A triple vision
John Campbell
CLASS IN BRITAIN by David Cannadine Yale, £19.95, pp. 242 As a British historian teaching in America for the last ten years whose magnum opus is the definitive dissection of the British aristocracy, it is easy to see why David Cannadine should have been drawn to the subject of the British class system. He must have been continually confronted by his students' bewilderment at the com- plex nuances and unspoken assumptions which informed his work. American society may be no more equal than British, but it is undoubtedly less class-ridden. The British talk more about class than other peoples perhaps it would be truer to say that we hint, infer and act on class assumptions more than we talk about it directly — for much the same reason that we talk about the weather. Our social climate, like our meteorology, is uniquely varied, change- able and difficult to define.
What he has written is, very sensibly, not a history of class as such, but a history of perceptions of class. Perhaps that comes to the same thing, since class has no objective existence except in people's minds. Mind-forged manacles, however, can be quite as imprisoning as real ones. His purpose is to show that attitudes to class over the last 300 years have been extraordi- narily consistent, and consistently contra- dictory. The structure of his book is very simple, not to say repetitive: he has taken a set of alternative models of class division and applied them in turn to the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, citing a wealth of eru- dite examples along the way but reaching essentially the same conclusions in each section.
We have, he suggests, three ways of look- ing at society, and we use all three at the same time. First, we have a hierarchical model, a single graduated pyramid from the monarch to the poorest of the poor, in which each finds his place. This is the tradi- tional static view of a God-given order, but it still survives in a more mobile world: society as a ladder.
Second, we habitually impose on this a triple division, which can be expressed in all sorts of forms. In the 17th century it was the better sort, the middling sort and the poorest sort. Adam Smith rooted observa- tion in economics by distinguishing three sources of income: landowners living on rents, businessmen on profits, and labour- ers on wages. By the 19th century, this triple taxonomy — upper, middle and working class — had almost official recognition, reflected in the three classes of railway carriage, and three levels of educa- tion (public schools, grammar schools and elementary schools). In this perspective, the middle class was usually seen as the repository of all morality and enterprise, by contrast with the idle rich above them and the idle poor below.
But there was also always a third way which saw society — from either above or below — simply as 'us' and 'them': rich and poor, toilers and spoilers, the masses against the classes, Disraeli's 'two nations'. Marx formalised the economic divide as the bourgeoisie versus the proletariat, Cap- ital versus Labour; but there have always been more satirical commentators, from the 18th-century Cesar de Saussure, who divided the English into those who 'got drunk in the daytime on liquor and beer' and those who 'get drunk at night on port and punch', to Nancy Mitford's `U and non-U' in the 1950s.
Both the latter models (`triadic' and `dichotomous' in Cannadine's terminology) break down on the impossibility of drawing watertight boundaries: there is no single middle class (think of Orwell's subtle self- definition as 'lower-upper-middle-class') nor a single united working class. Yet both retain their resonance in everyday speech, and are used rhetorically by politicians in ways we all respond to, though we know they are unreal. Cannadine demonstrates that we all use all three models inter- changeably, but suggests that the hierarchi- cal is still the most fundamental and most plausible. His most fascinating chapter brings this all home to Mrs Thatcher. From her mem- oirs, he shows that she unconsciously applies all three models to the Grantham of her youth. He quotes her rejection of class as 'a communist concept', and her egalitarian belief in individuals as con- sumers, but contrasts it with her simultane- ously fierce identification with the middle class (`our people'). One moment she could propound a Burkean view of hierarchy and natural subordination; the next — like Gladstone — she could be a populist rag- ing against the Establishment. 'Here were contradictions aplenty. Small wonder that Thatcher never projected a fully coherent social vision.'
The effect of her rule was to leave British society more polarised and in some ways more class-ridden than ever — as John Major recognised by his aspiration, on tak- ing over, to create a 'classless' society. Vain hope. With the benefit of his American experience, Cannadine ends with a triple prescription of how it might be achieved: by the abolition of titles, ending the educa- tional divide, and somehow overcoming the working class's 'poverty of expectations'. But he does not expect it to happen. The whole thrust of this stimulating book is that we love the infinite subtlety of our class distinctions.
John Campbell's biography of Edward Heath was published in 1993. He is now writing a life of Margaret Thatcher.
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