All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go by Malcolm Bradbury

Author:Malcolm Bradbury
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2015-03-25T14:08:56+00:00

PART FOUR

Having quality

EVERY PERSON OF quality knows, more or less instinctively, that there are certain senses in which the whole idea of class is a pure invention, something that has been brought about by morbid and continued introspection on the subject by so-called ‘specialists’. These persons are themselves a symptom of the neurosis of our time. There was a time, not so long ago, when these things did not matter in the same way as they are now supposed to matter, and then people were not concerned about what class they were, and what they ought to feel about it. They simply ‘carried on’ in the best British tradition. Even people of no quality at all were much happier, being content to be at the other end of noblesse oblige. And so they might—collecting their maundy money and their Queen’s shilling with a merry air.

It is certainly true that class consciousness today is a totally proletarian phenomenon. People of quality are not conscious of class—they may know the crowd they run with, but they do not think in terms of class. No one is so preoccupied with class as those who have not got it. They seem most concerned with something which is called ‘social mobility’. This is nothing new; it is just ‘getting on’, and the most important aspect of it, according to the texts, is acquiring a better job than one’s father, and marrying a richer woman than one’s mother. These principles have been known to the aristocracy for centuries, but they have recently been discovered by sociologists who have now sought to make the public aware of them; indeed, they are the principal selling line of these merchants. Of course, the crude emphasis on getting a better job than one’s father is just a modern technologized version of Oedipus, a way of doing him down. The marriage side of it is more complicated. There was a time when beauty was a principal criterion in picking a mate, but today ugly women have disappeared so alarmingly that there is really scarcely any criterion in choosing a wife except her fortune.

Since social mobility has become so popular, it is necessary for people of good stock to know a little more about their own position in this regard. For the general public it is clear that there was ever only one direction for them in which to be mobile (the process is often painfully slow, despite the vivid terminology) and clearly for the aristocracy too there is only one way to go, and this is downwards. It becomes self-evidently clear then that people who really matter are either not mobile at all, or are discreetly and gently mobile in a downwards direction.

Indelicate as the subject is, the question of ‘making ends meet in a classless society’ is one which many gentlefolk in reduced circumstances must face. Income tax with Pitt, death duties at the end of the nineteenth century, ‘progressive taxation’—all these form the background of the present difficulties of people of quality.

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