The New Book of Snobs by D.J. Taylor

The New Book of Snobs Reviews

• 
  J. D.

  The book details English snobbery over the last century or two (apparently an updating of Thackeray’s The Book of Snobs). “Snobbery,” Taylor writes, “is a matter of closed circles, exclusive groups, knowing the jargon and knowing how to behave….” For example, before, “a gentleman could only be born.” Subsequently, “he could be made as well, simply by conforming to the accepted codes of nineteenth-century gentlemanliness, dressing, speaking and comporting himself in the appropriate manner.” In the Victorian days, it was about boundary setting for one’s group and excluding “from it those who fail to achieve their own exacting standards” as, for example, “the almost fanatical insistence on ‘correct’ sporting dress, which can be observed from about the 1870s onward, a riot of curious rules, ‘colours’ and covert stipulations known only to a small cognoscenti.”
  
  Snobbery is much more than an upper- versus lower-class thing. It’s about superiority and inferiority in whatever domain. In his chapter, “Snob Lingo,” Taylor writes that “Although dress, gesture, deportment, consumer goods, houses and motorized transport each have their place in the cultivation of snobbery, nothing in the end, is more important to the snob than language. Practised exponents of the art can impose their personality and scale of values on a group of onlookers with a single sentence – in some cases a solitary word.” For the snob pedant, “Grammar might have been expressly devised for the snob – an abstruse system of linguistic rules, tyrannized over by various self-appointed authorities (‘I think we’ll have to refer that one to Fowler,’ snobs mumur’)….Taxed with nit-picking, the snob will piously remark that language is governed by laws, just like everything else, and without them ‘we’d all just be grunting at each other.’” The pedant’s cousin is “a Canute-like figure” who bewails “the confusion of ‘disinterested’ with ‘uninterested’” and laments “the fact that nobody now appreciates the distinction between ‘may’ and ‘might’” and complains “that it is surely incorrect for a village in the Balkans to be described as ‘decimated’ by an earthquake if more than 10 per cent of the population has died.”
  
  In other telling examples of snobbery, Taylor writes that “Feigning ignorance of a major public or sporting event…is a classic snob gambit.” He describes reverse snobbery as “the elderly lady who, rather proudly, announces that she is afraid she doesn’t ‘do’ email.” He says that snobbery, seemingly everywhere, would manifest itself even in a “society run on genuinely egalitarian lines, which would “still have a substantial cargo of snobs, canvassing their superiority not through material goods or social position but by the depth of their commitment to the cause.”
  
  Though he explains that “snobbery becomes yet more virulent in periods of social flux” when there’s a need “to carve out personal space in a crowded and unsettling world,” I don’t think that Taylor probes deeply into why there is such a thing as snobbery at all. The flip side of that question is, why not just let people be themselves? Why not just go with the flow rather than to assert superiority in whatever form that takes? Snobbery probably reveals more about our ape nature than we care to admit. For insights and answers, snobbery manifests itself in both a group-versus-group, and an individual-versus-individual sense, but these are also connected. Going back to Darwin, being a group member was the way the individual survived. Being excluded from the group was how the individual died. To be a member of the group in good standing, the individual has to have value. More value translates into more security so it’s not surprising that there’s a tendency to sort ourselves into a pecking order, both within a group and between groups. Though we’re ingrained with notions that we are enlightened people, not animals, and that we all come, naturally, from a Rousseau-like condition of equality, it’s hard not to wonder about the evolutionary origins of snobbery.
  
  Snobbery is the need to be part of a group per se, like a street gang or school clique. Conformity to a group simultaneously creates attitudes and judgments against those who are different. Being a member of a group in good standing –-an elite of sorts, either self- or group-selected–- reinforces a we-they distinction that in turn creates attitudes distrust or disdain for those on the outside. Differences threaten. Group identifiers (language, mores, dress, smells, etc.) are challenges to tolerance, and looks (race, dress) and belief systems (religious) are particularly difficult. Group-tribal loyalty and patriotism go hand-in-hand with a certain xenophobia.
  
  Finding ways to elevate ourselves, in particular, or in general means that others move, relatively, downward. What about those who are on the lower end of the group scale of value? As Taylor says, and as a Psychology Today article points out, there are those who envy the so-called upper-class group and want to be like them, which those in the “upper” echelon have little tolerance for because it defeats their very being, the need for distinction. Lower wants to be higher, but there can be no higher without a lower. There’s truth in this of course, but many don’t particularly want to be “upper class” in any general or particular sense. Is it a snob’s projection that because he or she wants elevation that all others want the same? Those who don’t play the ranking or the in-out group game want to be left alone. They just don’t want to be pushed to the bottom, individually or as a group. These are normal people who are comfortable with their place – as long as they are valued for what they do. Reasonably enough, they have a sense of dignity about themselves, even if they don’t stand out in any special sense. Assertions of rank and the attitude of elite exclusivity that goes along with that creates anger about being put down. Is this what Trump tapped into? The aforementioned Psychology Today’s piece on snobbery misses this point. That magazine calls this anger reverse snobbery: people with lower status, education and income sneer “at people who have what they don’t.” But maybe it is not that at all. Maybe it’s the simple wanting of these people to be valued for what they do, a holding of their ground, not wanting to be put down. Dignity, not envy, is what they are about.
  
• 
  Alison C

  "The New Book of Snobs," as its title implies, is a 2016 update of William Thackeray’s "Book of Snobs," which dates from Victorian times. As such, it’s quite an entertaining read, as it goes about skewering everybody from “school snobs” (those whose attachment to their upper-class school is paramount) to “sports snobs” (somewhat falling out of favour now because more sports are open to more people than in the past); Mr. Taylor also includes character sketches of various people whom he considers to be particularly effective snobs. The main trouble with this book is that it is very, very English in scope and so the author is constantly making reference to people and events about which nobody outside of England will have ever heard. Nevertheless, amusing to read.
• 
  SueKich

  A definitive guide to modern snobbery? I beg to differ.
  
  How can this possibly be a guide to modern snobbery without a mention of Hyacinth Bucket and Margo Leadbetter? Without the famous Cleese/Barker/Corbett sketch? With nary a word about the arch-snobbery of the Americans? And without a single decent cartoon? (The ones in this book are baffling.) I'm afraid I found this achingly dull.
  
  
• 
  Catharine

  Well, researched, interesting and funny.
• 
  Richard Thomas

  An enjoyable book to read as you feel like it. D J Taylor writes nicely and lightly on a subject which is fascinating although I did feel that I shouldn't indulge myself in enjoying a read about snobbery in all its dreadful forms. But I did enjoy it. No great psychological profundity but learned and interesting. Well worth finding.