Class is to Britain what sex is to teenagers-more talked about than practised. Stein Ringen of Oxford University has argued persuasively that: “What is peculiar to Britain is not the reality of the class system and its continuing existence, but class psychology: the preoccupation with class, the belief in class, and the symbols of class in manners, dress, and language.” David Cannadine’s book takes that as its starting point. He then identifies three very different models of a class structure which we jumble up with “sociological meldings and taxanomical glissades.”
His first model he calls hierarchical, with an infinity of gradations, like a state procession, starting with the grandest and ending with the lowest. This is both a hierarchy of status and of income. Second, what he calls the “triadic” model of upper, middle and lower classes with agricultural wealth marking the upper classes, professional or industrial activity for the middle classes, and then manual workers. (This second model has been favoured by people who see themselves as being in the middle, which somehow becomes the repository of wisdom and prudence.) Then there is a third “polarised” model of “them” and “us,” patricians and plebs. This has always appealed to radicals who claim to speak for all except the decadent top 10,000. It reminds us of Gladstone saying that when it comes to “truth, justice and humanity… I will back the masses against the classes,” and Thatcherites shocked by the defeatism of the patrician establishment.
Cannadine shows how we can make sense of much social, political and cultural argument in Britain over the centuries by seeing people slipping and sliding between these three different ways of contemplating class. But the real test of his argument is to explain why the British are so preoccupied with class, if we are not an unusually class-divided society. His explanation is that our political and historical stability has bequeathed us a “larger repertoire of surviving vernacular models than most nations for discussing any social inequality” That sounds plausible.
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