Dickinson College Humanities Program in Norwich

So the other night a few students and myself went out to grab a quick dinner and a pint following our alumni event, as the “Honey I Shrunk the Salmon Cakes” hors d’oevres could not fill our gullets for the night.  Donned in dapper suits and freshly purchased genuine leather kicks, we set out to find our destination.  Our first interaction with a Brit came in the form of a toothless, homeless woman with dreadlocks.  She approached us, our eyes met with hers and she approached us rather briskly, uttered some kind of local gibberish which we all interpreted to be “do you have any spare change?”.  One student obliged as the rest walked onward, glad to have escaped the incredibly awkward situation.  We came back from it, discussed it a little bit and walked on.  Upon finding the ideal pub, we sat down and sipped on our local brew, chatting and recapping the passing day.  Soon we had our second interaction; a homeless man with a torn shirt asked us for money.  One student offered him a little bit, the man mumbled something to himself, and he slammed the coin back on the table and walked on.  We were shocked, but the madness continued.  A third woman (who was far more well dressed mind you) walked up to us and explained how somehow her inability to get a bus pass meant that one of us had to give her a sip of our beer.  After a bit of debate with her (I gave her the germaholic excuse), she just nodded and walked on.

So what do these 3 interactions mean?  We discussed how the fact that we were all dressed in suits clearly had some impact on the surrounding Brit’s conceptions of our class status, since they seem to value appearance quite a bit in what we have seen so far.  I have to admit we were getting some looks from Brits other than the homeless population while we wandered the streets.  So clearly, we had people convinced we were some sort of businessmen judged by the first look.  Why then was this slew of impoverished people so willing to approach us and ask us for their money?  Maybe it has something to do with the fake politeness we have discussed concerning the Brits.  How far can politeness go though?  Do homeless people only go after the people they think can afford to give away a little money?  It could be that these class systems are so defined but have such big extremes that the lowest of the low may only think to ask the top dogs if they could spare it, sine they can read people so well that they wouldn’t think to ask anyone that wouldn’t afford a few extra pence.  What about the guy who rejected our offer?  He acted as if we were being smug to give him only 10 or 20 pence.  Maybe he had labeled us so that he thought we could afford more.  But then what happens to the idea of fake politeness?  This beggar rejected our offer of money, which wasn’t exactly the most polite of actions.  Don’t even get me started on the girl who only wanted to swipe a sip of our beer.  I can’t imagine that would be a polite thing to even ask.  There is no way that this politeness deal can only work from the top down.  The mystery of the British people continues to unravel…

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Last night at Barclays Wealth was the first time I have ever been to an event where I was expected to mingle with rich, important people with one of my intention being to network for possible jobs (the other being to represent my school and my program, but I’ll get to that). I felt I was supposed to get dressed in formal clothing (painful shoes, scary make-up processes, scary hair frying devises) so I wouldn’t stick out as someone that didn’t care about the program, and it was kind of stressful. I recognize that a lot of people like dressing up, and that is great (they were super helpful and made it way less stressful). But I don’t like dressing up. I rarely dress up, and when I do, I’m really uncomfortable. I also have no idea how to network. I’m perfectly happy talking to strangers, but I don’t know what any of the social customs are for that particular type of event. The fact that I was wearing fancy, uncomfortable clothing leads me to believe that I am not expected to act like myself even though that is what I expect a person’s advice would be if I asked them directly. Otherwise I would being wearing normal clothes, the clothes I wear when I am expected to be myself. There are unwritten codes of conduct and a change in clothing and appearance denotes that those codes need to be enacted. I don’t think anyone could overtly tell me what those codes are because they are codes that you only learn through practice, and people that know them are unconscious of them because they seem natural.

