Class in Angus Wilson

Hand-woven djibbah

In Such Darling Dodos, Angus Wilson writes about groups of people who are imprisoned together by money. Adult children get a small allowance. Even after the war (when most people had jobs), it’s acceptable for young women to live at home without studying or working. The idea is that they will meet a suitable young man and get married, but their parents have no spare money for the strenuous social life that would enable this. Things changed in the 60s. A bit.

The rock garden… looked so bare and pathetic in winter, but he anticipated with pleasure the masses of aubretia, crimson, lavender, blue, that would blaze there in May. (Only purple aubretia is permitted, and Upwards insist that it is “aubreta”.)

Here's the room that goes with this garden: “the Medici prints, the little silver bowls, the mauve net curtains, the shot-silk covers, the beaten copperware, the Chinese lanterns and Honesty in pewter mugs – it was all so pathetically genteel and arty.”

A spinster wears: “lucky charm bracelets and semi-precious necklaces”. Jingling or clanking jewellery was warned against by etiquette authorities.

“Dresses on Priscilla would always seem like hand-woven djibbahs.” A djibbah was what we’d call a kaftan (though the word was also used for a child’s overall). They became a uniform for progressive women like Priscilla who in the late 19th century refused on principle to wear corsets. They also became short-hand for a certain kind of woman: intellectual and fey. She might be a social reformer or a spiritualist.

Tony, an elderly conservative Catholic, visits his Oxford cousins: He entered that awful sitting-room with its Heal’s furniture, its depressingly sensible typewriter and long low bookcases… Hard little, bright-covered books full of facts, a dangerous array of so-called scientific knowledge that tried to treat man as a machine. Long, low bookcases were a marker for university lecturers. Penguin (orange) and Pelican (turquoise) paperbacks were full of the “illusory paradise of refrigerators for all”.

Priscilla has written to Tony to say that her husband is ill. Now she regrets it. The sort of wretched, hysterical outburst that one hopes so much will never happen, but which always does at these hateful, morbid times. According to her code, all expression of human emotion is hysterical or morbid.

Kitty visits her relative’s employers: “Kitty came downstairs to meet them, her fox fur and eye-veil resumed for the occasion.” The net eye-veil was part of her hat.

Margaret’s “dainty” room features: “Venetian glass swans and crocheted silk table mats”.

In another story, landlady Greta is out with her elderly boyfriend. He had told her so often that physical caresses in public were ‘just not done’… She no longer said ‘serviette’… She never went out now without gloves… but she also no longer blew into them when she took them off. She was jealous sometimes… but he told her not to be so suburban. Blowing into your tight leather gloves was a class marker: But did anybody really?

Here's poor Jacky Bast from Howard's End in the early 1900s: Her appearance was awesome. She seemed all strings and bell-pulls – ribbons, chains, bead necklaces that clinked and caught and a boa of azure feathers hung round her neck, with the ends uneven. Her throat was bare, wound with a double row of pearls, her arms were bare to the elbows, and might again be detected at the shoulder, through cheap lace. Her hat, which was flowery, resembled those punnets, covered with flannel, which we sowed with mustard and cress in our childhood, and which germinated here yes, and there no. She wore it on the back of her head. (She also "sees to" her hat by blowing on it.)

Get the Look

“We wanted a cottagey stately home kind of feel.” 1991 Martin Parr, Signs of the Times

Sort of the Scandinavian-French-New England style. (Bunting-loving seller on Sarah Beeny’s Selling Houses)

Natural simplicity/modern heritage/boutique townhouse (Argos ranges)

The Modern Heritage Lounge Look: To create this traditionally-inspired Heritage style, a leather sofa with an antique feel looks stunning accented with sumptuous textured cushions in deep blues and plums. Adorn walls with Darwinian inspired botanical prints in bold picture frames and opt for paint effects and patterns with the patina of age. Occasional pieces with period detail and a sense of craftsmanship complete the Heritage collection. (argos.co.uk)

