Faulks on Fiction . Great Programs on BBC Two

Faulks on fiction presented by Sebastian Faulks (started on 5 February) were a four part series on the brilliance of the British novel and its characters. Very well done, and a unique opportunity for revisiting marvelous BBC series based on famous books.
The four episodes were : Heroes”, “Lovers”, “Snobs” and “Villains”.
This post presents you with images from "The snob".
Watch the film in the next "post", and you will get the general idea.
Yours ... Jeeves











Faulks on Fiction
Review by John Sutherland

Published: February 4 2011
Faulks on Fiction, by Sebastian Faulks, BBC Books, RRP£20, 376 pages



This is a good book about good books. It, and the four-part BBC TV series it accompanies, will encourage people to read and reread classic British novels.
Sebastian Faulks starts from the position that critical theory, which has been a dominant trend in academic discourse for 50 years, is inherently sterile. Put bluntly, it goes round and round in smaller circles until it disappears up its own vocabulary. Equally dead-ended, in Faulks’s view, is the more recent fashion for biographical explanation. He illustrates his objection with a wry personal recollection: “When I went round the country doing readings after my fourth novel, Birdsong, came out in 1993, most people could not conceal their disappointment. They had expected me to be 105 years old, French and, in some odd way, female.”

What Faulks proposes is a return to “reading for character”. Fiction, he maintains, creates people. They live, we know them, we have relations with them. That is what our focus should be. There follows a survey of great characters in great fiction: “Heroes”, “Lovers”, “Snobs” and “Villains”.
Faulks’s method is to nominate his character (Robinson Crusoe, Heathcliff, Lady Chatterley), describe them, and then offer a résumé of the story with shrewdly enlightening observations.
The tone of the book is resolutely commonsensical. For example, the opening paragraph in the chapter on Jane Austen’s Emma (Miss Woodhouse, unsurprisingly, comes under the category “Snob”): “The trouble with Emma is that she’s had things rather too much her own way; the trouble with Emma is that it’s a novel of such scintillating brilliance, and so quick on its feet, that anything a reader can say about it seems doomed to bathos. If you were to hear the Amadeus Quartet playing Mozart on a summer evening in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles with your lover on your arm and a glass of Bollinger 1990 fizzing on your tongue, it would probably be vain to try to put the sensation into words.”
It’s all amiably chatty. But the chattiness often verges on, well, looseness. Faulks writes of the seventh “bout” in Lady Chatterley’s Lover: “The prose is sufficiently opaque that it had to be explained to the jury at the obscenity trial in 1960 that this was indeed sodomy.” In fact, as Jeremy Hutchinson, one of the defence lawyers, has assured me, Penguin’s counsel deliberately obfuscated this fact, the prosecution were too dozy to pick it up and the jury never caught on. Had they caught on, the trial might well have gone the other way and post-1960s fiction would have been very different.
Another example of that looseness, from Faulks’s Emma discussion: “When a piano arrives for Jane [Fairfax] from an unknown donor, there is speculation that Mr Knightley has sent it.” No there isn’t. Frank (the actual donor) encourages guileless Emma to believe that it is a gift from Jane’s illicit admirer Mr Dixon. A main section of the plot, and our final judgment on Frank, depends on Emma’s scurrilous misapprehension. Any A-level candidate committing this kind of elementary error could kiss goodbye to Oxbridge. Faulks’s easy-goingness is one of his book’s charms. But there are altogether too many bloopers. The dates ascribed to the many illustrations in the book are, every single one of them, grotesquely wrong – by a century in some cases. The author and his research assistants (whom he graciously thanks) should really have taken more trouble.
The main attraction of this book is how light it travels. Only three literary critics, by my count, are mentioned in passing (I’m gratified to be one of the three). We don’t need all that dry-as-dust scholarship is the implication. All we need is the bracing encounter with novelists and their characters.
A price is paid for this indifference to all those dreary scholars who devote their lives to understanding literature. “When Thackeray,” writes Faulks, “called Vanity Fair in its subtitle, ‘A novel without a hero’, he meant to indicate, I think, that none of the male characters fulfilled the heroic role.” A glance at the scholarship would have informed Faulks that the explanation is quite different. Thackeray began seriously thinking about his “Waterloo novel” in 1842, when London was in a hubbub about Thomas Carlyle’s lectures “On Heroes and Hero-worship”. Vanity Fair is imbued throughout with anti-Carlylism. To miss that fact (as Faulks does) is to miss much of what the novel is about.
Literary criticism, used judiciously, can help. And wilfully ignoring what literary criticism offers can lead the reader into misreading. Unnecessary blemishes somewhat disfigure Faulks on Fiction but the book remains readable, entertaining and well conceived. The corrected paperback might, however, be a better investment.
John Sutherland is the author of ‘Literature: 50 Ideas You Need to Know’ (Quercus).
‘Faulks on Fiction’ begins on February 5 on BBC Two

The origin of the word 'snob' ....

