Status Anxiety

IV

SNOBBERY

1.

Up until a certain age, no one minds much what we do, existence alone is enough to earn us unconditional affection. We can burp up our food, scream at the top of our voice, throw the cutlery on the floor, spend the day gazing blankly out of the window, relieve ourselves in the flower pot—and still know that someone will come and stroke our hair, change our clothes and sing us songs. We begin our time on earth in the hands of a mother, who asks little more of us than that we continue to live. Even those who are not our own mothers, be they men or women, behave as indulgently: they smile when they see us on a family shopping trip, they comment on the pretty patterns of our clothes and, on a lucky day, bring us a furry animal, a few rails of wooden track or a signal box as a reward for just being ourselves.

But this idyllic state is fated not to endure. By the time we have finished our education, we are forced to take our place in a world dominated by a new kind of person, as different from a mother as it is possible to be and whose behaviour lies at the heart of our status anxieties: the snob. Though certain friends and lovers will remain immune from snobbery, will promise not to disown us even if we are bankrupted and disgraced (on a good day, we may even believe them), in general, we are forced to subsist on a diet of the highly conditional attentions of snobs.

2.

The word “snobbery” came into use for the first time in England during the 1820s. It was said to have derived from the habit of many Oxford and Cambridge colleges of writing sine nobilitate (without nobility), or “s.nob, ” next to the names of ordinary students on examination lists in order to distinguish them from their aristocratic peers.

In the word’s earliest days, a snob was taken to mean someone without high status, but it quickly assumed its modern and almost diametrically opposed meaning: someone offended by a lack of high status in others, a person who believes in a flawless equation between social rank and human worth. In his Book of Snobs (1848), a pioneering essay on the subject, William Thackeray observed that over the previous twenty-five years, snobs had “spread over England like the railroads. They are now known and recognized throughout an Empire on which the sun never sets.”

Though traditionally they may have been associated with an interest in the aristocracy (for they were first pinned down in language at a time and place when aristocrats stood at the social apex), the identification of snobbery with an enthusiasm for old-world manners, blazers, hunting and gentlemen’s clubs hardly captures the diversity of the phenomenon. It lets too many off the hook. Snobs can be found through history ingratiating themselves with a range of prominent groups—from soldiers (Sparta, 400 B.C.), bishops (Rome, 1500), and poets (Weimar, 1815), to farmers (China, 1967), and film stars (Hollywood, 2004)—for the primary interest of snobs is power, and as the distribution of power changes, so, naturally and immediately, will the objects of their admiration.

3.

It is easy to recognise the moment when we have entered the orbit of a snob. Early on in an encounter, the subject of what we “do” will arise and depending on how we answer, we will either be the recipients of bountiful attention or the catalysts of urgent disgust.

The company of the snobbish has the power to enrage and unnerve because we sense how little of who we are deep down—that is, how little of who we are outside of our status—will be able to govern their behaviour towards us. We may be endowed with the wisdom of Solomon and have the resourcefulness and intelligence of Odysseus, but if we are unable to wield socially recognized badges of our qualities, our existence will remain a matter of raw indifference to them.

This conditional attention pains us because our earliest memory of love is of being cared for in a naked, impoverished condition. Babies cannot, by definition, repay their caretakers with worldly rewards. In so far as they are loved and looked after, it is therefore for who they are, identity understood in its barest, most stripped-down state. They are loved for, or in spite of, their uncontrolled, howling and stubborn characters.

Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement: being polite, succeeding at school and later, acquiring rank and prestige. Such efforts may attract the interest of others, but the underlying emotional craving is not so much to dazzle because of our deeds as to recapture the tenor of the bountiful, indiscriminate petting we received in return for arranging wooden bricks on the kitchen floor, for having a soft plump body and wide trusting eyes.

It is evidence of this craving that only the most inept flatterer would admit to a wish to base a friendship around an attraction to power or fame. Such assets would feel like insulting and volatile reasons to be invited to lunch, for they lie outside the circle of our true and irreducible selves. Jobs can be lost and influence eroded without us perishing nor our childhood-founded need for affection slackening. Talented flatterers therefore know they should suggest that it is strictly the status-less part of their prey they are interested in, that the ambassadorial car, newspaper profiles or company directorship are mere coincidental features of a profound and pure attachment.

Ye t, despite their efforts, the prey are liable to detect the fickleness beneath the polished surface and leave the company of snobs fearing the irrelevance of their essential selves beside any status which, for a time, they may hold precariously in their hands.

4.

Given their exclusive interest in reputation and achievement, snobs are prone to make some sudden tragi-comic reassessments of who their closest friends might be when the outer circumstances of their acquaintances alter.

On a foggy evening in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century, the bourgeois narrator of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1922) travels to an expensive restaurant to have dinner with an aristocratic friend, the Marquis de Saint-Loup. He arrives early, Saint-Loup is late and the staff, judging their client on the basis of a shabby coat and an unfamiliar name, assume that a nobody has entered their establishment. They therefore patronize him, take him to a table around which an arctic draught is blowing and are slow to offer him anything to drink or eat.