Fair Client: "I want it to be nice and baronial, Queen Anne and Elizabethan, and all that; kind of quaint and Nuremburgy you know – regular Old English, with French windows opening to the lawn, and Venetian blinds, and sort of Swiss balconies, and a loggia. But I'm sure you know what I mean!" (Cartoon by George du Maurier, Punch, November 29, 1890)

We're aiming for a fairly cosy, retro-farmhouse kind of look. (blog post commenter re ripping out a 30s kitchen)


Middle-class Upwards loathed the home makeover show Changing Rooms, with its staple-gun approach to design: the opposite of the genuine shabby chic achieved by living in one house for generations. In one episode a Goth couple got – not Dracula’s castle but a pseudo-medieval bedroom with hardboard arches, fleur de lys everywhere, ochre walls and red and blue swags.

Middle-class Upwards do some historical research on the period or look they want, or think they do. Perhaps they are just as guilty of “getting the look”.

“Moroccan is all about sumptuous fabrics and glowing colours.” (TV programme Get the Look)

This translates as “gold thread”. “Inspired by” and “theme” are key. “The wallpaper picks up the geometric theme” – but it’s a pattern of seed-pod slices. You get the “French look” with “curves and gilding”. Boot sale buys are transformed with a bit of paint. Underneath it all is a small Victorian terraced house.

The Get the Look website

offers a choice of:

Shabby chic
Contemporary
Mid-century modern
Art Deco
Floral

Bright & bold
Metallic
Hollywood glamour
White
Coastal

Scandinavian
Glam Rock'n' Roll
Moroccan
French
Boutique Hotel


For Hollywood Glamour, “Animal prints and glitz are mixed with muted shades and 1950s style furniture for true Hollywood style. The black sofa brings out the colours of the flamingo wallpaper and the cushions bring a glimmer of luxurious materials to the room - mohair, silk, sequins and diamante. Existing furniture is livened up with a feathered trim added to the standing lamp.”

If Argos customers can get an  off-the-peg Heritage Lounge Look (industrial, worn leather, old books), what will the Upwards do?

And I hate to say this, but it's "standard lamp".

World of Interiors, and links to more on decor.

World of Interiors 2

Dough-craft wall plaque

The most recent house a middle-class Upward can live in is Edwardian – they haven’t reached 30s Arts and Crafts yet. Chinese millionaires love Tudoresque houses – they think it’s the most upmarket style. For Upwards, this is just another reason for loathing all things Jacobethan. Upwards hate half-timbering because it is just stuck on, not "honest" – though they don't mind classical fireplaces modelled on Greek temples.

In a BBC poll (Sept 2013), “period properties” were ranked:
Georgian
Victorian
Edwardian
Inter-war
Post-war
Upwards, with their Edwardian terrace houses and genuine enamel colanders, like to live in the past (with central heating, broadband, digital TV and Macbooks, of course). The 20s and 30s are too recent for them. Hipster Rowena Upward is always trying to revive a moment that all her relatives will loathe. She’s buying up 80s jewellery, hoping for a boom. She's always ahead – back in the 80s she arranged broken bits of blue-and-white china on an old tin tray and hung a single chandelier luster in her window to reflect the light. When Samantha tried to copy her, it never really worked – the sherds and crystals got lost in the clutter of postcards, nicknacks, books and coffee mugs. However hard she dug, she couldn’t find enough blue-and-white fragments in the garden. She suspected Rowena of breaking plates on purpose.

An old-style millionaire built a many-gabled mansion in the 80s. “He added a 20-foot waterfall to the back of the house and installed an indoor shark tank and private burro zoo….” But ostentation is out. [Now] interiors are ripped out, to turn elegant collections of rooms into enormous voids.” (New York Times)

Upwards always call an eat-in kitchen a “kitchen/breakfast room” because they don’t want to imply that they’d eat dinner in their kitchen, even if they don’t have a separate dining room. And “diner” is American. Nor can they talk about “banquettes” or “breakfast nooks”.

