Oh what fun. I left little England 25 years ago so I get to enjoy this so much more from a distance where I get to be English only when I feel like it. Somewhat ironically, this opting in and out is also “one of the older rules” (that the old imperial hands knew about back in the day and it’s why many of them left). One way to indulge one’s love-hate relationship with Englishness is to leave the rainy little island and opt in and out at will.
A darker version of this plays out in the film “Another Country”. A good film.
Also worth noting: the rules are not actual secrets; they are codes that have been culturally context-nested like Matryoshka dolls. There are so many that you need to build the scaffolding to even see them, and that takes a really really long time (better to start at prep school: aged 8, and go from there). You won’t ever have cause to learn the thing about the pile of Wellington Boots unless you are in a place that has them, and has need of them. Nobody is hiding the thing about the boots from the townies, it just won’t come up until you are physically there. So you need lots of trips to the country or other contexts to figure it all out.
Also, and this might be controversial, but I don’t think that there are different rules for different classes so much as “general rules” and “specific rules”. If you can’t afford bone china you don’t need to worry about bone-china maintenance. If you don’t live in the country you don’t need to care about wellies. Pretty much everyone drinks tea so the tea-related rules are no mystery to anyone, except foreigners.
If these rules have class connotations that’s a consequence of context, mostly. It’s an outcome, not the prime input.
English rules (class specific and/or generalized) are possibly more complex and tiered than Scientology, and no less expensive to access. Not because they are restricted but because of all of the (often, not always) expensive contexts you need to be in so you can be exposed to them. The French are similar, they just have a lot of different rules. As i have French family too I had a lot of rules to learn as a child, often conflicting.
The only formal text I can remember on this is “The Sloane Ranger’s handbook” from the 80s, and if memory serves that is mostly jokes about the rules and lifestyle, so it’s only funny if you already know what all the rules are. No use, I’m afraid. I suppose books like “Porterhouse Blue” might be useful also, but again, no use unless you already know a lot of it. Different rules emerge at Cirencester learning how to manage one’s estate than at Oxford, learning how to manage one’s society. Just different nodes in the network, at the end of the day.
I left a long time ago, so if this looks dated it’s because it is.
I like the Scientology comparison. And am a big fan of Another Country - watched it again for the first time in ages a couple of years back and it still holds up.
There’s a great line in the film about how they are not being trained to build an empire, as this would take energy and imagination, and their schooling has none. They are merely being trained as administrators.
As a lower middle class person operating in an upper middle class world, this was one of the reasons that I fucked off to Australia. There are absolutely class distinctions in Australia, but as an immigrant you encounter them obliquely.
You took a long time to summarize "shabby gentility".
I've always been amazed at how much risky behavior is baked into landed gentry life: Firearms, boating, driving off-road vehicles, "muscular christianity", playing rugby, etc.
Along with that comes the expectation to always be dressed for the occasion, with the most capricious of judgements on those who aren't. My personal experience with that was being invited on a bird shoot where I wore sensible American L.L. Bean gumshoes instead of the leather-soled "proper" shoes one had to fussily change out of for the Wellingtons you so vividly describe. I might've well have been a naked Watusi war dancer from all the ensuing derisive comments. But I managed to shoot better than all of them ;-)
My even bigger shock on one shoot was when I started picking up my own spent shells from around my peg, after finding the whole concept of having a "loader" distracting and distasteful to my American sensibilities. And when the gamekeeper showed up with the dressed birds, I was the only one who actually took them home, because one eats what one kills.
This also extends into what I've always viewed as the most damaging aspect of what you describe that creeps into British life in general: Alcohol. There's that old phrase "drunk as a lord"; when one's life is so carefree that sobriety becomes a "middle class trait". I saw it in how booze-soaked events at private schools/Oxbridge were (Bertie and Wooster-style bun fights left for the footmen to clean up). I saw it in "Monty Python's Flying Investment Bankers" comments on City culture making it back to the States ... read: "these striped-trousers ninnies aren't really serious people."
The British judgementalism on accents is another key factor. This goes well beyond knowing which cutlery to use. Even those of us who grew up in Mainline Philadelphia or went the Harvard will *never* perfect that "marbles in the mouth" insouciance. How was I to know that "Magdalen College" was really "Maud-lin", but "Cheapside" was, well, "Cheapside"? Forget Bicester and the rest!
I must admit, there's a lot of this aesthetic I like personally. Let the dogs drag in some mud, furnish your London apartment with banged-up furniture from mummy and daddy's country house (amongst WASPs in the US, there's the withering phrase "they're the sort of people who had to buy their own furniture"), don't worry if your clothing is a bit threadbare as long as it's the *correct* clothing as a class marker.
That said, I observe there's also a lot of rather casual conservatism that comes along with people who've skated through life with an expensive but nonetheless pedestrian education, offset by a fully-charged current account from The Bank of Mom and Dad, that's pretty distasteful.
