Mayhew opened it up with a stunningly simple distinction borrowed from anthropology. He divided the race of man into two groups of tribes, each distinguished by their physiognomic characteristics. These were the Settlers and the Wanderers. Settlers had big heads; Wanderers had big jawbones. Civilised people settled (so, eventually and with help, did the George Eliot–Charles Kingsley members of the radicalised working class); uncivilised people wandered. It was as satisfactory and watertight a scheme as a Calvinist’s vision of the elect and the damned – and it had the enormous advantage of cutting straight through the conventional class hierarchy. Most important of all, it offered an eloquent, pseudo-scientific justification for the baffling sense of alienation which people from the middle class felt when they contemplated the astonishing lives of their poorer brethren. They had guessed it all along . . . two tribes was an even more convincing statement of the difference than Disraeli’s analogy of the two nations.
When Mayhew measured the features of the industrial working class, he found himself confronting Caliban. The nomad, he wrote:
is distinguished from the civilised man by his repugnance to regular and continuous labour – by his want of providence in laying up a store for the future – by his inability to perceive consequences ever so slightly removed from immediate apprehension – by his passion for stupefying herbs and roots, and, when possible, for intoxicating fermented liquors – by his extraordinary powers of enduring privation – by his comparative insensibility to pain – by an immoderate love of gaming, frequently risking his own personal liberty upon a single cast – by his love of libidinous dances – by the pleasure he experiences in witnessing the suffering of sentient creatures – by his delight in warfare and all perilous sports – by his desire for vengeance – by the looseness of his notions as to property – by the absence of chastity among his women, and his disregard of female honour – and lastly, by his vague sense of religion – his rude idea of a Creator, and utter absence of all appreciation of the mercy of the Divine Spirit.
Such painstakingly detached and quirky generalising is Mayhew’s unlikely prologue to a spectacularly imaginative and sympathetic investigation of the personal lives of these ignoble savages. Perhaps he needed this self-conscious distance from his material in order to exercise his warmth of feeling and avid curiosity upon it. Certainly he tends to sound, in his preface, like a collector of fossils – or, rather, he shared, with Darwin and Linnaeus, the passion for systematic inventories, ways of discovering the world by cataloguing it:
Those who obtain their living in the streets of the metropolis are a very large and varied class; indeed, the means resorted to in order to ‘pick up a crust’, as the people call it, in the public thoroughfares (and such in many instances it literally is,) are so multifarious that the mind is long baffled in its attempts to reduce them to scientific order or classification.
But reduce them Mayhew did: he found six general classes of occupation – sellers, buyers, finders, performers, artisans, and labourers. He then subdivided each group according to the materials they handled, from fresh eatables down to dog dung and cigar butts. In other words, he classified this outcast tribe in terms of taboo, by the classes of objects which they were allowed to touch.
This was a radically new technique to apply to English society. It was generally known that social ranking in the caste system in India depended on the relationship between people and touchable objects; but in a democratic capitalist system it was an essential part of the unstated creed that a person’s position in society was to be measured in terms of his relationships, not with objects, but with his fellow men. On this assumption rested the whole edifice of Victorian morality and the righteous pursuance of a social policy of laissez faire. Implicit in Mayhew’s theory of classification was the suggestion that the industrial city might resemble a caste system (with all the inequalities and superstitious boundaries which are necessarily entailed) much more than a class system. In the East End of London, Mayhew discovered a honeycomb of caste groups, each one circumscribed by the commodities in which it dealt, living in a state of thievish animosity towards a society of hostile others.
The moral and political implications of Mayhew’s argument have never been considered with the seriousness of attention which they deserve. The tone of his preface is too eccentric and inconclusive. But the practical results were immediate. By associating people and things in this way, Mayhew was able to discover an order where other people had only seen a colourful chaos: the mass became suddenly, and subtly, articulated – its strange hierarchy was revealed to be as intricate in its way as the English class system, though its laws appeared primitive, foreign and cabalistic. Mayhew rendered the dark side of the city legible, and at the same time he explained to his readers why they had been unable to see it before – they had peered at it through the wrong glasses, expecting it to be a familiar English kind of society when in reality it was quite another.
The perceptual problems which the city presents today are substantially different from those which engrossed Mayhew: most important, it is not the poor we find so puzzling, but the young, the thriftless middle class, the temporary and mobile, the cult camp-followers, the stylists. It is these people from the economic centre of things whose diversity seems so random and illogical, who, like the street arabs of the nineteenth century, might have come from another continent for all the nonsense they appear to make of our conventional class categories. A Cosmopolitan reader moving in a diaphanous sheen under her turquoise ‘fun fur’, bedraggledly svelte; another girl with an Afro frizz and a copy of One Dimensional Man; a close-cropped Primrose Hill boylette; a car-customiser rigged out in a parody of 1950s teddy-boy gear; a flipped-out King’s Road dandy; a puddingy Promenade Concerteer; one boy dressed like a Red Indian, another looking like a Mexican bandit; a middle-aged man in full drag; a glimpse of tinted spectacles, leather jacket and signet ring . . . the different house fronts, the assorted styles purveyed by individual boutiques, the savagely diverse tastes in furniture, in books, in music and painting and eccentric religions . . . the way in which established national politics provoke an increasing uninterest and inertia at a time when ideologies, of a more private and local kind, seem to be taking demoniacal possession of more and more members and groups within society. I think we find these things as baffling, intractable and ultimately invisible in their detail, as Mayhew’s contemporaries found the poor. Like the poor, they defeat by their sheer numbers. Like the poor, they are a by-product of a city life whose workings have persistently defeated our attempts to explain them. Like the poor, they are liable to strike us in the mass as the very type of what is alien and nasty. We had better heed Mayhew’s method, and recognise that we may need some outlandish scheme of classification, a suitably exotic hypothesis, if we are to understand them.