The ever-wonderful Middle Class Handbook notes the way poshos mix old paperbacks, Cornishware mugs and Duralex glasses with expensive wine and looseleaf tea. “Their TVs are old and small.” This is real upper-class shabby chic. You have lived in the same house for decades (extra points if you’ve had the same holiday cottage for decades – preferably since the 20s). If it ain’t broke, you don’t fix it. You just add things, and the result is what “eclectic” café style is aiming at. You do the same with your clothes (and jewellery). And the holiday cottage is full of kilims and durries that have faded almost to extinction with age, also hardbacks with tattered dust jackets spotted with damp and mould.

Lower middle Jen Teale has spotless beige fitted carpets – she has them professionally steam cleaned. According to the Middle Class Handbook Brits buy 25% fewer carpets now than they did in 2006. Jen hangs a reproduction Renoir over the fireplace. Only Teales and working-class Definitelies have “wall plaques” (the Sun, the Green Man, the Virgin Mary). About 20 years ago actress Jane Asher started up a craft magazine which was damned by a reviewer just quoting the words “doughcraft wall plaque”. Doughcraft was an 80s Upward craft – they have moved on to making their own bunting.

Very posh people and the Nouveau-Richards have dining pavilions in the garden.

More here, and links to the rest.

Make It Legal

Not just a piece of paper

Our country’s governance will increasingly have to be based on legally enforced rules, rather than the universally accepted norms of behaviour that were once “the best thing about British society”. (Michael McCarthy, Independent, paraphrase Aug 2011)

No more regulations; what’s needed is a change in culture. (quoted on BBC News 2013 6 8)

Education, Not Regulation, is What's Needed at Britain's Rowdy Tabloids. ... No, what needs to change is the culture, the ethos that operates in British newsrooms. (Tony Rogers, journalism.about.com)

“There is no such thing as common law marriage or common law man and wife.” (nidirect.gov.uk)


The middle classes don’t quite understand that the law applies to everybody – and that means them.

They’re always moaning about regulations (“There are too many laws! We should repeal the lot of them!”). They howl when laws are passed that apply to them, especially about smoking, seatbelts and speeding. They loathe the idea of a DNA database. They want a bobby on the beat, but CCTV is an instrument of the devil. Any law a “law-abiding” citizen may actually break is a “petty regulation” imposed by busybodies and bureaucrats.

But they don’t complain about the “nannying and meddling” that banned adulterated food, or ended London smogs (the Clean Air Acts of 1956, 1968 and 1993), or healed the hole in the ozone layer after econuts campaigned against CFCs. They’re quite happy to benefit from safety curtains in theatres.

They say you can’t ban smacking because it would criminalise most parents in the UK. Or even criminalise innocent, law-abiding people. But if the government makes something a crime and you keep on doing it you are not abiding by the law. (They object to a lot of things on the grounds that they would “criminalise” middle class people – ie treat middle-class lawbreakers the same as chav scum lawbreakers.)

The same people who whinge that Britain is becoming a police state approve of boarding schools, corporal punishment and workhouses, and think the civil liberties of “yobs” should be taken away.

They think we don’t need laws against paedophiles or bottom pinchers: “In my day we easily got rid of them – it’s between the people concerned – these pathetic people needn’t concern us.”

They think people should be kept in line by a “change of culture” (though many hate protesters like Occupy). Upper-middle Upwards think the liberal project should be carried on by “social pressure”, not legal changes. (This may mean Upwards spouting propaganda, organising sit-ins and generally being bossy, as usual.)

"Change of culture" is management-speak, and seems to mean “becoming more ethical”. In the old days we called it “teaching people morality”. But, as the Upwards say, the word “morality” has been “hijacked by the right”. What ARE we to do?

Oddly, the people calling for a change of culture rather than more regulations are the same ones who insist the English language follows rules, and say that Americanisms should be banned. (And that people who say "Can I get a latte?" should be shot.)

Right-wingers think that they are prevented from making racist or sexist remarks by something called “political correctness”. Actually it’s the Crime and Disorder Act of 1998.

They like to say “You can’t legislate away bigotry and intolerance.” Yes, we can. For example, acceptance of homosexuality has risen in countries where civil partnerships have been introduced. Read about it here. And here.

