Upper Class Twits

       Complete the following three word phrase:

UPPER  . . . CLASS . . . ?    (What?)

Well you could say “swine”, “oppressors”, “parasites” or “anachronisms”, but we all know that in England you would be drowned out by the chorus of “TWITS”.

       The immediate source for this cultural reflex is Monty Python’s 7-minute Upper Class Twit of the Year sketch in which 5 characters with names like Gervaise Brook-Hampster and Oliver St. John Mollusc compete over a complex obstacle course for the 127th championship of their breed. But the origins of the image go much further back. They go back through P.G.Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster who could only ever get out of scrapes with the aid of the low-born Kentish Jeeves and back through W.S.Gilbert’s peerage who throughout history

        . . . did nothing in particular
       And did it very well.

Back, in fact, into the eighteenth century and a Hanoverian Settlement which gave us a commercial and parliamentary society with a king who did not rule and an upper class which was not a ruling class, a unique culture in which you could have status without respect. The realities of power in such a society were neatly expressed by Robert Walpole in 1742 when he remarked that his acceptance of the title of Earl of Orford meant the end of his political career. The aristocracy developed foppish and eccentric styles, living on the military and agricultural fringes of society with a share of power at best, quite different in nature from the French aristo or the Prussian Junker in places where land and army were not marginalised. Nobody ever thought of Count Otto Von Bismarck as a twit.

       Christie Davies, author of seminal works on the sociology of humour, has argued that because we had James Gillray we did not have a revolution. Gillray (1756-1815) was the first savage political cartoonist. His chief target in his early days was George III whom he portrayed as a kind of Teutonic Gervaise Brook-Hampster, to the complete incomprehension of the monarch. But when the French Revolution occurred Gillray revealed a profoundly conservative side and turned his graphic venom on the revolutionaries. In doing so he revealed himself – and despite being a Scot – as the prototype of the English satirist. English satire is not Swiftian; it does not consist of bleak visions of the human condition. It is not the politically purposeful satire of the continent where “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” always has a contemporary resonance. It is cheerfully conservative satire, bolstering our disrespect for everyone and everything and dishing it out to the lower classes as well as the upper. This is true of Python as of Gilbert. A more recent example, The Fast Show (1998-2002), maximised our affection and our contempt in equal measure for the aristocratic Lord Ralph Mayhew (whose mummy always cuddled the dog instead of him) and for the lower class Wayne and Waynetta.

       One piece of simple sociology should never be ignored in all this, especially if you equate “upper class” with aristocracy. From the eighteenth century onward the powers and privileges of the aristocracy were real but limited; crucially, you could become immensely rich and powerful without joining their ranks. On the continent, where success required membership, the aristos of the Ancien Regime were 15% of the population as were their Russian equivalent at a later date. In Imperial Berlin titled folk were 7% of the population. Such aristocrats were likely to monopolise the best jobs, or claim rights for their doves over your corn (a huge issue in France)  or to insist on you giving up your seat on a Berlin horse-bus. All of which would be likely to make you dislike and resent them. In England, on the other hand, where such grade inflation never occurred the aristocracy was a fraction of 1% of the population. Most people were unlikely to meet one and only in certain rural and coalmining areas would they be the people whose decisions affected your livelihood. Thus I would expect those who saw the upper classes as “swine” and “oppressors” rather than “twits” to come disproportionately from these areas.

       The mainstream tradition thus formally opposes, in modern and Enlightenment terms, the very existence of an upper class then sees the actual upper class as highly risible and rather harmless – twits, in short. But there is another tradition of satirical attack on the upper classes which is conservative and usually religious. This tradition hankers after an upper class which would give us spiritual and cultural leadership and it despises our actual upper classes as vulgar, ignorant, insular and excessively preoccupied with sex and sport. In Culture and Anarchy (1869) Matthew Arnold’s chapter on the aristocracy is called, simply, “Barbarians” (his chapter on the middle classes is called “Philistines”). This was echoed by a number of catholic humorous writers including J.B.Morton, the principal “Beachcomber”, as well as Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton. Evelyn Waugh is a complex example of this phenomenon and one does not have to look into his writing in any depth to see the distinction between those who are “gentlemen” in the moral sense and those who merely have that status socially. Belloc’s aristocrats exemplify the English equation of Snobs with Yobs. His John Vavassour De Quentin Jones (a name earlier up the same line as those of the Python twits) was “very fond of throwing stones” because

 . . . like many of the upper class
He liked the sound of breaking glass.

Personally, I’ve got a good deal of Yob in me and some Snob, but very little Matthew Arnold.

                           Lincoln Allison