"we" I don't know about, as for I, came from a small ton of a somewhat mixedly
glorious past on the eastern side of a sea
Subject: [lit-ideas] Arts & Letters: On snobs
If we tend to forget where we come from, here's a remedy: In a recent edition
of Arts & Letters (daily) there's a link to a book review of D.J. Taylor's _New
Book of Snobs_ (the title is derivative of William Makepeace Thackeray’s _The
Book of Snobs_ (1848), where a snob is specified as someone 'who meanly admires
mean things'). The review opens
thusly:
The English writer William Golding (“Lord of the Flies”) had a
longstanding sense of social inadequacy. When he applied to Oxford
University, the admissions interviewer noted that he was “N.T.S.” —
not top shelf.
Golding wrote that he would like to sneak up on Eton, the elite
private school, as if he were a cartoon villain, “with a mile or two
of wire, a few hundred tons of TNT and one of those plunger-detonating
machines which makes the user feel like Jehovah.”
There’s no sting like a class sting. There’s a bit of Golding, an
imagined status-anarchist, in most of us. Who doesn’t hate snobs? Yet
we’re all snobs about some things.