Working-class Mr Definitely thinks “human rights” means prisoners having tellies. (“Prison’s just like a holiday camp!” as he used to say when Butlin’s was popular.) He also likes to say “I know my rights!” and “It’s a free country!”. His bosses call him a “barrack-room lawyer”.

Posh Stow Crats know the law, particularly in regard to inheritance (for the stately home and land).


When it comes to marriage, Upwards think they’re living in a pre-legal society. Discussions about marriage in the Guardian (Why is it out of date, or back in fashion?) never mention the legal aspects: rights to pensions, property, inheritance, guardianship of children. Unmarried fathers have few rights, and since the Children Act of 1989  have to opt in to parental responsibility by filling in a form (“petty bureaucracy” again).

If you exchange vows in your garden in front of your friends you’re married in their eyes which is what matters. “The legal and fiscal side would diminish the relationship and communal side,” say some Upwards.

Upwards think that “making it legal” means that the state thinks only marriage is a legal union. Living together is not illegal (where are the cohabitation police?), it just doesn’t give you legal rights. It hasn’t since 1753.


The rights gained on marriage or civil partnership (they differ) are explained here. Just one example: if you aren’t married, and have a joint bank account, and one of you dies, the remaining partner ceases to have access to the bank account until the estate is sorted out.

Bohemian Arkana Nightshade says that this is all so utilitarian and unspiritual – you should trust that the universe and humanity will look after you. Hipster Rowena thinks weddings are retro – and vintage and antique. She has a Goth wedding at a Unitarian church.

Other Upwards think it’s better not to be married because divorce is so expensive. Splitting up will be even more expensive when you find you have no rights to your home or your partner’s pension. Dividing up your assets will be just as costly if you’re not married. What if you’ve contributed to the mortgage but your name isn’t on the deeds? What’s your legal position? I don’t know, do you?

Some amazingly witless Guardian-readers whine about marriage (September 3, 2011)

Having lived together a very long time, my husband and I … decided to get married for reasons of inheritance tax. Harry was an anarchist, and as such felt we did not need the approval of the state to do so (presumably “live together”), and wanted it not to be known … that he had committed this heretical act.

Last year my husband (shudder) and I had to get married for tax reasons…

I never thought of marriage as mandatory…

We had no religious beliefs and regarded marriages as no more than a piece of paper. We thought there were some beneficial tax reasons but did not make enquiries. Then my husband found out from work that if anything happened to him, his dependents would receive nothing, whereas if we were married we’d be secure…

(What do they teach them at these universities? They always bring out the bit of paper line as if they were the first to think of it.)

Update: After 10 years, the middle classes are as idiotic as ever: 

A précis by @stevewebb1 of the many ways in which unmarried couples are discriminated against (in life and on death) relative to married couples, even after (as here) 30 years together. Time for the law to catch up with modern society. (@MissJoEdwards. They just need to get married. Costs about £100.)

More here.

More Euphemisms

Leafy suburb

“Look at inner city. Once merely a descriptive term to distinguish a core urban area from the surrounding suburbs, it has become a code word for 'the place where unemployed black people on welfare, living amid the drug trade and homicides, send their children to bad schools and the penitentiary.' The inner city is contrasted with the tree-lined streets of leafy suburbs, meaning 'the place where affluent white people live and where the writer lives, or would like to.' Contrast leafy suburbs with any place described as hardscrabble, which indicates 'usually rural area or place in flyover country where working-class or poor white people struggle to get by'. (The Baltimore Sun, January 2013)

be yourself: don’t copy Kevin and Tracey from down the road

brands: Decipher expert says ABs shopping at Primark while CDs buy aspirational brands. The Times, Oct 29 2011 (Meaning that the best upper sets are saving money by shopping for clothes at budget store Primark, while the less well-off buy branded merchandise by Armani, Louis Vuitton etc. Top people may buy Cath Kidston and Boden but in some mysterious way these are not “brands”.)

