The fall and rise of the English upper class: Houses, kinship and capital since 1945

By Daniel R. Smith

The fall and rise of the English upper class explores the role traditionalist worldviews, articulated by members of the historic upper-class, have played in British society in the shadow of her imperial and economic decline in the twentieth century. Situating these traditionalist visions alongside Britain’s post-Brexit fantasies of global economic resurgence and a socio-cultural return to a green and pleasant land, Smith examines Britain’s Establishment institutions, the estates of her landed gentry and aristocracy, through to an appetite for nostalgic products represented with pastoral or pre-modern symbolism. It is demonstrated that these institutions and pursuits play a central role in situating social, cultural and political belonging. Crucially these institutions and pursuits rely upon a form of membership which is grounded in a kinship idiom centred upon inheritance and descent: who inherits the houses of privilege, inherits England.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Apr 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9781526157003

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The fall and rise of the English upper class

ffirs01-fig-5001.jpg

The fall and rise of the English upper class

Houses, kinship and capital since 1945

Daniel R. Smith

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Daniel R. Smith 2023

The right of Daniel R. Smith to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 5701 0 hardback

First published 2023

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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For Julia and Beatrice

… what he spake, though it lack'd form a little,

Was not like madness. There's something in his soul,

O’er which his melancholy sits on brood;

And I do doubt the hatch, and the disclose

Will be some danger. (William Shakespeare, Hamlet)

This story deals with gentlefolk, or with those who are obliged to pretend that they are gentlefolk. (E. M. Forster, Howards End)

Contents

List of tables

Acknowledgements

Introduction: England’s hope and loss

Part I:Fall and rise

1. Houses, kinship and capital

2. England as a house-society

Part II:The social poetics of houses

3. Imperial melancholia: Rory Stewart's The Marches (2017)

4. Arcadianism: Adam Nicolson's Sissinghurst (2008)

5. ‘Island Englishness’: Roger Scruton's England: An Elegy (2000)

Part III:Houses as kinship and capital

6. The Reading Public

7. The Branded Gentry

8. The fortunes of the land

Conclusion: contingent remainders

References

Index

Tables

2.1 Sir Gregory King's estimate of population and wealth, England and Wales, 1688.

8.1 British peers whose fortunes are in the billions, 2019.

8.2 British aristocrats listed in The Sunday Times Rich List, 2019.

8.3 MPs who declare land ownership on the 2018 Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

Acknowledgements

Writing this book, I have been helped by many kind and generous people. Thank you to Tom Dark at Manchester University Press for arranging a meeting about this project, and persisting with it. I would also like to thank the anonymous peer reviewer from MUP for their astute and helpful criticisms. Various people have been very helpful teachers and colleagues. Over the years these include Jonathan Barry, Henry French, Anthony King, Tom Rice, James Rosbrook-Thompson, David Skinner, Matthias Varul and Jane Whittle. Since joining Cardiff University I have benefited greatly from conversations and advice from: Paul Atkinson, Finn Bowring, Ryan Davey, Sara Delamont, Robert Evans, Sophie Hallett, Jenny Hoolachan, William Housley, Jamie Lewis, Kate Moles, Shailen Nandy, Robin Smith, Gareth Thomas and Katharine Tyler.

A few chapters have had welcome opportunities to be shared and have received generous comments and helpful suggestions: parts of Chapter 2 were presented to the Contemporary Elites and Global Inequalities panel at the Royal Geographical Society Annual International Conference, August 2021. Thank you to Katie Higgins and Laura Clancy for including me on their panel, and for their comments. Chapter 4 was presented to the Department of Social Policy and Intervention's seminar on Elites and Social Class at the University of Oxford, June 2022. Thank you to Aaron Reeves for the invitation, and the audience for their extremely stimulating response. An earlier version of what became Chapter 1 was presented to the departmental seminar at Loughborough University, May 2018; thank you to Thomas Thurnell-Read for the invitation. A version of Chapter 7 was presented to the BSA Merit or Meritocracy Conference, University of Newcastle, April 2018. Thank you to Geoff Payne for the invitation to speak at Newcastle, and for commissioning a chapter on elites for his Social Divisions textbook. Chapter 7 benefited from the workshop with the Moscow Centre for Cultural Sociology in October 2021, where Andrea Voyer's paper on Emily Post's etiquette, as well as Phil Smith's insights on Sloane Rangers, helped focus my themes. I would like to thank Peter York for our humorous conversation in 2015, as it helped shape both Chapter 7 and

Chapter 8.

