la_marquise | A sense of class

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society

A sense of class

Several years ago, a Chinese colleague asked me how he could tell what social class someone British belonged to. I opened my mouth, hesitated, and said, 'Ummm' a lot. Because in that moment, I realised that I simply did not have a straightforward answer to that question. I could, reliably, assess the social class of pretty much every Briton I met. I'd learnt to do that from my earliest days. But I didn't know a shortcut. I think in the end I suggested he look at food choices, knowing at the time that that was probably of little help, as being able to make that assessment itself depended on knowing nuances that he might not recognise. I can define class, assign class, recognise class within my culture, but except in the broadest way, I cannot easily explain how I do it. It's made up of numerous little things, expressed in dress and speech and posture, food and expectations, politics and cars and television programmes. I am first generation lower middle class. The marquis is solid upper middle class, and rooted in it for at least 4 generations. My friend A is middle middle class, as is friend B, but there are substantive differences between them based on region. My friend C, on the other hand, is a classic class traitor (ahem), born into the working class but deliberately assimilated into the upper middle class. My current next door neighbours are way posher than me and I'm a bit scared of them, but beyond them is an upper working class family who I really like and find easy to chat to. To the best of my knowledge I don't know any members of the British Upper class, let alone the aristocracy, though I do know several people who are definitely much, much higher up the social ladder than me (and who as a result are sometimes almost incomprehensible to me in certain ways). From time to time, friend D (who comes from a very similar background to mine) and I get together and shake our heads over the class-based weirdness of some of those we know. I like all these people, but how I react to them, my comfort level in talking to them, and the degree to which I and they experience moments of dissonance varies considerably according to class.

Or, at least, it does for me. It's a peculiarity of people like me -- first generation left-wing lower middle class -- that we tend to be class-conscious. Some of that is about training. The UK, like it or not, is a hierarchical culture and people react to you according to where you sit in that. The lower middle are a bit too posh for the working class, but rather suspect to the middle and upper middle (don't ask me about the upper class. They're outside my experience). It's a curse of the lower middle that we are hyper-aware of this, and always rather anxious about it, partly from embarrassment, partly from fear, and as a result we are also rather annoying. Tell me I have a class-based chip on my shoulder, and I have to hold up my hands in acknowledgement. I have known, as long as I can remember, that there are places where I don't belong and wherein I have to be extra good. I've been taught from birth to notice where I don't fit and to feel obliged to try not to make others uncomfortable about that. (Well, except about politics. My socialist beliefs go as deep as my class consciousness, and are central to who I am and to my definition of correct, ethical behaviour.)

A number of my upper middle class friends find this awareness of mine very irritating (and I don't blame them). They don't have this sense and they don't see the need for it. I find this interesting, too. They're higher up the tree than me: they don't need to notice as much as I do. As in any hierarchy, the better your position, the more relaxed you can be. None of them are bad people, not in the least. They're just different to me. But class shapes everything in this country, and we cannot, however we try, get away from it. There's a healthy dollop of class snobbery in the broadsheet dismissal of reality television, for instance and the perpetual gas-lighting of certain food choices as simply 'bad' without allowing for factors about price and access and cooking facilities. Sometimes this is easy to see: tabloid sneering at those receiving state benefits, the very different treatment meted out by gossip columnists to pop stars from working class and middle class backgrounds; stereotypes of public schoolboys and chinless wonders. Sometimes it's all but invisible: the ins and outs of how public funding ends up being used and assigned, the places that are written off without any apparent notice, the people who are deemed to be, in the words of George Bernard Shaw, "the undeserving poor". The current Tory project to clear the deficit entirely through cuts is rooted in one understanding of class rights and privileges. The call, in the late 1970s, by Labour Chancellor Dennis Healey to 'tax the rich until they squeak' is rooted in another. (Anyone who's known me for more than about 20 minutes can guess, I suspect, which of those positions I'm more comfortable with.)

And it stacks. Like everything else in our uneven, unfair, hierarchical culture, class intersects with gender and race and sexuality and ableism in ways that can be deeply, deeply damaging and toxic and cruel (and that's one reason why denials of the effect of class are themselves so suspect, as they discount things which can really harm).