civilised: A “civilised” (i.e. posh) festival, Rewind has 1980s pop, “glamping” and champagne bars. (The Week, May 2011)

educated: middle class

emerging neighbourhood: embourgeoisement, gentrification

fine dining: linen tablecloths and obsequious waiters

from all walks of life: all classes

grinding chaos: other people (“I hate the noise, the dirt, the fumes and the grinding chaos." Politician Ian Duncan Smith on living in London, March 2013)

he rose from a humble or non-academic background: working-class background – it must have been if he “rose” from it

heavy, heavily: code for vulgar décor (“The rooms, though heavy with brocade swagged curtains…” redonline.co.uk “The tablecloths are heavy with starch.” Daily Mail, May 2012 “Heavily decorated chiffonniers inlaid with of mother of pearl.” frenchprovincialmag.com)

hysteria about paedophilia: using the word “paedophile”. (Only chavs say “paedophile”. Chavs are hysterical about paedos. We have legitimate concerns about child molesters.)

idyll: middle-class cosiness, flight from reality

intelligent: Men like to say that they find intelligence attractive. This means “not an Essex girl, won’t show me up in public”. Middle class, in fact.

It's only the poor and the posh who “breed”. (Andy Lewis/@lecanardnoir)

locals: yokels

man, woman, girl: In Agatha Christie, if characters refer to people as “the man Archer” or “that girl Amy”, it means Archer and Amy are working class. Same goes for “a woman called Mary Smith”.

mannered (of an actor’s performance): posh

our absurdly risk-obsessed society: We had a teensy fire at our house and firemen and paramedics turned up and started telling us what to do!

petty bourgeois: lower middle class (They’re soooo petty! Actually it’s “petit” and it just means “small”.)

popular culture: working-class culture

potential: “The middle classes are leaving the state sector in droves… partly because they think their children will be mixing with pupils who will not help their child reach full potential.” (Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, reported in the Evening Standard, Nov 23 07)

product of the northern club circuit: working class (Telegraph piece on Frank Carson explains, Feb 2012)

reality TV: common people getting on television

regional accents: the Home Counties (around London) are not a “region”. (Viewers switch off the One Show because the presenters are from the northeast and Wales. Or do they just say they do?)

regional: working-class (Regions are where “we” aren’t.)

rentier class: always petty like the bourgeoisie (from Marxism?)

rough: working-class (Skegness too rough for Peroni, Guardian, 22 April 2013)

run-of-the-mill: people we are superior to

rural idyll: chav-free zone (“Why is the rural idyll I call home voting for Marine Le Pen?” Independent headline April 30, 2012)

social mobility: upward social mobility

There are certain standards!: I am a snob.

very ordinary people: working-class people (writer to The Times explaining that it’s not just middle-class Anglicans from the south who sing in choirs)

we, us: middle-class white people

More here.

Quotes About Class (and Kirstie Allsop)

Labour MP @SimonDanczuk, humiliated by @OwenJones84 on BBC2, yelled "It's alright for you, you come from the posh part of Stockport!" (‏@mrmarksteel, 2 July 2013)

I was astonished to find that it was possible to spend your life surrounded by great literature and remain (or become) paralysed by snobbery. (Julian Barnes, Guardian, July 2013)

A London of struggling writers "living in a middle-class style on a working-class income”. (John Goode on writer George Gissing)

Cashed-up bogans... It is a term my middle-class tribe uses disparagingly to make us feel better about being educated, but comparatively poor. I am not the first privately educated university graduate who wishes she had done a truck-driving course instead. (BBC on Australian chavs 2013-02-24)

Nothing is more bourgeois than to be afraid to look bourgeois. (Andy Warhol)

The journey was mind-numbingly tedious: a sequence of Ms and As with various numbers attached, interspersed with service stations that appeared to be patronised solely by people who had recently been released from prison. Where were the middle classes? There's a gap in the market – I'm sure a service station that incorporated a contemporary art gallery and a sushi restaurant would be a huge success. I'd go there. The Age of Uncertainty

The old class stratifications have gone – it’s much more nuanced now, says the BBC 2013-04-03 commenting on its new survey. (People have said this every year for the past 30 years.)

