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Friday, August 1, 2025

Snobbery

 

“Sketch in the Lobby of the House of Commons” 1881


     I do not doubt that I have been, out of my hearing, called a snob.  I would much rather attend the Metropolitan Opera than the Superbowl, and, in fact, I have never in my adult life watched any sporting event.  I could not name a single tune of Beyoncé or Taylor Swift, yet I could easily distinguish Mozart from Brahms.  I have read three dozen books by Trollope and none by Stephen King.  I have visited Kathmandu yet never mean to set foot in Epcot Center.  Am I here strutting or simply stating facts?  Do these preferences make me a snob?

     Perhaps the court of my gentle readers could use more evidence.  If I am to be deemed a snob, I must have achieved that status as early as my teen-age years.  In my freshman year of high school we read Great Expectations, but our class was given a shortened version, which I spurned.  For several weeks I, probably with a degree of ostentation, carried a fat unabridged edition.  During my junior year, the literature textbook [1] contained a photo essay on Richard Wilbur, whom I have always admired as a virtuoso poet and a skilled translator, but I saw that the editor’s goal in featuring him was quite clearly to demystify his arcane profession by depicting a fairly young, rather good-looking, casually dressed writer in a cardigan sweater  who would not put off the young.  Does my feeling patronized by this appeal constitute snobbery?

     Art museums at one time displayed the visual art of the past with considerable dignified reserve, only labeling works with title, artist’s name, and perhaps a date.  Once these institutions conceived the ambition of increasing their appeal to the general public, they began adding further information, historical, biographical, and interpretive.  Like textbook introductions to poems, such editorial additions may have aided some, but at the cost of substituting the predigested views of accepted experts for the viewer’s or reader’s direct and spontaneous responses.  Then, perhaps with the 1972 show The Treasures of Tutankhamen in the British Museum which reached the Metropolitan in New York in 1976, was born the blockbuster show with its greatly expanded publicity expenditures followed by even greater revenues. King Tut’s free publicity even reached Saturday Night Live where it inspired Steve Martin’s amusing song about “the boy king.”  Those with a genuine interest in ancient art noticed that a new profit-oriented, business-based model had replaced the earlier aims of education and scholarship.

     According to the New York Times eighty percent of visitors to the Louvre come to see the Mona Lisa [2].  I can personally report that once they have entered the room these tourists do not even study the painting. Instead, standing shoulder to shoulder, they take selfies of themselves trying to capture Leonardo’s work in the background, presumably to prove to their skeptical friends that they actually made the trip.  Is it snobbish to think that these people are getting no experience of art whatsoever and would have a better time at Disneyland Paris?

     Turning to music, for the past week and a half I have been attending the Bravo!Vail music festival. The program includes celebrated performers, a good admixture of old and new music, and an admirable inclusion of non-white musicians and composers.  Yet, in pursuit of larger audiences, the organizers have also included such programs as a showing of The Princess Bride with the Dallas Symphony playing the soundtrack, then another evening devoted to movie music, and, far worse, an entire program in which a reduced corps of orchestral musicians aided by rock performers sang pop songs of the ‘80s.  Such programs scarcely display the classical performers’ skills. The semi-orchestral arrangements of top forty songs are surely no improvement over the original versions.  I do concede that the music of movie composers like John Williams at least potentially deserves a place in the concert hall, but I suspect their place in the program was motivated less by the value of their work than by the artistic director’s ambition to sell tickets to people who liked Stars Wars and Jurassic Park.  The kids in the audience who were waving their light sabers are not, I think, more likely to ask their parents to bring them back to hear Mozart.  Does my distaste for the replacement of aesthetic values with financial ones make me a snob?

