Back to the Classics #5

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2020.

19^th Century Classic. I’ve been reading Thackeray since about 2017 but I read a fistful of his books - Barry Lyndon, Pendennis, Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Cairo - before I got around to the one everybody reads if they are going to read Thackeray, Vanity Fair. Because I didn’t want to approach Thackeray the way everybody else does – even, seemingly, hardcore readers who do reading challenges. Because I’m a snob.

The Book of Snobs – William Makepeace Thackeray

Snobbishness ranks among the many qualities nobody willingly admits to having. Few would ‘fess up to being a prude. Even the grouchiest cranks take umbrage at being accused of having no sense of humor. And the dumbest, least competent among us describe themselves as stable geniuses.

In this examination of the varieties of snobbish people, Thackeray takes aim not only those who pretend to exclusive circles of people. He also broadly satirizes people who are arrogant about their hangouts and the pets they keep. Doing so, he paints wonderful word pictures:

At six o'clock in the full season, when all the world is in St. James's Street, and the carriages are cutting in and out among the cabs on the stand, and the tufted dandies are showing their listless faces out of 'White's,' and you see respectable grey-headed gentlemen waggling their heads to each other through the plate-glass windows of 'Arthur's:' and the red-coats wish to be Briareian, so as to hold all the gentlemen's horses; and that wonderful red-coated royal porter is sunning himself before Marlborough House;—at the noon of London time, you see a light-yellow carriage with black horses, and a coachman in a tight floss-silk wig, and two footmen in powder and white and yellow liveries, and a large woman inside in shot-silk, a poodle, and a pink parasol, which drives up to the gate of the Conflagrative, and the page goes and says to Mr. Goldmore (who is perfectly aware of the fact, as he is looking out of the windows with about forty other 'Conflagrative' bucks), 'Your carriage, Sir.' G. wags his head. 'Remember, eight o'clock precisely,' says he to Mulligatawney, the other East India Director; and, ascending the carriage, plumps down by the side of Mrs. Goldmore for a drive in the Park, and then home to Portland Place. As the carriage whirls off, all the young bucks in the Club feel a secret elation. It is a part of their establishment, as it were. That carriage belongs to their Club, and their Club belongs to them. They follow the equipage with interest; they eye it knowingly as they see it in the Park. But halt! we are not come to the Club Snobs yet. O my brave Snobs, what a flurry there will be among you when those papers appear!

As in his other books, Thackeray’s intention is to get us to thinking so that reading will reveal something of ourselves to ourselves. So I wonder about snobbery in my own daily life. My back gets up when I encounter entitled narcissism so it’s lucky for me that I don’t often meet people who think their wealth and status provide paths that will bypass lonely graves. Nor do I rub shoulders with reverse snobs who think they are ready for the apocalypse because they can change an oil filter.

What I’m snobbish about is clear. I’m a reading snob. I pat myself on the back for reading books virtually nobody else reads.