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I've read a lot of books from the last few hundred years, and heard a lot of stories from my grandparents about what it was like growing up, and I've never once seen them sneering at the British working class. There was a status hierarchy, and probably a certain amount of selective obliviousness about how that hierarchy was kept in place, but in general it would never occur to the aristocrats of that time to sneer at working-class people for being working class. What else should they be? The elites of that time were Christians and believed that everyone had their role to play in society.
It's only postwar, when social mobility became possible and then expected, that you start seeing sneering like @BurdensomeCount. And even then, only really in the last 20 years as mass immigration and wokeness took off (and the economy died). When I was growing up the working class were treated with great respect. There was sneering at scroungers, but that was the working class sneering at those who couldn't be bothered to work.
There is also the memory of postwar socialism to consider. The socialist government made a concerted and largely successful* attempt to destroy the aristocracy and the capitalists, and those who remain aren't going to forget that in a hurry. My parents had bricks thrown at them in the 70s and they definitely haven't forgotten.
*The upper classes are still over-represented in positions of influence, but not as the upper class. It's the difference between, say, a plutocratic society where powerful people inherit companies, and a plutocratic society where powerful people get expensive volunteering opportunities to garnish their CVs.
Okay this is totally fair. Bog standard was a bit too much.
But this strain of eugenics type thinking has been around in intellectual circles for a few hundred years. Intellectual weren't always in charge of the elite class though, you're right.
I come out in hives whenever I try to read anything by the Bloomsbury group, so I wouldn't really know. I got the impression that the eugenicists were interested in making the working class better for its own sake to some degree, rather than just swapping it out for the highest-IQ people around, but I might well be wrong about that.
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As an American who lived in London for a bit, I met several people who seemed completely identical to the rest of the English at first-blush[1], but they'd eventually confess to me that they're quite ashamed of their obvious(??) working class upbringing. The forward-ness of this surprised me, because I had many English acquaintances who would never open up about their feelings like this on other topics, no matter how much we were drinking. I do wonder if being an outsider helped them confess this to me, or if this is just something you have to voice to everyone.
Anyway, it sounded markedly different from meeting someone from the Midwest in NYC confessing their shame at growing up in corn fields of Indiana or whatever. The person from the Midwest just felt good to be in NYC, like they escaped. Whereas the persons I met in London very much projected that they could never escape their class, and this deeply affected them.
Can this shame lead to rage as this down-trodden feeling class is apparently ignored while the government falls all over itself to support problematic foreigners? I can see that, 100%
I think it's fair to say that the working class are usually much more emotionally open that the upper and middle classes, and are the subject of alternating envy and disapproval for that reason. It's certainly true for the people I knew.
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Fascinating, my experience has been middle class people insisting that they're working class.
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You've read a lot of books and I read a comment on Saltburn... The gist is random redditor claims that it isn't unheard of for middle class kids to pretend to be working class because it carries more favor with the elite kids.
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