This brings me to class. We’ve been spending all this time talking about how class in England is so weird because it’s based on habits and lifestyle choices when in America it’s mostly just a tax bracket thing. I really think we’ve been exaggerating this difference quite a bit. Class in America might be about tax brackets once you get there, but if you want to get rich, you probably need a sweet job, and if you want a sweet job, you probably need to be good at mingling with rich, important people. People from lower classes in the United States and in England alike do not get the same opportunities as the upper classes to practice mingling and all the social customs that go along with it (being comfortable in fancy clothes, which hand to hold your drink in, the best hand shake, how to politely find important people, what subjects are taboo, what jokes are okay, how coarse to get with language, how to gracefully enter and leave a conversation, how much criticism of society is acceptable and what part are off limits, how to show off without seeming like a jerk, etc.).

As a disclaimer, I’m not trying to paint myself as a victim and say that class limited me here. The fact that I’ve never had to look for a real job and that I just don’t like wearing fancy clothes limited me, but that is expected because I am young. But that experience of being really uncomfortable brings to my attention that there is a huge difference in social customs. Dickinson gave me this opportunity, and I’ll be better at it next time. What about people who just don’t get this opportunity in the first place?

For America, it’s the same thing we hear over and over again. The American Dream is a myth that propels itself by a handful of people who actually make it. People from lower classes have the deck stacked against them in more ways than one and the rich have just hte opposite. For England I think it’s a little more complicated, and I invite anyone to put their two cents in because I’m still trying to work it out myself. If England has a more rigid class system in which people take pride in their working class characteristics, how do they learn the social customs necessary to network and make more money? How can we even say that England has a rigid class system if Kate Fox says that middle classes have so much class insecurity that the use of bizarre upper class sounding, French terms are now characteristic of middle classness? If class in England is really not about money and success, is it the ends to some English equivalent to the American Dream?

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Video on YouTube

After we got off the Tube at Covent Garden, we were a little disorientd  so we asked a somewhat friendly-looking woman on the street for directions.  In an eominous harbinger of our afternoon to come, she responded- in a dead flat American Midwestern accent- “Oh, I have no idea, it’s my first time here, too.” We soon realized the market was located just down the street.  Within five minutes of entering, we found what the market was really about: a place for tourists and middle- and upper-middle-class locals to window shop and buy quasi-luxury items.

The first thing that surprised us about the market was the near total lack of ethnic food vendors. We actually only saw one food vendor, a fruit cart, despite the title Apple Market above the carts. Items for sale  included handbags, jewelry, soaps, and other window shopping items. All of these were conspicuously advertised as “handmade,” creating a sense of authenticity for shoppers. Several of the vendors also sold paintings of the more traditional parts of London;  items specifically for tourists. One vendor even had posters of American stars (i.e. Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe). These particular actresses are icons of higher class, which we felt reflected the classes that the market meant to attract. The area seemed to contain a lot of nouveaux rich items that would appeal to the middle- and upper-middle classes, as Fox suggests in Watching the English. The area seemed mostly designed for window shopping and watching free entertainment.

One of the entertainers, a melodramatic unicyclist, performed in front of St. Paul’s Church. There were two homeless men on the steps that most people seemed to be ignoring. The other historical area near the site was the Royal Opera House.  To add to the artistic atmosphere, flags and various paintings hung along the market’s rafters.

We were surprised to find that most of the people in the area were white considering the amount of diversity in London. The people also seemed religiously neutral, compared to others we’ve seen elsewhere in London—we did not see any religious indicators, such as headscarves or yamoulkas.

The buzzword for the afternoon was definitely “homogeneity.”  The market and its proprietors guarded the blandness of the place with extreme zeal. Ethnic restaurants (often chain restaurants) brandished flags with their countries of origin as if to make it obvious for tourists. A highlight of the unintentional comedy that this produced was a pub that hung a sign in the window saying: “Football colours are not permitted.”

The shops surrounding the market were equally lacking flavor.  Many of the retailers were large American companies, such as: Oakley, Build-a-Bear, and Disney.

