2.
The word “snobbery” came into use for the first time in England during the 1820s. It was said to have derived from the habit of many Oxford and Cambridge colleges of writing sine nobilitate (without nobility), or “s.nob, ” next to the names of ordinary students on examination lists in order to distinguish them from their aristocratic peers.
In the word’s earliest days, a snob was taken to mean someone without high status, but it quickly assumed its modern and almost diametrically opposed meaning: someone offended by a lack of high status in others, a person who believes in a flawless equation between social rank and human worth. In his Book of Snobs (1848), a pioneering essay on the subject, William Thackeray observed that over the previous twenty-five years, snobs had “spread over England like the railroads. They are now known and recognized throughout an Empire on which the sun never sets.”
Though traditionally they may have been associated with an interest in the aristocracy (for they were first pinned down in language at a time and place when aristocrats stood at the social apex), the identification of snobbery with an enthusiasm for old-world manners, blazers, hunting and gentlemen’s clubs hardly captures the diversity of the phenomenon. It lets too many off the hook. Snobs can be found through history ingratiating themselves with a range of prominent groups—from soldiers (Sparta, 400 B.C.), bishops (Rome, 1500), and poets (Weimar, 1815), to farmers (China, 1967), and film stars (Hollywood, 2004)—for the primary interest of snobs is power, and as the distribution of power changes, so, naturally and immediately, will the objects of their admiration.
3.
It is easy to recognise the moment when we have entered the orbit of a snob. Early on in an encounter, the subject of what we “do” will arise and depending on how we answer, we will either be the recipients of bountiful attention or the catalysts of urgent disgust.
The company of the snobbish has the power to enrage and unnerve because we sense how little of who we are deep down—that is, how little of who we are outside of our status—will be able to govern their behaviour towards us. We may be endowed with the wisdom of Solomon and have the resourcefulness and intelligence of Odysseus, but if we are unable to wield socially recognized badges of our qualities, our existence will remain a matter of raw indifference to them.
This conditional attention pains us because our earliest memory of love is of being cared for in a naked, impoverished condition. Babies cannot, by definition, repay their caretakers with worldly rewards. In so far as they are loved and looked after, it is therefore for who they are, identity understood in its barest, most stripped-down state. They are loved for, or in spite of, their uncontrolled, howling and stubborn characters.
Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement: being polite, succeeding at school and later, acquiring rank and prestige. Such efforts may attract the interest of others, but the underlying emotional craving is not so much to dazzle because of our deeds as to recapture the tenor of the bountiful, indiscriminate petting we received in return for arranging wooden bricks on the kitchen floor, for having a soft plump body and wide trusting eyes.
It is evidence of this craving that only the most inept flatterer would admit to a wish to base a friendship around an attraction to power or fame. Such assets would feel like insulting and volatile reasons to be invited to lunch, for they lie outside the circle of our true and irreducible selves. Jobs can be lost and influence eroded without us perishing nor our childhood-founded need for affection slackening. Talented flatterers therefore know they should suggest that it is strictly the status-less part of their prey they are interested in, that the ambassadorial car, newspaper profiles or company directorship are mere coincidental features of a profound and pure attachment.
Ye t, despite their efforts, the prey are liable to detect the fickleness beneath the polished surface and leave the company of snobs fearing the irrelevance of their essential selves beside any status which, for a time, they may hold precariously in their hands.
4.
Given their exclusive interest in reputation and achievement, snobs are prone to make some sudden tragi-comic reassessments of who their closest friends might be when the outer circumstances of their acquaintances alter.
On a foggy evening in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century, the bourgeois narrator of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1922) travels to an expensive restaurant to have dinner with an aristocratic friend, the Marquis de Saint-Loup. He arrives early, Saint-Loup is late and the staff, judging their client on the basis of a shabby coat and an unfamiliar name, assume that a nobody has entered their establishment. They therefore patronize him, take him to a table around which an arctic draught is blowing and are slow to offer him anything to drink or eat.
But, a quarter of an hour later, the marquis arrives, identifies his friend and at a stroke transforms the narrator’s value in the eyes of the staff. The manager bows deeply before him, draws out the menu, recites the specials of the day with evocative flourishes, compliments him on his clothes and, so as to prevent him thinking that these courtesies are in any way dependent on his link to an aristocrat, occasionally gives him a surreptitious little smile that seems to indicate a wholly personal affection. When the narrator asks him for some bread, the manager clicks his heels and exclaims:
“Certainly, Monsieur le baron!” “I am not a baron,” I told him in a tone of mock sadness. “Oh, I beg your pardon, Monsieur le comte!” I had no time to lodge a second protest, which would no doubt have promoted me to the rank of marquis.
However satisfactory the volte-face, the underlying dynamic is bleak, for the manager has not of course amended his snobbish value system in any way. He has merely rewarded someone differently within its brutal confines—and only rarely do we have the opportunity to find a Marquis de Saint-Loup or a Prince Charming who will speak up on our behalf to convince the world of the nobility of our souls. More commonly, we are made to finish our dinner in the arctic draught.
5.
The problem is compounded by newspapers. Because snobs combine a weak capacity for independent judgement with an appetite for the views of influential people, their beliefs will, to a critical degree, be set by the atmosphere of the press.
Thackeray proposed that the obsessive English concern with high status and the aristocracy could be traced back to the country’s papers, which daily reinforced messages about the prestige of the titled and the famous and, by implication, the banality of the untitled and the ordinary. His particular bugbear was the “Court Circular” section of the papers, which reverently covered the parties, holidays, births and deaths of “high society.” In October 1848 (the month of publication of his Book of Snobs), the Court Circular of the Morning Post reported on Lord Brougham’s hunting party at Brougham Hall (“a good sport was had by all”), Lady Agnes Duff’s impending accouchement in Edinburgh and Georgina Pakenham’s marriage to Lord Burghley (“Her Ladyship was magnificently attired in a white satin dress, with lace flounces and a corsage.montant. It is needless to say that she looked exquisite”).