The myth of class mobility
And I say to hell with class mobility, embrace your background and wear it with honour.
Britain is a society built on class. Differentials of class, tensions of class; admonishment of the class system, and sometimes its veneration. From the kitchen-sink realism of Cooper-Clarke, through the aspirations of Waugh, and into the grandeur of Byron, it sits at the centre of our public life.
This is known. Discussions of class have dominated British culture and comedy for decades. In everything from Monty Python and Downton Abbey, to Only Fool's and Harry Potter, class is irretrievable from British culture; or at least what remains of it.
This owes itself to a particular quirk in the British mind, and of the social fabric of our civilisation; that class is baked into the DNA of the Briton. As such, class mobility simply does not exist. It is a myth. And if one searches for it, they shall only ever clutch at air.
This is not to say that the poor cannot get rich, and the rich cannot lose it all. Rather, what is self evident is that class in Great Britain is not tethered to money. I see this in my own life, as I have known working class millionaires, and penniless aristocrats.
I, myself, am of the middle class. I was raised by an artistic family in the comfortable, leafy suburbs of the home counties, educated at a fee-paying school that offered no elite pedigree - except for that it sat above the others in my locale -, and obtained my degree from a respectable, non-Oxbridge university. I am a writer, a novelist and a poet, and the mindset of the middle permeates in what I write. There is a puritan streak, and a libertine secret. I may become wealthy beyond my wildest dreams, and cash-buy a country house in the New Asturias; inversely, I may be forced onto Universal Credit, and live out my days on an estate, forever woken in the dead of night by barking dogs and knife fights. The fact remains the same, I was born into the middle class, and I shall die in the middle class; irrespective of what happens in between my first breath and final whimper.
The causes of this particular phenomenon, and why is it so, are not quite clear. Though I can speculate. Perhaps the nature of an Old World society is given to it by the birth of the New. The New World was sold to inhabitants of the Old as a place that lay beyond the differentials of class, and the particulars of birth. It was the world after feudalism, a world without Earls and Viscounts, Kings and Emperors. It is, as they say, the land of opportunity, where a broke man can find his fortune, and a rich man can lose his. But we do things differently. We kept what others discarded. This is, in many ways, a defence of the class system; not as a means of keeping the rich rich and the poor poor, as I have stated quite clearly that these things do indeed live in flux, but rather that class offers a sense of place that is rapidly vanishing in the harsh light of contemporality. Those who shunned the luring hand of the New World did so because they understood, keenly, the follies of revolution.
Class offers pride, a sense of community, a camaraderie and a mutual identification. It offers security, certainty, continuity. It offers a bond between father and son, made of Damascus steel, for their toil is the same.
What too is a distinct quirk of British life and British Class is the identifiable accent of each. Class, it seems, is so axiomatic of the Anglo, the Scot, the Paddy, and Cymry, so endemic is it of British life that one can often tell the class of another within seconds of meeting. If how one speaks is indicative of how one thinks, then class is intractable. If how one thinks affects the choices one makes, then class is intractable.
There is no shame in this. I am yet to meet a man of the working class who is ashamed of being such. Likewise with the upper class. Perhaps with the middle, but a crippling self-awareness is a feature of the middle class mind, not a bug - I am of the authority to say. And I say to hell with class mobility, embrace your background and wear it with honour. After all, it is not where one is from, rather where he is going. It won't make you rich and it won't keep you poor.
