privileged to assert their own concerns, although this is not just working class people who want one). Acknowledging a working class background seems to have again become a matter of defiant pride, much as it was in the sixties. But the Establishment is still largely made up by the public school educated, and in the recent debates over whether to invade Iraq, in the face of widespread public opposition and a country split down the middle, the Old Harrovians and Etonians of the Conservative party, in collusion with the prime minister, carried the day. We also cannot ignore the fact that “New Labour” only came to power because they were able to successfully rebrand themselves as a middle class party, abandoning bread-and-butter socialism. Things are not as bad as they were class-wise in the eighties, but the picture is still very mixed.

Another interesting topic to consider is what England would have been like without this type of class system. It’s always hard to answer these sorts of “What if” questions, but given the evidence of the few decades in the twentieth century in which the welfare state was actually functioning and paying attention to the needs and concerns of the majority of the population, I think we would by now be living in a country which, socially and legislatively, would bear a strong resemblance to Scandinavian countries such as Norway or Sweden. Our central location would likely still make for a very vibrant culture and commerce, although, since we would have been ‘deprived’ of Norman military strategy and imperial pretensions (it is interesting that England formed a part of a large and powerful Norman empire after the Conquest), there may not have been an Empire. This, however, would certainly have been a good thing for the English working classes. We would not be stigmatised abroad because of the cold, repressed front presented by Establishment types on the one hand and the violent behaviour of insecure football hooligans on the other. The English as a people would probably be more optimistic and certainly much more confident (and confidence is badly needed), and English antagonism towards the French in particular and the Continent in general, largely born of the Conquest, would most likely not be nearly as big a problem today, even taking the experience of both world wars into account.

The enslavement and muzzling by the Normans of the native English and all subsequent immigrants who were absorbed into the working classes is what is referred to as the Norman Yoke, and it is the historical background to the frequent observation that the common people of England, in Chesterton’s words, “have never spoken yet”. Personally, I think it’s about bloody time we started speaking. Even though class has had such a long and negative influence on English culture and society, it is possible to make advances, if only people have the will to start demanding that government represent the concerns, not just of the upper classes and the middle classes, but of the working classes as well. To do that, people have to stop buying into the system itself and foregoing their rights in the hope of their own future social advancement, since that is the single most important block to the establishment in England of a type of government that has been successful in Scandinavia. We must prevent Englishness from being forever identified with the culture and lifestyle of the upper classes, and overcome the “even if it is broke, don’t fix it” mentality. It is very difficult to break with social history to this extent and get a fresh start, but it can be done. –Isabel Taylor