I'm a Brit and one of the things we don't tell you is that it's an incredibly classist society where there is almost no social mobility. Which is ironic because the landed gentry are feral, inbred thickos with a huge dose of mannerless entitlement. And they run the country.
This was a fun read. I don't have anything insightful to say, but I do enjoy how consistently American media shits on complacent old money and enjoy that idle wealth is broadly considered gauche here. Where I'm from in Texas, kids of family's who have had oil since Spindletop still have to at least pretend to have real careers. The ones who don't get bullied out of polite society.
I do worry this perhaps makes me overly judgement towards Europeans and their class bizarre class system. At least our lords value work. That the UK still has a literal monarchy that could very likely exert direct influence on their laws, frankly, primes me to have little respect for them. A nation of cuckolds.
Is it better to pretend to have a real career (and with it, a veneer of competence to excuse the “meritocracy” of your access to top schools, companies and opportunities)? Many, many British toffs work in finance (men) or fashion (women), where they rub shoulders with the American upper class.
In the US you refer to “nepo babies.” But that hasn’t actually stopped it.
I suppose a lot of us believe that intellect trumps class - but for most us that is never put to the test because we never meet these kind of people!
We probably also assume that levelling youth culture has been dominant for so long that there surely can’t be anybody unmodified by it - unless they are very old indeed. Again, our assumption may be wrong. We never meet these people so we hang on to our assumption.
I wonder if it's just about the overlap of scarcity and antiquity (in terms of the perceived allure of the lifestyles). Only a limited number of people can buy truly old buildings, or have ancestors who fought at Crecy or whatever, and most of that kind of thing just isn't available if you live in the States.
Possible. There is certainly less tradition and precedence in the US. Another factor is that the moneyed class in the US didn’t or failed to establish a rigid class system to enshrine themselves at the top of the pecking order. There is the old money. But they don’t matter as much in American culture as in England.
Oh what fun. I left little England 25 years ago so I get to enjoy this so much more from a distance where I get to be English only when I feel like it. Somewhat ironically, this opting in and out is also “one of the older rules” (that the old imperial hands knew about back in the day and it’s why many of them left). One way to indulge one’s love-hate relationship with Englishness is to leave the rainy little island and opt in and out at will.
A darker version of this plays out in the film “Another Country”. A good film.
Also worth noting: the rules are not actual secrets; they are codes that have been culturally context-nested like Matryoshka dolls. There are so many that you need to build the scaffolding to even see them, and that takes a really really long time (better to start at prep school: aged 8, and go from there). You won’t ever have cause to learn the thing about the pile of Wellington Boots unless you are in a place that has them, and has need of them. Nobody is hiding the thing about the boots from the townies, it just won’t come up until you are physically there. So you need lots of trips to the country or other contexts to figure it all out.
Also, and this might be controversial, but I don’t think that there are different rules for different classes so much as “general rules” and “specific rules”. If you can’t afford bone china you don’t need to worry about bone-china maintenance. If you don’t live in the country you don’t need to care about wellies. Pretty much everyone drinks tea so the tea-related rules are no mystery to anyone, except foreigners.
If these rules have class connotations that’s a consequence of context, mostly. It’s an outcome, not the prime input.
English rules (class specific and/or generalized) are possibly more complex and tiered than Scientology, and no less expensive to access. Not because they are restricted but because of all of the (often, not always) expensive contexts you need to be in so you can be exposed to them. The French are similar, they just have a lot of different rules. As i have French family too I had a lot of rules to learn as a child, often conflicting.
The only formal text I can remember on this is “The Sloane Ranger’s handbook” from the 80s, and if memory serves that is mostly jokes about the rules and lifestyle, so it’s only funny if you already know what all the rules are. No use, I’m afraid. I suppose books like “Porterhouse Blue” might be useful also, but again, no use unless you already know a lot of it. Different rules emerge at Cirencester learning how to manage one’s estate than at Oxford, learning how to manage one’s society. Just different nodes in the network, at the end of the day.
I left a long time ago, so if this looks dated it’s because it is.
I like the Scientology comparison. And am a big fan of Another Country - watched it again for the first time in ages a couple of years back and it still holds up.
There’s a great line in the film about how they are not being trained to build an empire, as this would take energy and imagination, and their schooling has none. They are merely being trained as administrators.
As a lower middle class person operating in an upper middle class world, this was one of the reasons that I fucked off to Australia. There are absolutely class distinctions in Australia, but as an immigrant you encounter them obliquely.