Chapter 6 was read by some of the participants of the chapter, and I'm glad they saw the story about English literature and its relation to English society in favourable and relatable terms. Chapter 1 received extremely generous and helpful comments from Marilyn Strathern, Jeffrey Alexander, and Des Fitzgerald. I remain indebted to them. I would like to thank Marilyn Strathern for both permission for the chapter epigraph and her incredibly close reading of the chapter: to be told that I had properly understood After Nature and taken that wonderful, wonderful book in fruitful new directions was both a humbling compliment as well as welcome encouragement to continue with writing this book outright.

Appropriately for a book about fathers and sons, I could not have written this book without the help and support of a woman. I owe everything to Julia Carter.

Introduction: England's hope and loss

England is a society divided. While this is not a contentious statement, this book claims that the source of division can be located in an elusive entity, the English imagination. ‘The English imagination takes the form of a ring or circle. It is endless because it has no beginning and no end; it moves backwards as well as forwards’ begins Peter Ackroyd's (2004: xix) Albion. Ackroyd claims this English imagination is the result of ‘the fact that no other European nation has kept its boundaries intact over so many centuries’ (Ackroyd, 2004: xx). While this definition from Ackroyd's cultural history of English arts and letters claims to be timeless, his survey begins c.673 and ends c.1970, not long after Britain entered the EU. It seems more appropriate to say that the English imagination is less endless, more stuck and ruptured in time.

Ackroyd's definition captures a central facet of Englishness: it is prelapsarian. England's utopia is Arcadia, and Arcadia is not a place that has never existed (in the literal meaning of utopia: no place); Arcadia is the world we once had and have since lost. Arcadia was England, this self-same land, before our fall. The clue given by Ackroyd's periodisation, which ends Englishness at a time of European integration, suggests that Arcadia contains an original sin which expelled the English from their Eden. As historian Timothy Snyder (2018) has argued, we can view the latter half of the twentieth century as propagating a myth in European politics of the wise, old nation. Imperial decline not only pushed European societies toward international integration, it was also accompanied by a retrospective mythology of national sovereignty and cultural specificity. What we take to be ‘Britain’ is an eighteenth-century invention, caught up with imperial expansion; Britain was an upper-class English project, in large part, which subsumed the nations of the UK and its colonies under its influence (Colley, 1992; Cannadine, 2000; for a critique see Thompson, 1995). As the Empire unravelled, Englishness faced not only a crisis of political-economic global prominence but a much deeper identity problem: it was unable to easily (re)affirm its cultural hegemony over Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland (Nairn, 1981). The original sin that expelled the English from their prelapsarian innocence is Empire, and what is occluded in Ackroyd's definition of Englishness is all which went into preserving ‘this England’: a wilful forgetting of the world beyond the boundaries of an island nation.

The defining political moment for the UK in the early twenty-first century, the 2016 EU Referendum, can be viewed in light of the myth of English innocence and its eternal imagination, as Virdee and McGreever (2018) demonstrate. On the one hand Brexit is motivated by an island mentality: a vision of England first as Nature, a green and pleasant land – the undercurrent of which being the racial and ethnic histories of Empire and colonialism that this pastoral idyll occludes. On the other hand, Brexit articulates a form of post-colonial melancholia as England is unable to grapple with the loss of political-economic prominence on the world stage, and with it a hostility to the centralised state that intrudes into the life of its citizens (symbolised by ‘the EU’). The fantasy of Brexit is an Empire 2.0, which will arise phoenix-like after exiting the EU, returning us to this ‘green and pleasant land’ after border controls are reimposed. What Virdee and McGreever (2018) have identified in their contradictory drivers in English sentiment behind the 2016 Referendum is the fracture or split in the eternal circle of the English imagination. This mentality made its way into classical English political philosophies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with its twin categories of empiricism and traditionalism (Anderson, 1964). To the English mind, what is known is related to the past experience, while the past illuminates whatever passes through experience. Viewed this way, there is only one way unity could falter: external influence. An imagination which knows no origin has only one possibility of fracture: the breaking of the ring or circle from the outside, while a political philosophy of traditionalism has only one fate: the usurpation of customs by way of foreign invasion.