     As a teen, I was fiercely loyal to “Chicago’s fine arts station” WFMT, often listening with friends and sometimes taping broadcasts of operas or symphonies.  The station allowed the inimitable Studs Terkel his Wax Museum, and relaxed its braces for Leadbelly and Tom Lehrer on the Midnight Special every Saturday evening, but concert hall music was central.  Now, with classical an ever-declining share of recorded music sales, the far fewer surviving stations playing Bach and Brahms tend to program only single movements while the music occupies ever-decreasing segments of the day.  Their standards and their respect for the audience has deteriorated.  And in my youth my taste was not so peculiar.   A 1955 study of the Minneapolis Symphony (now the Minnesota Orchestra) revealed that the median age of its ticket-buyers was 33, very close that of the nation as a whole, with students making up nearly a quarter of attendees [3].  Now game shows and interviews with pop singers and comedians and endless discussion of the news have supplanted the original cultural role of NPR outlets.  One hears virtually no poetry at all on even the best community-supported stations.  In spite of radio’s being an ideal medium for the art it has, I suppose, too few enthusiasts to merit inclusion in regular programming when public stations as well as commercial ones are courting numbers.

     Something comparable is seen with public television.  Early PBS shows had been largely those which could not survive in the marketplace and yet were considered worthy: lessons for GED or language-learning, music, plays, both classic and modern.  Yet these so-called “educational” stations began to play for a mass audience with soap opera-like features like BBC’s Forsyte Saga in 1967 which, due to the actors’ accents alone, seemed somewhat classy.  While aiming for a mainstream viewership doubtless increased their revenues, the gain came at the cost of diluting the role of such stations, making them more like all the money-oriented outlets to which they had once been a real alternative. 

     Higher education has been similarly degraded.  The ignorant used to complain about professors being evaluated on research rather than on teaching, but this objection is based on a misconception of the role of colleges which in fact represent the only place in modern society where scholars and scientists may pursue new knowledge for its own sake, without regard to financial considerations.  Universities have turned into vocational schools, with their administrators often welcoming the change in hopes that it might bring both new tuition-paying students as well as funding from commercial enterprises, while “impractical” majors like Classics fall to the wayside and the idea of a liberal education is quite forgotten.  My wife accuses me of pretending to aristocratic values by maintaining that no one should have to be bothered by the obligation to earn a living through work for wages.  I prefer to think that aesthetic and intellectual pursuits, which are, after all, ubiquitous in human society, are not elitist, but rather profoundly popular.  The manipulation of symbols, cognitive exercise in general, is the most characteristically human of occupations and one of the most pleasurable.    Pursuit of knowledge, like art, is a self-justifying activity.  One knows it is good because it is so achingly beautiful, and one knows beauty through pleasure, whether contemplating Euclid or Homer, Max Planck or James Joyce.   Yet the fact remains that many people who are surely in no way less human do not care to engage with thinkers and artists and might consider those who do pretentious. 

     Surely the worst sort of snob is a long-winded one, and I fear my evidence, whether tending toward guilt or innocence, has accumulated to a great enough heap, but for any meaningful verdict to be rendered one must first define the offense.  Snobs have been spoken of for only a few hundred years and the current usage is considerably more recent.  Some authors maintain that the word arose from the expression “sine nobilitate,” abbreviated “s. nob.,” which, without evidence, they claim appeared in university records and lists of ship passengers to indicate people who might be addressed without the use of a title.  Though this ingenious origin has been disproven, it is not entirely wide of the mark. 

     Those who were first called snobs could scarcely have been taken for noble even at first glance.  Francis Grose’s A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue in 1785 contains this entry: “Snob, a nick name for a shoemaker.”  Quite likely the  prior and underlying meaning is simply a person of the lower classes of whom the cobbler was merely representative, though this can only be speculation about speech unrecorded in print.  A bit of doggerel titled “Epitaph on a Cobler” from 1790 begins “Here lies poor Bob/ An honest snob.”  Cambridge undergraduates around the same time called the townspeople snobs (while at Oxford the term was cads), rather as if I and my fellow students at the University of Illinois had referred to the locals as farmers, whatever their occupation.

