As long time followers of this blog will know, I periodically write about issues of social class and how they impinge on the English church, particularly given our majority middle class makeup. Inevitably, when you have these conversations, people begin pushing hard for specifics. Tell me the particular defining traits and characteristics that will objectively determine a person’s class. Often this is done as a thinly veiled attempt to find any grounds whatsoever to avoid otherwise obvious conclusions, but sometimes it is an honest desire to get their head around what are by any measure real classifications that elude simple definitions knowing there are nevertheless genuine issues that result in reality.

I have just started reading Watching the English by Kate Fox. In her opening chapter effectively laying out her methodology as she hunts to define the national character of Englishness, Fox states the following helpfully about class which might explain something of the frustration I outline above:

When this book was in the planning stages, almost everyone I talked to about it asked whether I would have a chapter on class. My feeling all along was that a separate chapter would be inappropriate: class pervades all aspects of English life and culture, and will therefore permeate all the areas covered in this book.

Although England is a highly class-conscious culture, the real-life ways in which the English think about social class and determine a person’s position in the class structure – bear little relation either to simplistic three-tier (upper, middle, working) models, or to the rather abstract alphabetical systems (A, B, C1, C2, D, E), based entirely on occupation, favoured by opinion pollsters and market-research experts.⁹ A schoolteacher and an estate agent would both technically be ‘middle class’. They might even both live in a terraced house, drive the same make of car, drink in the same pub and earn roughly the same annual income. But we judge social class in much more subtle and complex ways: precisely how you arrange, furnish and decorate your terraced house; not just the make of car you drive, but whether you wash it yourself on Sundays, take it to a car wash or rely on the English weather to sluice off the worst of the dirt for you. Similar fine distinctions are applied to exactly what, where, when, how and with whom you eat and drink; where and how you shop; the clothes you wear; the pets you keep; how you spend your free time; and, especially, the words you use and how you pronounce them.

Every English person (whether we admit it or not) is aware of and highly sensitive to all of the delicate divisions and calibrations involved in such judgements. I will not therefore attempt to provide a crude ‘taxonomy’ of English classes and their characteristics, but will instead try to convey the subtleties of English thinking about class through the perspectives of the different themes mentioned above. It is impossible to talk about class without reference to homes, gardens, cars, clothes, pets, food, drink, sex, talk, hobbies. etc., and impossible to explore the rules of any of these aspects of English life without constantly bumping into big class dividers, or tripping over the smaller, less obvious ones. I will, therefore, deal with class demarcations as and when I lurch into them or stumble across them.

At the same time, I will try to avoid being ‘dazzled’ by class differences, remembering Orwell’s point that such differences ‘fade away the moment any two Britons are confronted by a European’ and that ‘even the distinction between rich and poor dwindles somewhat when one regards the nation from the outside’. As a self-appointed outsider – a professional alien, if you like – my task in defining Englishness is to search for underlying commonalities, not to exclaim over surface differences.

9. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of economic, social and cultural capital are more helpful in understanding the English class system, but only if one is very specific about the precise nature of each type of capital associated with particular social class.

I may decide to cite more of her specific insights as and when I run into them on this front. But I hope this does something (albeit only a little) to neatly encapsulate why it is virtually impossible to just ‘give a definition’ of class when asked.