When the British-Jamaican sociologist, and member of the Windrush generation, Stuart Hall (1991: 46) said ‘I am the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea’, he wanted to tell us that identity is not an eternal circle of self-reference but, in fact, always-already split in terms of identification. He was trying to awaken the English to the original sin disrupting their prelapsarian innocence: Empire. He wanted us to appreciate that we can only know our own normality through an Other upon whom said normality becomes contingent and fragile. To be able to enjoy a cup of tea in Lancashire, one needs an imperial-colonial trade and governing apparatus that connects Lancashire with Ceylon. English national identity is contingent upon people such as Stuart Hall; which is not to say it ‘depends on’ an ethnic, racial or any other abject Other but, instead, to say: English national identity mis-recognises its own contingency through eschewing difference. ‘People like me who came to England in the 1950s have been there for centuries; symbolically, we have been there for centuries […] That is the outside history’ remarks Hall, ‘that is inside the history of the English. There is no English history without that other history’ (1991: 45–46).

The Fall and Rise of the English Upper Class makes the intervention that one native idiom of the English imagination has concealed the imperial outside of English history inside English society, and with it ‘our’ sense of societal unity. It is the native idiom of the house. In the history of English capitalism and national identity that the book traces, England's ruling institutions are houses that have become personified as moral persons capable of standing for belonging to English society, outright. Membership to English society became, and remains, situated in idioms of kinship: who inherits the house, inherits England. As Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism (1995) reminds us, in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, the English idyll of life in a country house was only possible due to the slave holdings of Sir Thomas’ West Indies sugar plantations. But the fact that Fanny Price finds only ‘such a dead silence’ when she asks her uncle about the origins of the house's fortunes is because one assumes that ‘one world could not be connected with the other since there simply is no common language for both’ (Said, 1994: 115). The idiom of the house combines the kinship of English ancestry with the fortunes of capital from ‘elsewhere’ in such a way that both are naturalised and internalised to ‘this England’.

Indeed national histories of decline in England are often told as the decline of houses. As imperial decline saw English self-certainty fall and its sense of national identity morph into a myth of island innocence, this ‘decline and fall’ was sociologically and historically explained through a decline in the political, economic, social and cultural prominence of its aristocracy (Wiener, 1985; Cannadine, 1990, 1996; Anderson, 1964; Nairn,

1964a). In The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (

1990) David Cannadine concluded that, with the protracted waning of the upper classes’ economic and political power from the end of the nineteenth century, their future role would be consigned to the symbolic prestige afforded to them as guardians of the nation's heritage, as their grand houses and landscape gardens were placed in ‘trust’. The country ‘house’ epitomised the social, political and economic prominence of the upper classes and their protracted decline in the indices of capital and kinship; a living but entombed upper class. Decline and Fall (1990) was followed up with two best-selling histories of national decline and the unravelling of traditionalism.

First came Class in Britain (

1998) in which he argued that class is an extension of British national identity, notable in its reversal of German Idealism for English empiricism: it is not class consciousness that determines the social existence of the nation, but consciousness of class that allows one to know their place ‘within’ the nation. To know one's place, one needs to know what ought to be based upon custom, and one needs to know how to define others within customary ways of acting, thinking and feeling. To say that to the English class was or is largely manners, language and style, is to say they thought of it not as a thing but rather an experience: unlike in Kantian idealism, class could be an intuition without a concept. As the old joke goes: you know your place.