When my 12 year-old self went into the lobby of a 5 star hotel just to look, along with my mother, she said to me beforehand that she hoped they wouldn't mind, and both of us looked around with the same reverence we would have accorded a church or museum. I didn't know why, I just knew she felt that we didn't belong there, and therefore had to be extra polite. When my 18 year-old self was made to feel she didn't really belong in her university, it took me a while to realise that that wasn't because these new people could read my mind and knew I wasn't good enough, it was that they heard my short vowels and regional phrases, assessed where I got my clothes, considered what I chose to ate and pegged me, precisely, as a lower middle class girl from the midlands, who wasn't *quite* one of them. I loved the place anyway, because it let me sit in the library all day and read and my favourite lecturer, though he teased me unmercifully about my vowels, encouraged me as a student, made me feel bright, and supported me every step of the way. But my social circle as an undergraduate, by and large, was made up of people who, like me, came from what might now be called non-traditional backgrounds and I knew better than to try and be part of the famous shiny things which were marked out as the territory of the established upper middle and upper classes. I knew they weren't for me, like that 5 star hotel. I've always known, and I reproduce that everyday. It trips my tongue about, for instance, self-promotion (not done by women of my class); it inhibits me about trying for things ('that's not for people like me'). It gets everywhere and effects everything in British daily life.

But I couldn't explain it to my Chinese friend, not without talking for hours and trying to explain what is, in some ways, inexplicable (seriously, some of my upper middle class friends swear that this is not so and are utterly baffled by me, and that's fair enough). I could, of course, have pointed him to the classic The Frost Report class sketch:

but it is itself embedded in knowledge of how the system works and what the signals are -- and it's dated, rather, and it's all about men. I could only in the end umm and ahh and talk about table manners, because that's how it works, that's how it replicates, by being everywhere and in everything and being so very, very hard to explain.

Skirt of the day: blue flags (not the flower, but the cut -- it has vertical layers and a jagged hem, as if banners have been sewn to it).

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Oh I so hear you on this!

I'm of working class origins as you know but bucked for promotion to the middle class via a decent education and a career.

Himself's more solidly middle class.

That doesn't mean I will ever forget where I come from and it doesn't mean I'm about to vote Tory! As fine a bunch of overprivileged Eton & Oxbridge chinless wonders and hooray Henrys as you'll find on a long Summer's day, although you can say the same about the Labour bunch these days.

And I still don't know where to find a forelock! :o)

And then there's the American perception of the British class system, which goes something like this:

A Bit Of Rough (except Americans don't use that term)
Posh
Posh As Fuck

That's basically it, I'm pretty sure. :)

Thank you for this. I love learning about the "tells" in different cultural intersections (not only as a writer, but simply as a student of human beings). I sometimes try to tease out what my own "tells" are, based on how other people treat me as in/out-group. As you say: complicated. I can recall a number of interactional failures due to assuming that one intersectional identity necessarily correlated with other unrelated factors.

Educated working class here. But that's a Scottish sub-division. An education doesn't automatically project you into the middle classes. As education is seen as something for itself, and not as a pathway.

So you have shepherds in plays going off to get a degree and coming back to be shepherds.

'Cos, education isn't class based, it's resource based.

I do know nobility like. Proper nobility. Real upper upper class people are very much more like working class people than the middle classes.

The middles classes are the odd one out.

Education _was_ pushed into me to allow me access to the upper classes: I was privately schooled and had elocution lessons. So I had the skills to speak the correct vowels. But that was far more to do with my being illegitimate, than my being working class. That was about making sure I could fit in anywhere and no one would 'suspect' the hidden bits of me.

So I've always been comfortable with all types. Grew up in the poorest of the poor bogey-man areas (I had impetigo as a child, from playing with the other street kids near the broken sewers) yet privately educated in tiny select convent.

As I said, education was resource based: it was about having the money to get you into better paying jobs, but this is not automatically seen as moving out of the working classes in my area.

You can choose to move to the middle class houses: but you can also choose to stay in the 'scheme' (estate) and no one would think anything about it.

Lots of teachers in my area of birth lived in the same houses and streets as their working class pupils. Maybe a slightly posher end of the street, but they were not 'middle class' just as they were well educated.

I have recently been reading a lot of Georgette Heyer and Dorothy L Sayers who are incredibly class conscious. I think that the reason why the British class system is so confusing is that we're seeing the fraying remains of the pre war class system and none of us are sure whether it's still real.

I still remember a very charming former colleague who refused to drink champagne because she felt it was declassee. I was quite happy with the Pouilly Fuisse she insisted on buying for me though.

