Penguin no. 1348: Noblesse Oblige Edited by Nancy Mitford

Have you heard of the 'Butler Education Act'? I suppose not, although it happened in the days when you still lived among us...In his Education Act he provided for the free distributions of university degrees to the deserving poor. Very handy for splitting atoms and that kind of thing, you will say. But many of Mr Butler's proteges choose, or are directed into, 'Literature'. I could make your flesh creep by telling you about the new wave of philistinism with which we are threatened by these sour young people who are coming off the assembly lines in their hundreds every year and finding employment as critics, even as poets and novelists.

It was surprising to read in Simon's recent review of Noblesse Oblige that this Penguin can be an expensive book to purchase second hand. It is not really clear why this should be the case, as no vintage Penguin beyond number 500 is rare, and the book itself is only very slight, comprised of four brief essays, a letter, and a poem (together with some lovely illustrations by Osbert Lancaster). It runs to just over 100 pages, and can be easily read in a single evening.

Although the subtitle rather dryly suggests it as an enquiry into the identifying characteristics of members of the English upper-class, it is really more of a debate: there is a first scholarly essay outlining the hypothesised set of characteristics, followed by a series of written responses, with the book chiefly interesting because one of these is by Nancy Mitford, and one is by Evelyn Waugh. Despite the humorous tone, the intent still seems serious, with each essayist attempting to both entertain and convince.

It begins in 1954 when Alan Ross, the Professor in Linguistics at Birmingham University, publishes a paper on Linguistic class-indicators in present-day English in the Finnish journal Neuphilologische Mitteilungen. He proposed that other than an enthusiasm for tennis and a disinclination to embrace the newer products of technology, idiosyncrasies of spoken language were the only reliable markers that could be used to identify a random person as a member of the English upper-class. This volume includes a simplified version of his paper, listing his suggestions as to the identifying linguistic markers, classified as U (specific to members of the English upper-class) and non-U (never used by members of the upper-class).

Presumably the idea of linguistic markers that can be used to reliably differentiate between specific groups in society - either in terms of words or pronunciations - is not particularly novel, and a list of them can only really have been of interest to those who study linguistics or who perhaps wish to track the changes over time (and it wasn't interesting to me at all, although now that I have read the list, I find that I am more inclined to notice the nominated words being used in the fiction of the era). But his article and his classification system were elevated to greater prominence when Nancy Mitford referred to them in a rather tongue-in-cheek essay on the English Aristocracy which was written in 1956 for the magazine Encounter, and which is included here as part two. Though she doesn't agree completely with Professor Ross's list, she adopts his classification system, and adds a few suggestions of her own.

It can be inferred from Evelyn Waugh's contribution that Nancy Mitford's article must have upset many of her readers, including him. While he affects to treat her essay as a provocative joke, he seems to have taken issue with the broad generalisations she applies in describing the outlook of the English aristocracy, while others seem to have been more disturbed by this discussion of U and non-U usages. Perhaps this was less about the actual differences, and more about the attitude she conveys, of seeming to judge those who do not speak according to this upper-class code, but judging them all the more harshly if they try to do so.

I found Evelyn Waugh's letter to be the most entertaining and well-argued section in the book, with the exception of the single paragraph quoted above in which he sneers at an entire cohort of working class kids given the opportunity of a university education (and my first thought was of Jim Dixon and all he had to contend with). There also seems an antipathy displayed towards science of the kind discussed by C.P. Snow in his lecture The Two Cultures, when he endeavoured to highlight just how limiting such an attitude would be in finding solutions for many problems. (And the irony is that this book illustrates this point, though in a fairly trivial way. Many of the criticisms made in the response essays are valid entirely because you cannot answer the question under consideration by having each person argue a case based on a personal observation they assume to be representative. The tools to reliably find a set of identifying characteristics of any group, and to provide a measure of how certain you can be of your conclusion, are maths-based. If the question had been given to an empirically-minded researcher there would be no need for a debate.)

I think the most important observation is the obvious one that the system is dynamic, with the set of words changing over time, largely as a result of fashion. It means recognising that the identifying words have no inherent correctness; they are simply given that status by the upper-class people who use them, which could be seen as the equivalent of scoring well on a test which you have set for yourself.

Also by Nancy Mitford:
Penguin no. 1532: Pigeon Pie
Penguin no. 1976: Don't Tell Alfred