Amidst all this complaining about Covent Garden, it should be mentioned that the area felt extremely safe.  We saw more young children in four hours today than we have seen in the fourty-eight hours we have been in London.  The area was very family-friendly and also seemed to be a popular date spot for couples in their 30s and older. Also, the market was not totally soulless, as we had two fairly amusing encounters.  First, we spotted a large group of men in rugby jerseys wearing obviously fake moustaches and Afro wigs.  We felt compelled to ask them what drove them to do this, and the answer was that there was a rugby final at Wembley much later in the day. They came to the market to get drunk (although they seemed pretty well-behaved and claimed that they were neutral in support). Second, one of us gave in to the entreaties of a very haggard street salesman (wearing a lanyard with a card that said “WORKING, NOT BEGGING.” The card was not as unnecessary as it sounds) and bought a magazine from him.  As he was clearly doing very poor business, we didn’t feel that bad chatting him up for ten minutes or so, a conversation dotted with some spectacular moments.  The most memorable line was “You’re from the States then? You have Christmas, we have Christmas.  But I have one big question: What the fuck is up with Thanksgiving? Seems like a bit of fraud to me.”

While you walk down the streets of London you will see; fashionable people, a variety of restaurants, small and big businesses, tourist venues, and of course pubs. But where as in America we have bars, Pubs are much more distinct. When you walk into a pub, you are not just walking into a social venue for you pleasure, because it is so much more complex. When one enters a pub they experience and deep rooted part of London’s culture, and might even discover what historical figures have done the same.

Having been to a few pubs, over these past four weeks, I can tell you first hand that when one enters a pub, it is unlike any other experience. The type of people that you will encounter will range in age, class, and ethnicity/race, but will all be seeking the same thing as you, a drink, and a good time. Something small yet so significant in British culture pubs serve as a venue for people to come together and simply enjoy the company of friends while unwinding from the stressed of the day. Although I am not a huge fan of beers, ails, or any other hardcore alcoholic beverages I will say that I thoroughly enjoy pubs.

It isn’t so much that I like being able to drink legally (although I do enjoy this very much) but the fact that there is a place where you can just unwind and enjoy the time spent with friends, reflecting on the days past. The overall atmosphere of a pub is what really adds to the experience, in that once inside can only be described as “chilled.” Pubs, are understandably a huge part of British culture, a distinctively the Court is a big part of Dickinson student culture. I guess it’s one of those things that you will have to experience yourself.

I am very sorry that I am constantly bugging about anthropology, but I think the field has very interesting things to say about class, and it can help to understand class in London.

After seeing The Pitmen Painters at the National Theatre, a play I enjoyed very much although I could not understand some of the things the actors were saying, I thought how important cultural capital is. Cultural capital is the knowledge that most of us in the course have, because we attend a college, but that so many people do not have. Knowledge is capital, because it can take us places beyond our imagination and change us in many ways without us realizing it. The problem is that most of the times, the elite or canon will decide which kind of knowledge is valuable. Why is it important to know about Van Gogh, and not other painters? Why is there a way to speak proper English? Why do we have to behave a certain way in a museum, or in a restaurant?  Because someone decides what “proper culture is”, and as we saw very well reflected in the play, many people do not have this “proper culture” or cultural capital. The pitmen painters, did not have cultural capital, because after all, they were pitmen. Nobody ever taught them how to appreciate art because they never needed that knowledge to work at the mines. What is heartbreaking about the play, is to see that in the end, the pitmen are so alienated by their condition, that they cannot pursue what might have been their true nature as artists. After all, is any of us born to work in a mine? 

This thought made me think on how lucky we are that we have the cultural capital needed to understand the museums which we visit, to appreciate the classical music at the BBC proms, to know have connections through Dickinson, that allow us to have a talk with a top executive at Barclays. And yes, how lucky we are that we do not have to work in a mine.