American try to deny they're class conscious. That's one reason our understanding of social class is so muddled over here. It does exist, oh most definitely, but the transition from one class to the next is much easier than in the UK. Moving up takes money, mostly, and some sense of where to spend it. Not everyone defines class in the same way, too, which adds another layer of confusion.

I myself come from the working class, of course. Transitioning into the class I wanted to be was easy, because from the time I was 12 years old I knew I belonged to Bohemia, or Class X as some sociologists call it, riff-raff like artists and writers who don't "live like decent people." :-)

I understand your difficulty in answering the question, no idea how I would approach it. I would say, though, there isn't a *British* answer. Class operates differently in Scotland and England. I have no idea whether that also applies to Wales, though I wouldn't be surprised. It did surprise me how different it felt in England when I first moved there, class seemed to be much more important there than it ever has done here.

Thanks for the link to the classic sketch, I was thinking of it the other day and intending to rummage around YouTube for it. :-)

LJ is very weirdly swapping in the most recent previous video posted by someone else on my flist in place of the one you included, when I look at your post on my friends page, but not when I look at the post separately. I mention this on the off-chance they are messing up something of yours rather than something of mine.

Edited 2015-02-06 19:32 (UTC)

This suggests an important aspect of cultural world-building -- all the nuances of speech (or dress, or movement) that convey so much.

I would never claim Americans weren't class conscious, but I would claim we don't have the complex stratification that you're talking about. I also might be blinded by my own middle class upbringing. I can't look at someone and really know what variation of middle class they are, for instance, but I can tell when someone is working class or rich. Accent isn't a "tell." What they eat might be. Where they eat even more so. I've watched British friends mock someone for "slumming it" if they have a lover who is too different in class and I haven't been able to detect what they're hearing/seeing.

I can tell what someone is from the moment they open their mouth. But if you're not from the same culture, I suspect it is impenetrable.

I've come across two articulations of class differences that really rang true for me, and were complex, nuanced, and respectful of their subjects: Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour, a popular anthropology book by Kate Fox, and artist Grayson Perry's short documentary series In the Best Possible Taste about the aesthetics of taste among different class groups.

Hmm. I'm from the US and I don't know why you Brits find our class structure so hard to comprehend. It's very much like the classes in in the UK except we don't have royalty (our royals are celebrities and uber-rich).

I was from a working class family. My brother is a car mechanic and while he may make more than some middle middle-class folks, they look down on him because he works with his hands and isn't well read, even though he isn't stupid by any stretch.

I moved into the lower middle class because of education and occupation. My ex's family was in the upper middle class, but downplayed their money. My ex was lazy, and while we could interact with those above us on the scale because of our education and the way he was raised, our income couldn't compete, so we didn't live in the right neighborhood and drive the right cars to fit in. My ex's mother's family had been in the upper class. She grew up with maids and a cook. Her father owned a dry-goods store, so I guess that would have made him merchant class, but he invested well and weathered the Great Depression coming out on top at the other side. But his daughters each married beneath their station as they say, and the family fortunes have dwindled greatly. Two generations down from all his money and the cousins are all decidedly working class in their salaries regardless of what jobs they have.

Of course some of this is because of the economy, and the whittling away of the middle class by the politicians on the right. The third generation down from this man who was able to employ hundreds, had two stores and 3 factories, and had a mansion and a summer home in the posh city by the sea that he employed servants in year round, are all scratching to get by working as store clerks even though they are college educated.

I heard of a study that researched family trees going back to the middle ages and they found that over the centuries, people's lot in life rarely changed from that of their ancestors. In recent history in the US, I don't see it. One poor decision, one 'bad' marriage, and people can drop into poverty regardless of the class they were born into.

Urgh, I have never known what I am. In the north-west of England I was clearly pretty upper-middle-class, as in we got sent to a private school with a stupid uniform, our family owned a substantial business and were among the very few local kids expected to go to university. But then no-one before our generation had, and when I went to Oxford for an interview I had people asking me to 'go on, say something, your accent is just *so quaint*' in tones I could barely understand. And then I went to Durham and met people that I totally couldn't understand, including a Senior Man of the JCR that had his own car with a private number plate, and it was made to clear to me that I was pretty much working-class scum because I ate crisps and didn't know what lacrosse was and had never rowed, and my dad had an expensive car, but a fast and showy expensive car, not a subtly luxurious expensive car. It was very confusing, given that I'd spent the last several years being teased and threatened on the basis of being unbearably posh, you know?