Second, Cannadine's Ornamentalism: How the British Saw their Empire (2000) argued that the shaping of Britain's colonies was predicated upon imperial politics extending the monarchical and aristocratic hierarchical system of class, status and rank to native structures of hierarchy within the colonies: knowing one's place at home is an ornamental mirror through which native hierarchies in the colonies allowed ‘them’ to know their place in the Empire. In so doing, Cannadine argued that British society and history cannot be understood without the native intuitions of class and the extrinsic processes of imperial and colonial consolidation. National self-image and identity were an empirical unfolding of tradition and customary conduct. As the hierarchical class system was extended and reproduced in its imperial colonies, the forging of British identity tied together class with national identity, national identity with imperial hierarchies. When the Empire unravels, so too does national identity; and so, too, does the sociological composition of an imperial-native hierarchy: class.

An island mentality and desire for Empire 2.0, as much as they are fantasies of national belonging and capitalism, are more significantly existential stakes in how the English define themselves to themselves.

Cannadine's conservative mentality is illuminating for where we find ourselves in the post-Brexit landscape of the early twenty-first century. In Ideology and Utopia, Karl Mannheim (1952: 206) said that because conservatism and traditionalism ‘has no predisposition towards theorising’, it has no sense of utopia; or, more specifically, no utopia in a future-orientated and speculative sense. Instead, the utopia for conservatism comes after progressive and external pressure: the conservative utopia is the world before the present. We find ourselves in this moment, again. My contention is that the empiricism and traditionalism that epitomise the English imagination and its ideological extension to ‘Britishness’ (Colley, 1992) also shaped their experience of modernity.

I mean by modernity the search for societal unity and cohesion brought on by the historical passage to capitalism, industrialism, nation building and a metropolitan way of life. It can be distilled in the question: how can individuals find their place and significance in the life of a collective? (Simmel, 1971a; Pippin, 1999). Sociologists are accustomed to thinking of modernity in multiple different guises; this book explores English society's experience of what Scott Lash (1999) called ‘second modernity’, where the search for societal unity is characterised by uncertainty, transience and finality; a feeling of confusion in the seeking of unity to life. It is this tradition of the English imagination that Fall and Rise follows and it can be distilled by one modernist masterpiece: E. M. Forster's Howards End (

[1910] 2010).

English modernity is a desire to ‘live in fragments no more’ (Forster, [1910] 2010: 195), to ‘see life steadily and see it whole, group in one vision its transitoriness and its eternal youth – connect’ (Forster, [1910] 2010: 282). The titular house and the country estate in Howards End is the model for this connection of fragments into wholes. My argument is that, like Howards End, the passage the English took to modernity seized upon the upper-class ‘house’ as its model for a life lived not in fragments but whole. The ‘house’ was raised to an idiom of national unity and societal connection. Critically the house is an idiom which uses empiricism and tradition to forge its abstractions of us/Other. An Englishman's home is his castle, not because it reflects his values of individualism and privacy; rather an Englishman's home is his castle because it contains a model for an alternative definition of ‘society’ compared to his continental neighbour's. In Hegel's philosophy, ‘society’ is defined as a dialectical unity of opposing spheres of value tied together by the state: family (unity), civil society (difference) and the state (unity-in-difference). In classical sociology Weber's definition of modern stratification repurposes the same Hegelian model, where ‘class, status, party’ refer to separate but interconnected spheres of money (present power), honour (past power) and communal will (future orientation)). In Howards End a farmhouse in Hertfordshire acts as an idiom for the cohesiveness of ‘society’ without becoming an absolute centre, such as the continental European idea of the state (epitomised in the Brexiteer island mentality as ‘the EU’). In the English mentality ‘the house’ remains an absent centre: it remains a longed for sensibility always already lost. Houses are fragile: their heyday always-already been and gone and their members mere custodians of their past. Houses belong to the past and members belong to the house, not the other way round. As Forster's Margaret Schlegel observes: the house's ‘message was not that of eternity, but of hope on this side of the grave’ (Forster, [1910] 2010: 215). The house is continuity within discontinuity, tradition and empiricism incarnate.

