Clothes remain class giveaways, 70 years after Nancy Mitford’s essay. How U are you?
Of course there is no such thing as snobbery today. But it was rampant 70 years ago, in the winter of 1954. That’s when Nancy Mitford wrote her article on U and non-U – later expanded into her book Noblesse Oblige: An Enquiry into the Identifiable Characteristics of the English Aristocracy (1956). Mileage was made for decades about her glossary: which verbal expressions (looking glass, scent) indicated a U (for upper class), civilised upbringing; and which (mirror, perfume) were markers of the opposite (non-U). Mitford allegedly wrote the essay as a joke – but many a true word was spoken in jest. The sales of the book indicated an appetite from a public anxious for these signifiers. And the 1982 equivalent of Noblesse Oblige, The Sloane Ranger Handbook, stayed at the top of the bestseller list in 1982 and 1983. This new interest in the aristocracy was fuelled by the...
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