(Wow, I like living in another country where I'm just a plain old undifferentiated foreigner. I have no idea how I'd go about explaining all that to someone who has little idea what rugby is, let alone that there's two versions of it with wildly differing connotations.)

Is not TW3 - is The Frost Report.

I was thinking about the upper class people I know in British fandom and wondering how it is that you haven't met them, when I realised it isn't possible that you haven't, as a couple of them live in Cambridge.

So we must have different definitions of upper class? Now possibly you consider "went to Eton, Winchester or Harrow" as upper upper middle, but surely "due to inherit a title" must count for anyone?

Aldous Huxley knew what he was on about. "I'm so glad I'm a beta. Alphas have to work so hard, and gammas smell so bad..."

I realised this summer as a Canadian friend was telling me about the joys of Tesco that British supermarkets are as class-graded as anything. I know where I belong and I know what I despise, for absolutely no reason really. You could try that for your Chinese friend -- have them ask people which supermarket they prefer, on a scale that runs from Iceland to Waitrose.

Not just table manners. Although the napkin/serviette marker still stands!

I think it's about cash. And power (cash again). Those culture markers that Brits make so much of are little more than tomcats spraying territory - 'we iz the powerful group, keep out and know you're place'. Sometimes the markers can be adopted by those with less cash, but who still find it advantageous to camoflage themselves in the scent of power.

I always get confused about the boundaries between the lower-middle and middle-middle; and the upper-middle and upper so have tended to stick with working/middle/all those other posh gits.

Though I *think* I'd be somewhere in the lower-middle. Possibly first generation lower-middle. All my grandparents were definitely working class - with geordie miners on mum's side, and proper cockneys (and eastend low level criminal types) on dad's. Standard education expectations were to get out of school and get a proper job (or two, plus extra side businesses)as soon as possible, though mum insisted we at least get to GCSE level (so me doing the BA is endlessly perplexing to the wider family.)

My dad's mum had aspirations of social climbing so she pushed dad into nice office jobs and smoothing out the cockney so he could blend in. On mum's side, her dad died when she was young so they were very one-parent perpetually scraping to get by, and a tendency to graft and get creative to make sure they had what they needed.

Me, I grew up on one of the estates on the edge of Heathrow and given most folks living there were connected with the airport we were predominantly lower-middle with random selections of people from the working and middle-middle classes. One of my friends from the next road came from a distinctly middle going upwards class background as they had the nice house that we were terrified of touching things in, and the little yacht and sailing weekends, and the public school thing. Meanwhile we had the third hand furniture, the handmade clothes and the shrugging whenever someone laughed at mum for continually trying new business ideas to supplement the house income.

When we abandoned the sacred inner M25 area for the wilds of *gasp!there be dragons!* outside the M25, it was noticeable how much posher everyone was. And whiter. Sooo much whiter. So that was a bit of a cultural disconnect.

The mix of linguistic backgrounds does make for being very self-conscious as I can switch between the geordie, the cockney and a bit southern posh (thanks to a gran and both parents insisting we talk 'proper') but I tend to a weird cockney/geordie mix when I get a bit excitable. Which tends to make me feel like an uneducated oik at conventions as I know a lot of people who are either highly educated and/or talk with very RP English.

What puzzles me about Britain (from my very personal perspective) is that it seems to fit a lot of the different ex-colonies into it, seamlessly. So many Brits know where I belong and give me due credit for my background quite precisely. This doesn't happen int he same way in Australia at all. I don't know if it happens to all ex-colonials, to be honest, but I know it happens to me and to a couple of Malaysian friends (some years ago, and the generation they met were in their 20s in WWII, so it may be a special case). I think I need to learn how people assess Australians, and assign us, and then I will stop puzzling. (Not that I object to being seen for my background - it's an exotic and comforting feeling.)

I agree with all the other Americans who have said that Americans pretend class doesn't exist in any real sense, when it totally totally does. This actually makes it harder for people who are trying for class mobility: no one told my cousin A to enunciate "shouldn't" instead of pronouncing it "shunnunt," she had to figure that out herself. The kid code switches like a champ, bless her; it's part of why it's easy to help her out.