The climax of Howards End intimates something of the invisible drivers that Virdee and McGreever (2018) identified, the nostalgia for a harmonious island Englishness alongside a melancholic sense of loss of global economic prominence. Leaving the gates of Kings Cross at dawn, passing through Hertfordshire's pastoral harmony to meet his Fate, Forster's narrator has Leonard Bast notice farmers rising to work:

They are England's hope. … they can still throw back to a nobler stock, and breed yeoman. At the chalk-pit a motor passed him. In it was another to whom Nature favours – the Imperial. Healthy, ever in motion, it hopes to inherit the earth. It breeds as quickly as the yeoman … who carries his country's virtue overseas. (Forster, [1910] 2010: 341)

The yeoman and the imperial are the two contradictory drivers of Brexit, the vision of England as a green and pleasant land and an Empire exploiting riches ‘elsewhere’. Forster laments the separation of yeoman husbandry from the imperial colonial trade routes, and the titular house, Howards End, becomes their ‘hope on this side of the grave’. The end of the story finds Tom, the bastard son and heir of the yeoman (Leonard Bast) and imperial (Henry Wilcox) inherit Howards End through the maternal line of the Germanic Schlegel sisters; he may bridge the yeoman and the imperial and inherit the house, but he will not inherit happiness, harmony, nor eternity. Tracing this yeoman/imperial split the following chapters seek to situate the anxieties, hopes and political concerns of the present in the idiom of the house.

The house is a model for an imagined English future that satisfies their native empirical-traditionalist mode of thought: the future is modelled from its own past. One of the central arguments running through Fall and Rise is that the idiom of the house, from the country house to the public school system, monarchy to lesser gentry, has been seized upon over and over again in a variety of social, political and cultural beliefs and practices. In so doing, the English have turned their upper class into a ‘past’, a living form of ‘tradition’ beyond the empirical here-and-now. The upper class have been made into, in the phrase of anthropologist Mary W. Helms (1998), ‘Societal Others’: persons living in the present who are Other to us, but, nevertheless, sufficiently like us to allow us to become more-like-ourselves than we presently are. Our ‘Societal Others’ belong to the ‘there-and-then’ but live in the ‘here-and-now’. Unlike the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea, upper class personages enact the unity between the yeoman and the imperial ‘whom Nature’ favours, at once inside and outside imperial-island histories, ‘endless because it has no beginning and no end; it moves backwards and forwards’ (Ackroyd, 2004).

The book is separated into three parts. Part I, ‘Fall and rise’, consists of two chapters which lay out the empirical and conceptual groundwork.

Chapter 1 argues that sociologists would benefit from viewing England's traditional upper class not as an aberration of contemporary forms of capital accumulation or an anachronism to our comprehension of power, politics and identity. The argument picks up on Meiksins Wood's The Pristine Culture of Capitalism (1991): England's precocious passage to capitalism, a century before its continental neighbours, was not an incomplete capitalism because it arose in the countryside under the auspices of a hereditary aristocracy. Instead England witnessed a more developed form of capitalism whose pre-modern symbolism, far from stymying capital accumulation, exaggerated economic inequalities and social distinctions. Once this framework is in place, the chapter builds an argument to suggest that kinship idioms of inheritance and descent feed not only England's relationship to capital but also come to forge a vision of ‘society’ as well as the foundation for our language of class. Whenever class and capital are mentioned, kinship thinking follows close behind. This is illustrated through an examination of Eurosceptic laments on the demise of national identity written by, largely, upper-class men (b. post-1945) at the turn of the millennium. It is observed that these narratives of national decline form part of a genre of writing on English national identity crisis, a genre unified by the tendency to tell the story of national decline through the kinship idiom of father–son. It is out of this father–son idiom that a self-society perspective is developed, holding one key for understanding the imbrication of upper-class sensibilities with the crisis of national identity in which we find ourselves.