The word ‘snob’ is said to have arisen from the custom of writing “s. nob.”, that is, ‘sine nobilitate,’ after the names of children of untitled parents in certain English schools.

— Norman DeWitt, The Classical Weekly (Pittsburgh, PA), 1 Oct. 1941

“The word snob  is first recorded in the late 18th century as a term for a shoemaker or his apprentice. At about this time it was indeed adopted by Cambridge students, but they didn't use it to refer to students who lacked a title or were of humble origins; they used it generally of anyone who was not a student.”

(…) “Even an approximate age of the noun snob is beyond reconstruction, for no citation of it predates 1776. Judging by the records, it originated in the north of England, which neither means that it is a loan from Scandinavian into Middle English nor makes such a conjecture improbable. Some Scandinavian words that had been current in the north since the Vikings’ raids reached the Standard unexpectedly late. One of them is slang, whose history, contrary to the history of snob, has been traced in detail. The attested meanings of snob are as following (the dates in parentheses refer to their first known appearance in print); “shoemaker; cobbler’s apprentice” (1781); “a townsman, anyone not a gownsman (that is, a student) in Cambridge” (1796); “a person belonging to the ordinary or lower classes of society; one having no pretensions to rank or gentility; one who has little or no breeding or good taste, a vulgar or ostentatious person” (1838, 1859); “one whose ideas and conduct are prompted by a vulgar admiration for wealth or social position” (1846-1848). Snob “cobbler” is still a living word in some dialects, but most English-speakers remember only the last-mentioned meaning.

 The word snob and its derivatives (snobbery, snobbish, snobbishness; rarely snobbism) owe their popularity to Thackeray, who first published his essays on various snobs in Punch and later collected them in a book. His snobs are not always vulgar and ostentatious people: some are insufficiently refined, and their manners are ridiculed only because of the pressure of society, which slights those whose manners violate certain rules. A reader of older English literature may wonder what is meant when snob turns up in the text. Long ago, an annual called The Keepsake (the predecessor of Christmas books) was published in the United States. In the annual for 1831, the following verse appeared: “Sir Samuel Snob—that was his name—/ Three times to Mrs. Brown/ Had ventured just to hint his flame,/ And twice received—a frown.” We applaud Sir Samuel’s perseverance but would like to know why his surname was Snob. Most definitely, he was not a cobbler. I suspect that he lacked breeding, for otherwise he would not have accosted a married woman in such an ungentlemanly way.

 Some tie connects snob and nob. The latter has a doublet knob, and the two are often impossible to distinguish. Among other things, nob/knob means “head.” Cobblers (“snobs”) deal with people’s feet, not their heads, but nobs did not make hats or bonnets. Snobs and nobs are said to have arisen among the internal factions of shoemakers. (Here and below, I am using shoemaker and cobbler as interchangeable synonyms, but originally the cobblers claimed control over the soles of boots and shoes, and shoemakers over the upper leathers.) Allusions to “two great sections of mankind, nobs and snobs” turn up occasionally in 19th-century fiction and the popular press. According to an 1831 newspaper statement (again 1831!), “the nobs have lost their dirty seats—the honest snobs have got ‘em.” A hundred years ago, in British provincial English a strikebreaker, or scab, as such an individual is known in the United States, was called knobstick, blacknob, knob, and nob. Here “nobs” are again represented as dishonest. Although in regional speech the sound s– is often added to all kinds of words (hence the secondary bond between slang and language, for example), nothing suggests that the etymon (source) of snob is nob, with s– prefixed to it. Both snob and cobbler contain the group -ob-, but this coincidence is probably of no importance either.

 It does not follow that “cobbler” is the original meaning of snob because it is the earliest one in our texts. More likely, the starting point was “a vulgar person,” with “cobbler” chosen as the epitome of vulgarity. Students at Cambridge must have had that connotation in mind when they, the gownsmen, showed their contempt to the townsmen. At Eaton and Oxford, townsmen were called cads. Cad is a shortening of cad(d)ee, that is, of caddie “cadet” (cadet is a French word), and it meant “an unbooked passenger on a coach; assistant to a coachman; omnibus conductor; confederate,” in dialects also “the youngest of a litter; an odd-job man” before it acquired the meaning “townsman” and “an ill-bred person.” Cobblers and their apprentices are no more “vulgar” than conductors and their assistants.