One of the reasons Americans don't want to talk about class with all its money and education and priority variance is that it changed enough after WWII that you have a lot of people like me, whose family's class varies within the same side of the family rather than just by marriage. The GI Bill was a really big factor in this. (Basically you can never go wrong by looking into the GI Bill as an effect on American society post-WWII.) As a result, my grandmother was one of thirteen kids from a farm family, and their descendents range from comfortably lower-upper class to that range that has fallen out of working class due to lack of work available and is now just plain poor. People mostly don't want to go around elucidating that "we are intellectual upper middle whereas this cousin whom we see fairly often is lower working class clinging with teeth and nails to that." It's even less comfortable than it would be with people outside your family.

Confusing class and money seems deliberate to me, because it's easier. You can say, "Well, I have $x/year coming into my house, and that person has $y/year," there, done. That doesn't take into account where you vacation, what kind of car you drive (even if you bought it used), what you think are acceptable interests for your children, etc. I sometimes shorthand the class my dad and my roommate grew up in as "drove an old car but by God the kids got piano lessons," and Americans know who those people are even if they don't want to call it class.

I have to admit, I read this post a few times (found it on the frontpage of LJ), and I had to wonder "is this real?".

Being Canadian, most people here had relatives who were immigrants at one point or another. So as far as I can identify, our 'classes' are pretty darn limited, say from top to bottom:

- 'Old Money' - eg you came from England/France and started up businesses 'long ago'
- Politicians / Celebrities (we dont have much of these, and the industry is fickle.)
- 'Been here quite a while, I'm happily middle class' Eg, your great-great-(great)-grandparents immigrated, worked piddly jobs, and your family slowly moved from a dirt poor sod house to a developer-built tract home over the generations
- Recent Immigrants (Note: we take in a fair number of refugees, who literally have nothing but the clothes on their back. They aren't looked down on per se, it's more a general thought that 'if they work hard, they'll be like us very shortly'
- The degenerates (those that continue to waste money smoking, drinking, having illegitimate children and either sitting on welfare or getting locked up in jail)

-

I could have written this post about myself -- except that you did it so much better than I could have done. I was born upper working class in a pretty rough district in Manchester, but through education, modifying my accent and learning how to pass have moved up to "educated lower middle". My husband's background is similar, though his family is originally from Liverpool and he grew up in Doncaster

Class difference is one of the reasons I don't feel I completely belong in SF fandom. There are the assumptions about what type of restaurant one will go to or what one will eat or drink at home. It's that fear of letting the mask slip and revealing one's true origins. And then I have to fight the dreadful temptation to do the inverse snobbery thing and start talking about how we played on the local council tip as children and how most of the area I knew as a child was pulled down in the 1960s under Labour's "slum clearance" policies. Both of these facts are true, but don't truly represent my very respectable childhood. Because there's nothing as respectable as the upper working class family desperately trying to get on and become middle class.

This post is just fascinating for me. I live in the north west. (just, Cheshire) am 26 and have never really considered my class or the class of people around me. At least not consciously. I have been conditioned by my parents to sneer at accents though.

The closest i think I get would be in generalities 'stupid posh torys looking out for their posh mates' sort of thing.

Maybe it's a generation thing, if I can say that without being rude. Some of the things mentioned, like going to university might actually not be a big deal any more. at lot more people go to university now, though not necessarily anywhere topflight.

Or maybe i'm just so steeped in middle classness and a middle class world that i don't even realise it. I'm pretty sure I'm middle class, I like Radio 4's 18:30 programs after all. But i wouldn't be able to break it down further than that.

Whilst the British (english) class system is still very real it is also fluid. People do cross the divides in both directions. As an East End lad who has sort of dragged himself into middle class region I can testify to that ( indeed lost of the posts here indicate a certain mobility ). A lot of the intricacies of our class system is to do with the social square dance where upwardly mobile work out where they stand with the old money and the working class - and that can happen either at work, at a socilal event or at the family dinner table.

I think we handle class differently from lots of other cultures for lots of historical and social reasons.Some years (decades) ago I did some work in Austria where I was supervising some office and factory workers. As a thankyou for a job well done I took them to my hotel for a drink. My hotel was the Vienna Hilton. All of the Austrians were overawed and very nervous in a way none of my working class relations would be. The Austrians wouldn't have even have thought to go there. However in London my friend, family and work thought nothing of going 'up west'. Its perhaps this frankly bolshy attitude on the part of the 'lower' classes coupled with the fascination at the other end with working class sportsmen/entertainers/ criminals that make the whole hodge podge of english class so impenetrable to everyone else.

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