This summer I went to my local bookstore to pick up some of the summer reading for this course. I also decided to splurge on some travel essays and one very large guidebook. One of the books that caught my eye was Kate Fox’s Watching the English. In this tome of valuable information, Fox breaks down the hidden rules of English behavior…everything from food rules to dress code. Fox is not only an anthropologist, but also an English woman and her ability to laugh at herself and her people make her observations both accurate and amusing. I was laughing the entire time I was reading. The way she writes is so witty and entertaining that I found myself both apprehensive and even more excited to come to London. How was I going to survive in a place where it was not socially acceptable to smile at strangers as I walked down the street? I was also particularly worried about my laughter. As most of you now know, when I find something funny, I will laugh… loudly and for a long time. I can’t control it. I was worried everyone in England was going to think I was just the stupid American who is always loud. More about that later…Fox concludes that all these behavior rules revolve around class. You do things the way you do because of your class, plain and simple.

One of the most fascinating aspects of this theory has to do with language. I’m sure most of us have noticed that even though we are in England, there is not one generic English accent. And, according to Fox, “one cannot even talk at all without immediately revealing one’s own social class.” The indicators are in both the pronunciations and word choice. I’ll elaborate on one of my favorites…. ‘Pardon.’ The English apologize for everything, even if it’s not their fault. If you bump into an English person on the street, they will probably apologize anyway. However, the word they use is an immediate indicator of their class. A lower-middle of middle-middle person will say ‘pardon.’ A upper middle will say ‘sorry-what?’ and an upper class person will simply say ‘what?’ Ironically the same response of ‘what?’ is also used by the working class, although they may drop the ‘t’ to make it ‘wha-‘

So, we have leaned that speech is the most immediate and most obvious way to place a person within your class GPS system. In Lee Hall’s The Pitmen Painters, one of the first interactions between Mr. Lyons and the group of pitmen involved differences in speech. Mr. Lyons could not understand their thick accents and different pronunciations. Obviously Mr. Lyons was speaking what is commonly known as “Oxford English” whereas the pitmen were speaking in their own regional dialect. The Ashington group was a group of brilliant artists who just happened to be pitmen. But the people around them would often jump to conclusions when meeting them due to their speech. In Blood Brothers twins Mickey and Eddie were split up at birth and raised apart. Mickey remained with his biological mother in a working class environment. Edward (Eddie) was raised by the upper class Lyon family. Mickey points out the language differences from the first time he speaks with his brother by making fun of Eddie for his ‘posh’ phrases like “shag the vicar” and “smashing.” It’s the little details reveal the most about class differences. Although the brothers were great friend in their youth, it was the struggle between their classes that eventually led to tragic downfall. Your accent and speech does not reveal anything about your accomplishments but it does place you somewhere on that class scale. In a nation where verbal culture is prized over any sort of palpable or physical expression, language is the primary tool for recognizing social status.

The one place where all these class rules are put on ‘hold’ (well, I’ll let you decide) is the pub. The pub is a place with its own customs and is the main place of social bonding. Like in most cultures, the drinking-place tends to be socially equal or at least the differences are based on separate rules from the rest of society. Therefore, the pub is not really place of social or class equality, but the class differences are judged differently or are suspended whilst inside the pub. Only the English would have a completely different set of behavior rules specifically for the pub. I can’t believe these people sometimes. In a striking contradiction the rest of England, the pub is one of the few places where you can start a conversation with a complete stranger…as long as you’re not too forward and ask their name. This rule only applies at the bar counter and the fact that you go to the bar to order food and drink (rather than having someone come to your table) forces one to be social. It just keeps getting more and more strange. The art of queuing is quintessentially English. Always respect the queue, at the store, at the tube stop, wherever. But in the pub this rule changes. Instead of the usual neat and orderly structure, the thirsty pub goes all hang around the counter. This is what Kate Fox calls the “invisible queue,” where both the publicans and the customers know their positions in the waiting line. Everyone knows who is next and if you try and get service before your turn, the bar staff will ignore you the rest of your stay. One evening last week was a part of a group who decided to grab a drink at The Court, a local pub on Tottenham Court Road.  We accidentally placed ourselves outside the range of the invisible queue to disastrous consequences. Not only were we yelled at in front of the entire pub, it was hard to get service the rest of the night.

