Throughout the text, Orwell emphasizes both the terms “class” which is “a society based on achievement” and the term caste which is “a society based on ones ascribed status”. He described growing up in an upper-middle class society, which he explains is a layer of society lying between €2000 and €300 a year. He explains that the reason he defines his class in terms of money is simply because that is “always the quickest way of making yourself understood”, but that it can also be interpenetrated by a sort of shadowy caste-system. In England, you must not only take a man’s salary into account, but his traditions as well. For example, “a naval officer and his grocer very likely have the same income, but they are not equivalent persons”, and
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He does this to “call attention to the elitist attitudes which are cultivated in their children by parents - American as well as English - who want to differentiate themselves from those they regard as “common as dirt””. Throughout Orwell’s childhood, a European of bourgeois upbringing could not think of a working man as his equal. The children of shabby-genteel families were taught that the lower-class “smelled bad” not only because they were thought to be “lazy, drunken, boorish and dishonest” but because they were “dirty”. They would use this term because no like or dislike was as bad as the feeling of physical repulsion. The working class were stereotyped as being “dirty” because they often wore discoloured shirts, dirty pants, greasy rags and had unwashed bodies and black …show more content…
In England, Orwell explains that “you have always got to take a man’s traditions into consideration” rather than simply his wealth. In Orwell’s class, a man’s traditions were not to any extent commercial, but mainly military, official and professional. Before the war, you were either a gentleman to not a gentleman, and the people who went to war as soldiers and officials did not go for the money, but went because in India, the cheap horses, free shooting and hordes of black servants made it very easy to play a gentleman. Having a high prestige was the main goal in ones life during this
He does this to “call attention to the elitist attitudes which are cultivated in their children by parents - American as well as English - who want to differentiate themselves from those they regard as “common as dirt””. Throughout Orwell’s childhood, a European of bourgeois upbringing could not think of a working man as his equal. The children of shabby-genteel families were taught that the lower-class “smelled bad” not only because they were thought to be “lazy, drunken, boorish and dishonest” but because they were “dirty”. They would use this term because no like or dislike was as bad as the feeling of physical repulsion. The working class were stereotyped as being “dirty” because they often wore discoloured shirts, dirty pants, greasy rags and had unwashed bodies and black …show more content…
In England, Orwell explains that “you have always got to take a man’s traditions into consideration” rather than simply his wealth. In Orwell’s class, a man’s traditions were not to any extent commercial, but mainly military, official and professional. Before the war, you were either a gentleman to not a gentleman, and the people who went to war as soldiers and officials did not go for the money, but went because in India, the cheap horses, free shooting and hordes of black servants made it very easy to play a gentleman. Having a high prestige was the main goal in ones life during this