 The question is why snob, whatever its age and provenance, came to designate a person deficient in breeding and how it was coined. In the Germanic languages, the consonantal group sn– is sound symbolic, and in this respect it shares common ground with gl– (which often turns up in words for “glitter” and “glow”) and sl– (which is frequent in words for “slime” and things slovenly and sleazy). Initial sn– occurs in numerous words designating cutting (compare snip, snap, and snub) and sharp objects, including “nose” (compare snout) and its functions (compare sneeze, snooze, snort, sniff, and snuff). Among the Scandinavian words resembling snob, especially prominent are a few meaning “fool, dolt, idiot,” but they have the structure sn-p. The connection between cutting/snapping/ sniffing and stupidity is not immediately obvious, but one can be called a fool for so many reasons that guessing would be unprofitable. People may have called the sn-p man a fool because he was of stunted growth (“snubbed” by nature) or had an ugly “snout.” A snotty person produces too much mucus in his nose, but snotty is also “arrogant, supercilious.” Perhaps snotty “arrogant” is a variant of snooty “snouty,” unrelated directly to snot; however, one cannot be certain. Old Icelandic snotr “clever, wise” has cognates in other Germanic languages and continued into Modern Icelandic (snotur). The etymology of snotr remains a matter of debate. In any case, a person who has a sensitive nose smells things others miss and becomes clever in the process. In historical semantics, as in life, the distance between “wise” and “stupid” is short.

Welcome to the sn-club. Snob belongs to it, but its origin is partly obscure. When it emerged, it seems to have designated a person whose social status was low. Although, apparently, a northern word, snob does not sound exactly like any Scandinavian noun or verb and could be coined on English soil. It correlates with nob but was not derived from it, and its association with cobblers is more or less fortuitous. Snob may be a cognate of snub, but their kinship does not explain how it was coined. According to a legend, whose earliest version was offered in 1850, snob is an abbreviation of either s(ine) nob(ilitate) or s(ub) nob(ilitate). Allegedly, those words were written in the matriculation documents at either Cambridge or Oxford, or Eaton if a graduate was not an aristocrat. This legend, as Skeat, himself a long-time professor at Cambridge, put it, is a poor joke.”

Snob Before and After Thackeray

MAY 14TH 2008

By Anatoly Liberman

 https://blog.oup.com/2008/05/snob-before-and-after-thackeray/

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“No one knows why we used to call shoemakers snobs, although it seems fairly clear that this meaning was the first one intended by this word, beginning in the early to mid-18th century. The Oxford English Dictionary has evidence indicating that the word was next used in Cambridge University slang by the end of that century, to refer to a denizen of the town, rather than of the college.

 By the 1830s snob had taken on meanings that were directly related to class, but not in the way that we use it today. This early 19th century sense was “a person not belonging to the upper classes; one not an aristocrat.” In the middle 19th century the word took on the meaning of “one who blatantly imitates, fawningly admires, or vulgarly seeks association with those he regards as his superiors.”

He who meanly admires mean things is a Snob—perhaps that is a safe definition of the character.

— William Makepeace Thackeray, The Book of Snobs, 1848

 I’ll teach you how to behave to your superiors, you condescending snob of an aristocrat.

— Maude Howe, ”Phillida,” in The Ladies’ Home Journal (Philadelphia, PA), May 1890

Finally, by the beginning of the 20th century snob had come to be used to mean “one who tends to rebuff the advances of those he regards as inferior; one inclined to social exclusiveness.”

 He was in trade, he said, and was proud of it. He was an American through and through, and there was not an inch of the snob about him.

— The Nashville American (Nashville, TN), 11 Jan. 1901

And I had never been a snob about birth or position or money or even intellect, perhaps not even about breeding. I have always had friendly relations with tradespeople and servants.

— Abby Meguire Roach, The Louisville Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY), 28 Dec. 1919

 If you can transform that story of snob into the sort of anecdote that crushes in polite company, more power to you. Or you could look for an etymological anecdote which has not yet been debunked; there are a few of them out there still.

Merriam-Webster: proudly ruining your chit-chat since 1843.

Why Were Shoemakers 'Snobs'?

The word wasn't always so hifalutin.”

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/snob-word-history-origin

 THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE

 THE DIARY OF A NOBODY

 Great Expectations Pip

Keeping Up Appearances