Diagnosing British class is a sly business. Observe two strangers from the highly sensitive middle echelons meet for the first time and you can see the antennae twitching. The major as opposed to minor public school, the ambition of the family holiday (Costa Brava vs Côte d’Azur), the closely surveyed slopes of accent and vocabulary – all are brought in for trial and judgement. But for those weary of these routines, there is hope. According to a new study published in the journal English World-Wide, Nancy Mitford’s “U and Non U”, the most famous account of social distinctions in everyday speech, has been made redundant. A statistically significant sample of British people simply couldn’t distinguish upper from non-upper. The carefully trimmed privets of the English class system appear to be rotting away.
Basing her account on the work of the linguist Alan Ross, Mitford proposed several simple variations to distinguish between U (posh) and Non-U (otherwise). Dinner jacket or dress suit, “I was sick” or “I was ill”, napkin or serviette, and so on. And considering Mitford’s own upbringing, this was subtle stuff. Take a look at The Pursuit of Love, Mitford’s fictionalisation of her upbringing. The bluff patriarch Uncle Matthew, a version of her father, rages against the “awful middle-class establishment” of girls’ schools and their wonky output: “Legs like gateposts from playing hockey, and the worst seat on a horse of woman I ever knew.” In a bid to save his own children from such coarsening influences, (Lord) Matthew has a far more sophisticated homeschooling curriculum, involving chasing his children with bloodhounds across the Cotswold uplands. It is one of English fiction’s great displays of “cruel to be kind” parenting.
Mitford thought her original essay a trivial exercise, and promised it would contain “a volley of teases”. But for a time, U and Non-U for a time became something of a pop-sociological standard. And though much of its contents are simply anachronistic now (no one says “scent” instead of “perfume” anymore), its decline also reflects a genuine shift in British class politics. Neither the factory floor nor the manor house are as siloed as they once were, and it would be very difficult for two entirely distinctive vocabularies to develop in this way. In fact, from regional accents to dress sense, the gradations of English social life have been subject to an aggressive levelling effect – from both sides. Examining Mitford’s original list, it is notable that while some of her trashy colloquialisms have won out, so have several of her own preferences. So: we all say “glasses” over “spectacles” now, and “toilet paper” over “lavatory paper”. But it is mostly “pudding” not “sweet”, and “false teeth” over “dentures”.
Even if this was always a bit of a parlour game for Mitford, the language of class in the post-Non U landscape is one of utter confusion. The Labour government are presently struggling to define the “working people” they won’t be raising taxes on, a phrase which already sounded like something some wrinkly dowager would say while vaguely gesturing beyond the estate boundary. Keir Starmer says people who earn wages are working people, but those who own shares are not. But this must come as news to all the aspirational “Sids” who became first-time asset-holders when they bought shares in British Gas in the 1980s. The clear and clearly class-bound division between pay packet and private means is long-gone.
This is not to say class politics should be dead and buried. Britain’s working, middle and upper classes may have been squeezed culturally closer together over time. But, distantly above them all, the 21st-century has produced an international super-rich, whose customs and vocabulary (the luxury airport lounge; the Americanised phraseology) fall beyond the powers of any comic novelist currently in business. Much as the Labour government is unable to summon up a rhetoric of class politics, society at large scarcely knows what to call our new ruling elite – or “élite” as I imagine Mitford would have put it. As long as we are find ourselves ungainly lumped together as “working people”, and while this new and classless upper stratum goes unscrutinised, we may begin to miss the clarifying snobbishness of U and Non-U.