Chapter 2 theoretically elaborates and historically locates the claim that England ought to be considered what Lévi-Strauss (1982, 1988) called a ‘house-society’. It confronts the problem sociologists of class in Britain face: how to explain the persistence of a traditional upper class in an advanced modern society where class ought to prevail over status (both in Weber's sense). The chapter explores what Lévi-Strauss (1988) calls the fetish of the house in three domains: sovereignty, capital and demography, and finally the origin of English class categories and nomenclature. First by examining Sir Thomas Smith's 1583 De Republica Anglorum it is demonstrated that the vision of British society as a multitude of households and families provided the means to dispense with a centralised vision of state sovereignty or a unity-in-diversity vision of ‘society’ as found in the continental European tradition. Second, by revisiting the ‘origins of agrarian capitalism’ debate, it is suggested that the origins of the house-based vision of society arise, first, in the vision of society as a ‘multitude of individual households’ and, second, in the peculiar economic arrangement of the lease-copyhold which governed the economic relations and kinship structures of the early modern aristocracy and its agrarian economy. Because economic interests were conceptually indistinguishable from kinship terms, the organic transformation from feudalism to capitalism in England preserved pre-modern status terminology within naked ‘class’ (economic) interests. Third and finally it is shown, from Sir Gregory King's Natural and Political Observations and Conclusions upon the State and Condition of England (1696) to Savage's (2015a) ‘Great British class survey’, that class categories continue a conflation of economic interests with status, and kinship terms of inheritance with financial power.

Part II, ‘The social poetics of houses’, consists of three chapters.

Chapters 3 to

5 provide readings of three works in that genre of national identity narratives which utilise idioms of kinship to narrate societal past and future. They are somewhere between memoir, antiquarianism, personal history or romance, and perhaps even political philosophy. Chapter 3 examines the politician Rory Stewart's memoir, The Marches (2017), narrating his walks across the borderlands of England and Scotland with his late father. A memoir that seamlessly mixes a father–son relationship with a political tract for the future of Anglo-Scottish, British–European relations. As such, The Marches morphs into a melancholic search for the proper burial for the imperial world of Stewart's father and ancestors. Chapter 4 explores Adam Nicolson's attempts to ‘revive’ tradition at his ‘ancestral’ estate, Sissinghurst Castle, Kent. Here Sissinghurst becomes the beacon for his political philosophy of landscape, agriculture, and something approaching ‘England’ via his mythology of ‘Arcadia’. Finally, Chapter 5 considers Roger Scruton's lamentation, England: An Elegy (2000: vii), his ‘personal tribute to the civilisation that made me and which is now passing from the world.’

These texts all take the fate of Britain as their narrative's central existential stake, implicitly or explicitly. But they are not situated in the relation between an individual and collective future. Instead, they are dialogues between past and present forged in the idioms of kinship: they are dialogues between fathers and sons which then find analogies with inheritance and future-orientation, the history of landscape and its present community, imagined tradition and conventions in relation to the empirical conditions of experience ‘now’. As inquiries seeking to find national identity their investigations rest upon the empirical experience of things as the basis for claims about the existence, dissipation or even loss of said identity. From this empirical mode of inquiry, The Marches, Sissinghurst and England: An Elegy all share a particular tone or mood: they are melancholic narratives in search of something lost (Stewart's middleland), reviving what has been lost (Nicolson's ‘traditional farm’) or eulogising loss (Scruton's civilisation that made him). Situated in kinship idioms, their sense of loss is not that of mourning: they are not mourning the death of a parent but the abstractions which the parent stood for, national tradition. A nostalgic sense of loss becomes post-colonial melancholia (Gilroy, 2004; Mitchell, 2021), but with a Freudian twist. The argument is modelled on the Freud of Totem and Taboo ([1913] 2005): these men are, or imagined themselves as, sons of imperial fathers who must kill their fathers so as to ‘move on’. Unable to do this, they suffer an unconscious guilt from the sin of the imperial father. They love their father(s) but the sins of Empire hang over their memory, and the stain of Empire covers the totem of Englishness: in landscape, in the countryside, and through an island geography is where they melancholically roam and moan.

Part III, ‘Houses as kinship and capital’, takes the poetics of houses outlined in Part II and brings them into dialogue with three forms of upper-class identity: high culture, high status lifestyles, and the fortunes of capital.

Chapter 6 consists of an ethnography of a provincial English town's independent bookshop. Here discussions about the role of reading, literature and the high-street reveal deep, underlying concerns on the meaning of ‘culture’ in English society and its relation to the ‘moral health’ of the nation. Awakening the debates on the meaning of