That aside, I have had a great time every time I go to a pub. It’s a great place to people watch (one of my favorite pastimes) and see the rare interactions between the English. Of course, all pubs are not created equal. I will agree with my classmates that The Court caters to a younger crowd and is the kind of place where our American volume is somewhat more acceptable, whereas the Marlborough Arms is great place to grab a meal and to catch up with your fiends. Nothing against pubs like The Court, but I prefer places where I can sit down and not have to yell across the table to be heard. I guess that’s my inner 60-year-old woman talking. Besides, the chicken and leek pie on Sunday nights at the Arms is fantastic! Pub culture is a valuable part of life in England, and most people have found a pub that really fits their personality or lifestyle. You can lean a lot about the English by observing what goes on in a pub, and at the same time, you have to leave the pub to fully understand the culture. This place is full of contradictions. While I am yet to become a ‘regular,’ I hope I can investigate more of this strange phenomenon of the England when I get to Norwich… I might even find a football team to support.

To recap, everything is about class. Each social class has identifying elements that place one in a certain class. Don’t say ‘pardon’, avoid using fancy French words like serviette, and mind the invisible queue at pubs. We will all be reading Watching the English once we get to Norwich so now you all have something to look forward to. Keep an eye out for these hidden behaviors. I find it all quite fascinating. Also, if anyone feels like pie tonight, meet me at the Arms.

I feel the need to pop the Blood Brothers cherry in the Norwich Humanities blog. Let’s just say I wasn’t exactly impressed, to put it lightly, nor do I think many of us were. Unfortunately, I’m not a great lover of musicals in general, so I already had a bit of a strike against me going into the performance, but I felt my mind was open enough. After the first number or two, I began to realize what I was in for, though I tried my best to take the play for what it was all throughout the first act. Unfortunately, what it was was an over-the-top, stereotypical fluff musical marred by samey 80’s inspired music, bizarre British superstitions, melodrama, sound mixing that was too loud even for me, and too many mentions of the name “Marilyn Monroe.” By act two I could barely keep it together. Every time the narrator/Greek chorus/God figure made an appearance onstage (which was about every thirty seconds), Sarah and I would start snarfing, and then the Bon Jovi-esque drums would come in, and it was all over for me. I think my lip is bleeding from biting it so hard, and the narrator man is going to haunt my dreams.

Perhaps I’m being a bit harsh, but some of my attitude is coming from being a bit punchy from working on my walking tour for too long. In all honesty, I thought most of the acting was quite good, especially given the fact that the actors didn’t often have a lot of character to work with. I also thought the story itself actually had potential to be interesting, even though it’s one of those stories you come across several times a lifetime (I was reminded heavily of the Prince and the Pauper and even White Teeth, though the themes are a bit different in the latter). The “nature vs. nurture” theme is an interesting one to consider in light of the class structure in England, since at the end Mickey laments that if only he had been the twin to go to the Lyons’ his life would have turned out very differently, without pain or struggle. This is an interesting note to end on without further exploration in the play, since the wealthier characters never seem to be happy with their lot, either: Mrs. Lyons was unable to have a baby, and when she finally got one, she lived her whole life in fear of anyone finding out what she had done, and Eddie was torn between two worlds, as well as struggling with his secret love for Linda. I understand that the play is supposed to be a tragedy, but I would have been happier with the ending if I got more of a sense that the characters (or the ones that were still alive) had learned something, rather than just crying over the dead bodies before the curtain dropped. And there was a standing ovation. There wasn’t a standing ovation at Pitmen Painters, but there was for Blood Brothers.

Frankly, I just don’t think there are many musicals out there that will ever grab me (besides Urinetown!, but the whole premise of that one is to mock musicals themselves). I also thought Blood Brothers suffered from a severe case of melodrama, cookie-cutter characters, overproduction (I mean, really, I don’t need a drastic light cue as well as an ominous synthesizer noise to tell me something’s about to happen)…and those damn 80’s hair band drum fills.