It is widely believed, both in Britain and abroad, that the British are obsessed with class in the way that other nations are obsessed with food or race or sex or drugs or alcohol. According to John Betjeman, it is ‘that topic all-absorbing, as it was, is now and ever shall be, to us – CLASS’.1 It is impossible to tell whether the British are more preoccupied with class than some other European nations, and it is difficult to imagine how to devise, or to carry through, a research project which would subject this well-known cliché to the sort of rigorous comparative examination that it certainly deserves. This book makes no claims to attempt such an undertaking, but concerns itself with the second matter to which Betjeman's remark directs us: what, exactly, is this thing class with which the British are, undeniably, so obsessed? Stein Ringen has recently sketched this preliminary, provocative answer: ‘what is peculiar to Britain’, he suggests, ‘is not the reality of the class system and its continuing existence, but class psychology: the preoccupation with class, the belief in class, and the symbols of class in manners, dress and language’. ‘This thing they have with class’, he continues, ‘is a sign of closed minds, and it is among what is difficult for a stranger to grasp in the British mentality.’ ‘Britain’, he concludes, ‘is a thoroughly modern society, with thoroughly archaic institutions, conventions and beliefs.’2
Class, Ringen seems to be implying, is rather like sex: it is to some extent in the eyes of the beholder, and in the British case, takes place at least as much inside the head as outside. 3 As someone who has lived for ten years in the United States, with the lengthening vista on Britain that this perspective lends, it is difficult not to be impressed by these remarks. This undoubted British preoccupation may be varyingly regarded as admirable, appropriate, essential, inevitable, regrettable, unhealthy, ignorant, snobbish, petty, small-minded or mean-spirited. But whichever of these it is, or whichever combination of these it is, most British thinking about class is not only obsessional, but also vague, confused, contradictory, ignorant and lacking any adequate historical perspective. The purpose of this book is to suggest some ways in which we in Britain might begin to think about how we think about class more seriously, more deliberately, more historically, more reflectively and more creatively: to try, in short, to get a better sense of what class is and was, and of what it means and what it meant. ‘History’, Sir Keith Thomas once observed, ‘enhances our self-consciousness, enables us to see ourselves in perspective, and helps us towards that greater freedom and understanding which comes from self-knowledge.’4 This book is written in full agreement with those views, and seeks to open up those minds ‘closed’ to class of which Stein Ringen complains.
As such, it can be read in a variety of ways, and by a variety of audiences. At one level, it is an interim report from the historiographical battle front: an account of what historians have been thinking (or increasingly not thinking) about class during a twenty-year period which has seen the collapse of Communism as a system of would-be world dominion and Marxism as a system of would-be world explanation and, more domestically, the rise and fall of Thatcherism, the lingering aftermath of John Major, and the more bracing advent of New Labour. Writing against, and responding to, this changing national and international background, many scholars have concluded that class doesn't matter any more: which seems, to put it mildly, rather odd. It is not a conclusion which I (or most Britons) share.5 At another level, this book attempts to provide an account of the different senses of social identity, as they have evolved, competed and changed in the greater British world across the last three centuries, identities for which the word ‘class’ is both the best but also the most misleading shorthand term. As such, it is an attempt to write genuinely British history (though I am well aware how far it falls short of that objective), and to produce a new master narrative of class, built not around one (Marxist) identity, but around multiple identities. Finally, it is written to provide an historical perspective on the contemporary debate about the meaning and importance of class in Britain, and to offer some suggestions as to what would have to be done to achieve a ‘classless society’, assuming – and this is a very large and debateable assumption – that such a society is either possible or desirable.
This book breaks new ground in that it tries to sketch out a history of class as the history of changing (and unchanging) ways of looking at society, rather than as the more familiar history of changes (or lack of change) in society itself. It is concerned with economic history in that it recognises there have been many developments in what Marx would have called the mode of production: but it is mainly interested in assessing their impact on the ways society has been seen rather than their impact on society itself. It is concerned with social history, not as the old grand narratives of class formation, class consciousness and class conflict, narratives around which the law of diminishing returns long ago seems to have set in, but rather as the history of the varied and varying ways that Britons envisaged and described their social worlds. And it is concerned with political history, not as an account of ministerial manoeuvring and government administration, but as a study of the visions of society entertained by British politicians, and of the ways in which they have conceived their task to be that of imposing their visions of the people on the people. In short, this book hopes to offer a history of class primarily as a cultural history of the ways in which Britons observe and understand, think about and discuss, the unequal society to which they belong. It is not yet another book about toffs and nobs, social climbers, or working-class heroes.