JOLLY HOCKEYSTICKS!
In girls’ school stories by Angela Brazil and Enid Blyton (they flourished from the 1900s to the 50s), girls allegedly expressed approval with the phrase “Oh, jolly hockey sticks!”. NGram Viewer shows that it appears in the mid-60s and rises sharply to the present. worldwidewords.org says it was invented in the 50s by Beryl Reid for her radio character, the schoolgirl Monica.

It has become What To Say About TV property expert Kirstie Allsop, who went to the progressive and non-hockey-playing Bedales school.

As always with Kirstie, it's all very jolly hockey sticks. She's an Enid Blyton head girl on a mission and she's starting with the hall… She's right, it is much more satisfying to pick up a vintage one-off or to make something yourself than it is waiting for your ticket number to come up at Argos. And you'll never run the risk as having the same curtains as Maureen down the road. But while all of this is very nice, does anyone in their right mind really have the time to design their own stained glass window, weld their own bookends or crochet a five-sided gift box "perfect for chocolate, soaps or even a plant”? (thisisleicestershire.co.uk)

Jolly hockeysticks? That's all Nancy Mitford, Kirstie Allsop, "Ooh rah, time for games!" isn't it? (Facebook) (Nancy Mitford never wrote school stories.)

Kirstie is terribly jolly hockeysticks. (stephaniepomfrett.wordpress.com)

Kirstie used to seem naive, jolly hockeysticks, flirtatious. (mumsnet)

Kirstie’s jolly hockeysticks persona is a bit unusual in TV these days but I think she carries it off. I like crafts but I find her craft shows a bit too twee. (mumsnet)

The world presented in the movie is a kind of jolly-hockeysticks rural idyll where kids can run around the countryside all day unimpeded and the locals are eccentric yokels. The threats to this way of life come from city-dwelling interlopers and the loss of good manners. (Review on ciao.co.uk of a Nanny McPhee film. “Running around the countryside” does not involve hockeysticks.)

goodreads.com has a category of “jolly hockeysticks books”.

More classy quotes here, and links to the rest.

Yesterday's Papers

The upper middle-class Upwards whinge when all the press gives huge coverage to events like Wimbledon, assuming that everybody in the country likes the same things. Upwards are always trying to assert their difference from the rest of the country, and they have never really got over the introduction of 24-hour news (about 25 years ago).

They adored the royal baby watch, using the word “fawning” in every sentence and grumbling about BBC flannel. Upper-class Caro sheds a tear and pours herself a gin and tonic, middle-class Eileen Weybridge and Jen Teale share a baby watch party and love every moment. Working-class Sharon goes to Kensington Palace and leaves a cuddly toy and a card.

Journalists, Upwards and Weybridges agree, get everything wrong, write sloppily and are despicable human beings. This doesn’t stop all Upward graduates trying to get a job in the media. And if you are a journalist, people assume you write for one of the broadsheets (not for one of the hundreds of magazines that still exist despite the web – 3.7m sold every day, says answers.com), and spend all your time meeting celebrities and going on free trips abroad. (So when do you fit in door-stepping the bereaved, stalking the royals and rehashing press releases?)


Whenever snow is predicted, the middle classes will panic because they think everybody is going to panic – or even whinge. And they’ll go on about it too much. (Translation: the BBC will try to be prepared and tell us about it in advance.)

Upwards and Weybridges spend a lot of time moaning that newspapers and news programmes are full of stuff they aren’t interested in. They like to say:

Newspapers? All opinion or trivia. Haven’t contained any news since the Anglo Saxon Chronicle. Are full of ads which will hypnotise you into buying things you don’t want. Are full of porn. If a newspaper writes about anything you know about, you’ll find it’s got the facts wrong. Only need to capture the attention for a day. Ephemeral. Yesterday’s papers wrap today’s chips. Print media is dead!

This is a quote from my mini ebook Clichés: A Dictionary of Received Ideas ("Everything you need to know in order to be accepted as a member of polite society" Flaubert) A paperback version is now available.

More clichés here.