1919
Virginia Woolf writes in her diary:
“We went up to visit the Murrys [John Middleton Murry and his wife, Katherine Mansfield] & see Hampstead Heath. Our verdict was that the crowd at close quarters is detestable; it smells; it sticks; it has neither vitality nor colour; it is a tepid mass of flesh scarcely organised into human life. How slow they walk! How passively and brutishly they lie on the grass! How little of pleasure or pain is in them! But they looked well dressed & well fed; & at a distance among the canary coloured swings & roundabouts they had the look of a picture. Very little noise they made; the large aeroplane that came flying so steadily overhead made more noise than the whole crowd of us. Why do I say ‘us’? I never for a moment felt myself one of ‘them’.”
1937
George Orwell opines in The Road to Wigan Pier:
“I suppose there is no place in the world where snobbery is quite so ever-present or where it is cultivated in such refined and subtle forms as in an English public school. Here at least one cannot say that English ‘education’ fails to do its job. You forget your Latin and Greek within a few months of leaving school—I studied Greek for eight or 10 years, and now, at 33, I cannot even repeat the Greek alphabet—but your snobbishness, unless you persistently root it out like the bindweed it is, sticks by you till your grave.”
1970
Novelist Mary McCarthy writes to her friend Hannah Arendt about her stay in London. She quotes a remark made by Sonia Orwell (George’s widow), at a dinner party:
“‘Auschwitz, oh, dear, no! That person was never in Auschwitz. Only in some very minor death camp.’ The very essence of English snobbery.”
1986
Conservative politician Alan Clark writes in his diary about his detested “arriviste” colleague Michael Heseltine, quoting fellow MP Michael Jopling:
“The trouble with Michael is that he has had to buy all his own furniture.” Clark found the remark “snobby but cutting.”
1993
James Lees-Milne, the writer and country house expert, observes in his diary that he has turned down the offer of a CBE in the New Year’s Honours List as being too middle class:
“The CH [Companion of Honour] is the only honour I really covet… Another reason for refusing this absurd decoration is that many regard me as a snob. Yet I am not their sort of snob…”
Virginia Woolf writes in her diary:
“We went up to visit the Murrys [John Middleton Murry and his wife, Katherine Mansfield] & see Hampstead Heath. Our verdict was that the crowd at close quarters is detestable; it smells; it sticks; it has neither vitality nor colour; it is a tepid mass of flesh scarcely organised into human life. How slow they walk! How passively and brutishly they lie on the grass! How little of pleasure or pain is in them! But they looked well dressed & well fed; & at a distance among the canary coloured swings & roundabouts they had the look of a picture. Very little noise they made; the large aeroplane that came flying so steadily overhead made more noise than the whole crowd of us. Why do I say ‘us’? I never for a moment felt myself one of ‘them’.”
1937
George Orwell opines in The Road to Wigan Pier:
“I suppose there is no place in the world where snobbery is quite so ever-present or where it is cultivated in such refined and subtle forms as in an English public school. Here at least one cannot say that English ‘education’ fails to do its job. You forget your Latin and Greek within a few months of leaving school—I studied Greek for eight or 10 years, and now, at 33, I cannot even repeat the Greek alphabet—but your snobbishness, unless you persistently root it out like the bindweed it is, sticks by you till your grave.”
1970
Novelist Mary McCarthy writes to her friend Hannah Arendt about her stay in London. She quotes a remark made by Sonia Orwell (George’s widow), at a dinner party:
“‘Auschwitz, oh, dear, no! That person was never in Auschwitz. Only in some very minor death camp.’ The very essence of English snobbery.”
1986
Conservative politician Alan Clark writes in his diary about his detested “arriviste” colleague Michael Heseltine, quoting fellow MP Michael Jopling:
“The trouble with Michael is that he has had to buy all his own furniture.” Clark found the remark “snobby but cutting.”
1993
James Lees-Milne, the writer and country house expert, observes in his diary that he has turned down the offer of a CBE in the New Year’s Honours List as being too middle class:
“The CH [Companion of Honour] is the only honour I really covet… Another reason for refusing this absurd decoration is that many regard me as a snob. Yet I am not their sort of snob…”