When Jilly Cooper published her account of Class in 1979 (of which more later), she admitted herself ‘very aware of the inadequacies’ of what she had written. ‘The subject’, she went on, ‘is so vast and so complex that I have only touched on a few aspects which seemed important to me.’6 Anyone writing about class is bound to echo this disclaimer about their own work, especially when, as in this case, they are trying to breathe new life into an old subject. Moreover, the argument unfolded and developed here could have been made at much briefer length, or alternatively it could have been extended to several volumes. In seeking a compromise between these two scales of exposition, I have tried to combine the virtues of both approaches (brevity and detail) rather than their shortcomings (superficiality and over-kill). But there is one shortcoming of which I am especially aware: for these pages do not specifically address the question of what British women have thought about class. If Jilly Cooper's book is any guide, they think about it very much as men do, which is hardly surprising, since, for most of recorded history, the social position and social identities of women have been determined first by their fathers and then by their husbands. But I do not feel entirely happy with this formulation, and having recently re-read, side by side, The Classic Slum (1990) by Robert Roberts, and Hidden Lives (1995) by Margaret Forster, it seems likely that women visualise the social world, and their place within it, in some ways that are different from men. This ‘serious gap in our knowledge’ still awaits its historian, and perhaps the shortcomings of my account will provoke someone else to set out to fill it.7
In the course of preparing this book, I have incurred many obligations, which it is a pleasure to be able to acknowledge here. It began life as the inaugural series of the Leonard Hastings Schoff Memorial Lectures, which I delivered at Columbia University in the autumn of 1993, and I am deeply grateful to Professor Kenneth Jackson and his co-electors for their generous invitation, which gave me the opportunity to think about the subject in a more deliberate and systematic way than I might otherwise ever have done. Since then, parts of it have been delivered as the Raleigh Lecture to the British Academy and the George Orwell Memorial Lecture at the University of Sheffield, and also as seminar papers at Cambridge, Southampton and the Johns Hopkins Universities. Most of the writing was undertaken while I was a Visiting Fellow at the Whitney Humanities Center of Yale University, and I owe a particular debt to Professors David Marshall and Peter Brooks for providing me with such congenial colleagues and stimulating surroundings. I also wish to thank the Master and Fellows of Pembroke College, Cambridge, who kindly elected me a Visiting Scholar for the Lent term of 1996, which enabled me to get the whole project into better perspective. And I am especially grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation of New York, without whose financial support this book would not have been completed this side of the millennium.
The personal debts which I have accumulated are no less great. The study of class in Britain has been transformed during the last twenty years, and my obligations to the many historians now working in the field are extensively and appreciatively acknowledged in the notes. Like them, I have also relied on, and responded to, the writings of an earlier generation of scholars, who first made the history of class a serious subject, among them Asa Briggs, John Foster, Eric Hobsbawm, the late Henry Pelling, Harold Perkin, Dorothy Thompson, the late Edward Thompson, and Michael Thompson. I owe particular thanks to Andrew Adonis, Andrew August, David Armitage, Susan Bayly, Christopher Bayly, David Bell, Joanna Bourke, Bill Bowen, Richard Bushman, Robert Darnton, Eric Foner, Roy Foster, Kevin Kenny, Jonathan Parry, Sally Shuttleworth, Quentin Skinner, Sir Keith Thomas, James Thompson, Roberta Guerriero Wilson, Jay Winter, Isser Woloch, Sir Tony Wrigley and Harriet Zuckerman. John Nicoll of Yale University Press has shown his customary flair, brilliance and determination in getting this book and in getting it into print, and my gratitude to him is, once again, unbounded. Candida Brazil has overseen the manuscript with exemplary care and attention and Joye M. Horn has given invaluable assistance with the proofs. My agent, Mike Shaw, has provided support and encouragement in endless and bountiful abundance, and Linda Colley has, as always, made life worth living and books worth writing.
While working on this subject, I have often been reminded of some wise but rather discouraging words of R.H. Tawney: ‘the word “class”’, he rightly noted, ‘is fraught with unpleasing associations, so that to linger upon it is apt to be interpreted as the symptom of a perverted mind and a jaundiced spirit’.8 There is much to be said for this remark, from both a social viewpoint and a scholarly perspective. Class can be nasty, and class can be boring. In Britain, it is often both. But I must record, by way of unapologetic confession, that I have found this book an enormous pleasure to write, and the subject a source of endless fascination, constant stimulus and unfailing surprise. I trust I have been able to convey some of this pleasure, fascination, stimulus and surprise in the pages which follow. And since the British persist in lingering on this subject, and often do so in rather an unpleasing manner, it is surely neither a perverted aim nor a jaundiced ambition to try to shed some fresh historical light upon it. Accordingly, I offer this book in the hope that it will enable the British to understand class better, to understand their society better, and to understand themselves better. If it makes only a modest contribution to the achievement of these objectives, it will more than have served its turn.
David Cannadine
New Haven
Thanksgiving, 1997