Australia feels like a really interesting comparator, probably more so than the US
https://theconversation.com/weve-come-a-long-way-on-gender-diversity-but-what-about-class-how-networks-of-private-school-privilege-dominate-australian-society-226959
https://theconversation.com/the-concept-of-class-is-often-avoided-in-public-debate-but-its-essential-for-understanding-inequality-187777
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-01-24/six-class-system-dispelling-myths-of-a-classless-australia/9339532
I absolutely love this! You’ve summed up everything I hate about the British class system and also given me a new book to add to my tbr. Thank you!
You took a long time to summarize "shabby gentility".
I've always been amazed at how much risky behavior is baked into landed gentry life: Firearms, boating, driving off-road vehicles, "muscular christianity", playing rugby, etc.
Along with that comes the expectation to always be dressed for the occasion, with the most capricious of judgements on those who aren't. My personal experience with that was being invited on a bird shoot where I wore sensible American L.L. Bean gumshoes instead of the leather-soled "proper" shoes one had to fussily change out of for the Wellingtons you so vividly describe. I might've well have been a naked Watusi war dancer from all the ensuing derisive comments. But I managed to shoot better than all of them ;-)
My even bigger shock on one shoot was when I started picking up my own spent shells from around my peg, after finding the whole concept of having a "loader" distracting and distasteful to my American sensibilities. And when the gamekeeper showed up with the dressed birds, I was the only one who actually took them home, because one eats what one kills.
This also extends into what I've always viewed as the most damaging aspect of what you describe that creeps into British life in general: Alcohol. There's that old phrase "drunk as a lord"; when one's life is so carefree that sobriety becomes a "middle class trait". I saw it in how booze-soaked events at private schools/Oxbridge were (Bertie and Wooster-style bun fights left for the footmen to clean up). I saw it in "Monty Python's Flying Investment Bankers" comments on City culture making it back to the States ... read: "these striped-trousers ninnies aren't really serious people."
The British judgementalism on accents is another key factor. This goes well beyond knowing which cutlery to use. Even those of us who grew up in Mainline Philadelphia or went the Harvard will *never* perfect that "marbles in the mouth" insouciance. How was I to know that "Magdalen College" was really "Maud-lin", but "Cheapside" was, well, "Cheapside"? Forget Bicester and the rest!
I must admit, there's a lot of this aesthetic I like personally. Let the dogs drag in some mud, furnish your London apartment with banged-up furniture from mummy and daddy's country house (amongst WASPs in the US, there's the withering phrase "they're the sort of people who had to buy their own furniture"), don't worry if your clothing is a bit threadbare as long as it's the *correct* clothing as a class marker.
That said, I observe there's also a lot of rather casual conservatism that comes along with people who've skated through life with an expensive but nonetheless pedestrian education, offset by a fully-charged current account from The Bank of Mom and Dad, that's pretty distasteful.
I'm a Brit and one of the things we don't tell you is that it's an incredibly classist society where there is almost no social mobility. Which is ironic because the landed gentry are feral, inbred thickos with a huge dose of mannerless entitlement. And they run the country.
This was a fun read. I don't have anything insightful to say, but I do enjoy how consistently American media shits on complacent old money and enjoy that idle wealth is broadly considered gauche here. Where I'm from in Texas, kids of family's who have had oil since Spindletop still have to at least pretend to have real careers. The ones who don't get bullied out of polite society.
I do worry this perhaps makes me overly judgement towards Europeans and their class bizarre class system. At least our lords value work. That the UK still has a literal monarchy that could very likely exert direct influence on their laws, frankly, primes me to have little respect for them. A nation of cuckolds.
Is it better to pretend to have a real career (and with it, a veneer of competence to excuse the “meritocracy” of your access to top schools, companies and opportunities)? Many, many British toffs work in finance (men) or fashion (women), where they rub shoulders with the American upper class.
In the US you refer to “nepo babies.” But that hasn’t actually stopped it.
I suppose a lot of us believe that intellect trumps class - but for most us that is never put to the test because we never meet these kind of people!
We probably also assume that levelling youth culture has been dominant for so long that there surely can’t be anybody unmodified by it - unless they are very old indeed. Again, our assumption may be wrong. We never meet these people so we hang on to our assumption.
Your writing on class is almost as good as Paul Fussell’s — which is to say, the best I have found on substack so far.
Bravo, I’m now subsribed.
Thank you very much! Must admit I have never read Fussell
European upper classes hinder progress. But their lifestyles are far more alluring those displayed by American rich men, self made or not.
I wonder if it's just about the overlap of scarcity and antiquity (in terms of the perceived allure of the lifestyles). Only a limited number of people can buy truly old buildings, or have ancestors who fought at Crecy or whatever, and most of that kind of thing just isn't available if you live in the States.
Possible. There is certainly less tradition and precedence in the US. Another factor is that the moneyed class in the US didn’t or failed to establish a rigid class system to enshrine themselves at the top of the pecking order. There is the old money. But they don’t matter as much in American culture as in England.