     Thus from the start the term was associated with class, though ironically, today it is the Cambridge students who would be called snobs.  The term was popularized and its meaning altered by Thackery’s Book of Snobs the title page of which announced that its author was “One of Themselves,” that is, a snob.  Thackery provided a succinct definition: “He who meanly admires mean things is a Snob—perhaps that is a safe definition of the character.”  In practice, however, he used the term in several senses.  Some of his examples conform to the early meaning of vulgar or plebeian, for instance the man who eats peas on a knife or picks his teeth with a fork.  Again, to contemporaries it is the diner who feels superior due to practicing more genteel table etiquette who would be the snob.  Still the enduring comedy of the practice is suggested by the anonymous verse, variously attributed to Edward Lear, Spike Milligan, Ogden Nash or Shel Silverstein:

 

I eat my peas with honey,

I’ve done it all my life;

It makes the peas taste funny,

But it keeps them on the knife.

 

     Yet Thackery extended the word’s meaning from working class people to those of the middle class who, usually incompetently, ape a fashionable lifestyle.   Major Ponto and his wife bankrupt themselves by imitating their “betters.” The author is subjected to their daughters’ incompetent piano-playing. The Pontos relish the company of the disagreeable Lord Gules because of his aristocratic birth and the family us financially ruined by their son’s expenditures to maintaining an upper-class facade.         

     There remained only one further twist to bring the current sense of the word.  Today one may properly be called a snob if one feels that one’s possessions, material, intellectual, or even spiritual, make one superior to those less gifted.  Looking down on others is an error of taste, it is unseemly, and constitutes the real heart of true snobbery.  The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest example of this barbed sort of snobbery has to do not with financial or aesthetic but rather religious one-upmanship, citing Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma (1911): “All her childish affectations of conscientious scruple and religious impulse have been applauded and deferred to until she has become an ethical snob of the first water.”

     The sense of sharpness that soon accumulated around this sort of disdain is exemplified by Orwell’s relentless experience of his wealthier classmates’ contempt as scholarship boy in a prestigious school.  “I suppose,” he comments, “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.” [4]  Yet he noted a sort of snobbery as well among waiters who identify with their genteel clientele and even  among tramps who wish to let everyone know that they had “come down in the world.” [5]  

     I might defend myself by claiming my fondness for the films of Chaplin and the Marx brothers, the cartoons of Winsor McKay and of George Herriman, and the music of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, but all of these are artists who, though they worked in popular genres, are applauded by intellectuals.  My cousin compiles evidence on the considerable role of people with my surname in Scottish history, but a coat of arms has no significance for me.  I curse neckties and find my wardrobe in  the Salvation Army, but I am afraid I might here approach a form of inverted snobbery which has surely a different meaning entirely.

     I must fall back in then end on my insistence that I feel no shadow of superiority to those of differing tastes.  Unfortunately, the best support for this claim is subjective.  I can only depend on what I may hope is a reputation for broad sympathies, extending to all those who have found a way to agreeably pass the day on this black earth, whether it be among those who relish Taylor Swift or Stravinsky, Hamburger Helper or bouillabaisse, Star Trek or Wallace Stevens.  If I have failed to convey my appreciation for the myriad sorts of sensibilities that flourish in our species, my readers may be assured that I embrace those who fancy professional wrestling no less than those with a taste for Noh drama.  Perhaps we potential snobs not only cultivate special tastes; we may be a special taste as well and attract only those who will be amused by our affectations.  Let each enjoy what is found to be enjoyable, whether it be playing at being a snob or laughing at those who do.

 

 

 

1.  New York Times, Jan. 28, 2025, “Mona Lisa to Get Her Own Room as the Overcrowded Louvre Expands.” 

2.  I think it may have been Norman Foerster’s American Poetry and Prose, but I am uncertain.

3.   Greg Sandow, “Age of the Audience, Once More,” Arts Journal Blog for December 18, 2007, at artsjournal.com.

4.  The Road to Wigan Pier (1958), p. 169.

5.  Down and Out in  P:aris and London (1933), p. 89.

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