in message <
[email protected]>,
[email protected] ('
[email protected]') wrote:
> Here's a recent article that suggests Brits define class more by birth
> than by income:
>
http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm?story_id=7289005
My partner still defiantly insists she's working class. By any normal
definition of working class, she definitely isn't now, although she was
admittedly born into a classic 'working class' family. By contrast, my
father was a 'mandarin' - one of Britain's top civil servants, so I was
definitely born near the top of middle class.
But wait for it...
My father's father was a sharecropper who went bust in Texas in the
1890s, and ended up scraping a living farming a mosquito-infested swamp
close to the Saskatchewan/North Dakota border. My father's mother left
him there and returned to England where she made a very marginal living
as a washerwoman. My father, however, did well at grammar school, and
got a public scholarship to Cambridge University which was sufficiently
generous that it paid for a servant (no, really; I think the servant may
have worked for three of four undergraduates, not just my father, but
still).
Having got a double first from Cambridge, after service in the army
during the war he then sat the Civil Service exam and, passing that,
immediately went into the upper reaches of the civil service where he
spent the rest of his career.
The membrane between the middle and the working classes always has been
extremely permeable, in both directions, at least in Britain. Many
British institutions, but particularly the civil service (and, in the
old days, the imperial service) have always been highly meritocratic.
The barrier between the aristocracy and the rest, however, is different.
To get into the aristocracy, you father and grandfather have to have
been extremely rich and powerful. Getting out of the aristocracy is even
more difficult, since just going broke isn't normally sufficient -
you've still got the extended family and contacts which drag you back to
privilege.
Me? I'm a working sorceror. I study occult learning in weighty grimoires,
and by arcane spells and incantations conjure powerful daemons at vast
distance to do my will (don't you?). What does this make me? I am,
essentially, an artisan. I'm an artisan in a trade which is currently
highly valued, and consequently I earn somewhat more than a mason or a
joiner, but... essentially, I make things.
Does that make me 'working class' or 'middle class'? And does anyone
(apart from my partner) really care any more?
--
[email protected] (Simon Brooke)
http://www.jasmine.org.uk/~simon/
Ring of great evil
Small one casts it into flame
Bringing rise of Men ;; gonzoron