But, a quarter of an hour later, the marquis arrives, identifies his friend and at a stroke transforms the narrator’s value in the eyes of the staff. The manager bows deeply before him, draws out the menu, recites the specials of the day with evocative flourishes, compliments him on his clothes and, so as to prevent him thinking that these courtesies are in any way dependent on his link to an aristocrat, occasionally gives him a surreptitious little smile that seems to indicate a wholly personal affection. When the narrator asks him for some bread, the manager clicks his heels and exclaims:

“Certainly, Monsieur le baron!” “I am not a baron,” I told him in a tone of mock sadness. “Oh, I beg your pardon, Monsieur le comte!” I had no time to lodge a second protest, which would no doubt have promoted me to the rank of marquis.

However satisfactory the volte-face, the underlying dynamic is bleak, for the manager has not of course amended his snobbish value system in any way. He has merely rewarded someone differently within its brutal confines—and only rarely do we have the opportunity to find a Marquis de Saint-Loup or a Prince Charming who will speak up on our behalf to convince the world of the nobility of our souls. More commonly, we are made to finish our dinner in the arctic draught.

5.

The problem is compounded by newspapers. Because snobs combine a weak capacity for independent judgement with an appetite for the views of influential people, their beliefs will, to a critical degree, be set by the atmosphere of the press.

Thackeray proposed that the obsessive English concern with high status and the aristocracy could be traced back to the country’s papers, which daily reinforced messages about the prestige of the titled and the famous and, by implication, the banality of the untitled and the ordinary. His particular bugbear was the “Court Circular” section of the papers, which reverently covered the parties, holidays, births and deaths of “high society.” In October 1848 (the month of publication of his Book of Snobs), the Court Circular of the Morning Post reported on Lord Brougham’s hunting party at Brougham Hall (“a good sport was had by all”), Lady Agnes Duff’s impending accouchement in Edinburgh and Georgina Pakenham’s marriage to Lord Burghley (“Her Ladyship was magnificently attired in a white satin dress, with lace flounces and a corsage.montant. It is needless to say that she looked exquisite”).

“How can you help being snobs, so long as this balderdash is set before you?” demanded Thackeray. “Oh, down with the papers, those engines and propagators of snobbishness!” And, to expand on Thackeray’s thought, how greatly the levels of status anxiety of the population might diminish if only our own newspapers were to exchange a fraction of their interest in Lady Agnes Duff and her successors for a focus on the significance of ordinary life.

6.

It is perhaps only ever fear that is to blame. Belittling others is no pastime for those convinced of their own standing. There is terror behind haughtiness. It takes a punishing impression of our own inferiority to leave others feeling that they aren’t good enough for us.

The fear flows down the generations. In a pattern common to all abusive behaviour, snobs generate snobs. An older generation inflicts its own unusually powerful association between modest rank and catastrophe, denying its offspring the layer of emotional bedding that would grant them the inner ease to imagine that low status (their own and that of others) does not neatly equate with unworthiness, nor high status with excellence.

“There go the Spicer Wilcoxes, Mamma!” a daughter exclaims to her mother while walking in Hyde Park on a spring morning in a Punch cartoon of 1892. “I’m told they’re dying to know us. Hadn’t we better call?”

“Certainly not, Dear,” replies the mother, labouring under an ancestral sense of unworthiness. “If they’re dying to know us, they’re not worth knowing. The only People worth Our knowing are the people who don’t want to know us!”

Unless Mamma can be helped to heal the scars to which her behaviour testifies, there is little hope that she will ever be capable of a more rounded interest in the Spicer Wilcoxes—and so little hope that the cycles of fear-induced snobbery will ever be interrupted.

Ye t it is hard to renounce snobbish tactics on our own, for the disease is a collective one to begin with. A youthful resentment of snobbery isn’t enough to save us from gradually turning into snobs ourselves, because being insolently neglected almost naturally fosters a hunger to gain the attention of our neglectors (disliking people rarely being a sufficient reason for not wanting them to like us). The snobbery of a prominent group can thereby draw the population as a whole towards social ambitions that it may initially have had no taste for but now pursues as the only apparent means to love and recognition. Rather than scorn, sorrow and understanding might be more accurate responses to behaviour motivated at heart by a frightened and frustrated desire for dignity.

“THERE GO THE SPICER WILCOXES, MAMMA! I'm told they're dying to know us. Hadn't we better call?" "Certainly not. Dear. If they're dying to know us. they're not worth knowing. The only People worth Our knowing are the people who don't want to know us!”

Illustration from Punch, 1892

It may be tempting to laugh at those afflicted by urgent cravings for the symbols of status. The name-droppers, the gold-tap owners. The history of Victorian furniture, for example, was dominated by the sale of some candidly tasteless items. Many of them were the work of the London firm of Jackson & Graham, whose most flamboyant offering was a carved cabinet of pollard oak, decked out with figures of boys gathering grapes, two female caryatids and a set of carved pilasters. The whole was crowned by a majestic sixty-centimetre-high gold-plated bull.

Before ridiculing anyone who bought such a piece, it would perhaps be fairer to wonder about the wider context in which this kind of furniture was made and consumed. Rather than teasing the buyers, we may blame the society in which they lived for setting up a situation where the purchase of ornate cabinets felt psychologically necessary and rewarding, where respect was dependent on baroque displays. Rather than a tale of greed, the history of luxury could more accurately be read as a record of emotional trauma. It is the legacy of those who have felt pressured by the disdain of others to add an extraordinary amount to their bare selves in order to signal that they too may lay a claim to love.

7.

If poverty is the customary material penalty for low status, then neglect and faraway looks are the emotional penalties that a snobbish world appears unable to stop imposing on those bereft of the symbols of importance.

Carved cabinet of pollard oak, Jackson & Graham, London, 1852