One needs to look first at some of the specific ways in which conventional hierarchies fail to apply to the modern city. We are encouraged to think of capitalist societies as pyramids, and to assume that within the pyramid status and power continuously dilute towards the broad, pale working-class base. Energy is generated in the system by what letter-writers to The Times like to call ‘incentives’ – bribes to persuade everyone to strive to move further up into the narrowing cone above them. And the city is usually seen as an intense theatre of this capitalist process at work; movement in it is more rapid, more ambitious, more unchecked, more inventive than in the tranquil hinterland of country and small town. This folkloric view of the city has little basis in contemporary social fact.
For since the second wave of the industrial revolution in the latter part of the nineteenth century (a wave more of techniques of communication than of processes of manufacture), cities have become less and less directly productive. They have been the nerve- and distributive-centres of industry, but the factories and raw materials, both the hard muck and the hard money of the system, have either stayed or been moved elsewhere. The average city worker is not a producer: he helps t
o handle and transmit goods, he transports other workers, he liaises. Entrepreneurism happens at every income level, from the man who takes the tickets in the tube to the man whose signature commits a corporation to a contract. But, most significantly, entrepreneurism gives the pyramid a grossly swollen waistline; it fails to reflect the proportions of society as a whole by exaggerating a single level of education and communicative skill, and the relatively greater rewards accorded to people who handle rather than make goods. The clerk, the computer operator, the secretary, the systems analyst, the office-manager and whatever mysterious occupations lurk behind the much-advertised titles in the Appointments columns, ‘supervisor’, ‘co-ordinator’, ‘promoter’, and ‘negotiator’, are the staple people and jobs of the modern city. The typewriter and the telephone are the most common urban tools; paper the city’s most necessary raw material.
This enlarged entrepreneurial middle – the salariat – makes the theory of upward movement and incentives much harder to apply. Theoretically, there ought to be a clear relationship between production, profit and mobility; you work harder, you produce more, and you are promoted into the slack which your effort has helped to create. But the urban entrepreneur is radically divorced from the process and the means of production; he is not in a position to create slack, and his own productivity is determined by forces beyond his control. The upward-and-downward perspective, essential to the functioning of the pyramid as model, becomes hopelessly blurred and elongated. ‘Upward’ means into the stratosphere of higher finance; ‘downward’ means, perhaps, a dimly remembered view out of a grimy train window of tips and slagheaps in some distant part of the country, with flat hats and flatter vowels. Economic movement in the city, for the salariat at least, is a matter of joggling about, keeping roughly in the same proportionate position, changing firms, waiting on increments, getting salary-rises which may improve a standard of living but hardly affect status at all. As a number of sociologists have observed, social position in this increasingly numerous class is determined not by what a member produces but by what he consumes. In today’s great cities, the most visible and vociferous inhabitants tend to be useless (by any standards which rate bread as being of greater utility than circuses), disproportionately well-paid for their uselessness, equipped with the money, the time and inclination to spend a large portion of their lives out shopping. It is these people, that statistical minority from whose ranks come the heroes of a great deal of newspaper and television advertising, and whose values are more widely promoted than actually lived out, with whom I am concerned here. For however much moralists may justly berate their superficiality (and, indeed, question whether such people exist at all outside the studios of advertising agencies), they have coloured contemporary metropolitan life as boldly and distinctively as ‘the mob’, that older mass-produced image, coloured the Victorian city and had so profound an influence upon nineteenth-century architecture and demography.
Just as Mayhew found it convenient to classify his folk by the objects they sold, we may need to label ours by what they buy. For the modern city, at least in its middle-class quarters, is a temple of useless consumption. If a class of non-producers distort and swell its social structure, its commercial life is correspondingly inflated by the trade in objects whose sole function is to enhance the identities of their purchasers. A list of shops on the nearest block in the inner London suburb where I live illustrates this quite dramatically. The block is more raggy than grand; the shopping area for a honeycomb of flats whose owners and tenants look fairly tatterdemalion – not poor, but not within sniffing distance of surtax and trustees either. There are thirty-two establishments on the 80-yard-long block, which also has a number of rococo-fronted service flats with brass nameplates and buzzing doorphones. Of these, two are pubs and one a wine bar. Six are foreign restaurants, ranging from a smart Italian pastiche of a Venetian trattoria to a low curry cavern which serves business lunches; there is a fish-chicken-and-chips take-away, and a coffee bar with a downstairs folk cellar; shops selling leather goods and craft objects; a stripped-pine and Japanese lampshade furniture showroom; a cupboard-sized antiques boutique; a Continental supermarket, a delicatessen, a chain grocery, and a fancy greengrocer’s (with avocados more in evidence than carrots); a tobacco kiosk; a store which sells camping equipment for hikers; two travel agents; three fashion boutiques; a radio, TV & electrical shop; an off-licence; a dry cleaner’s and a launderette. An ordinary chemist’s at one end has just been turned into a bistro full of rubber plants and dessert trolleys; while the newest venture is a shop that sells only white-painted Moroccan birdcages.
No urban planner, puzzling out the rational requirements of a new city development, would ever have arrived at the Moroccan birdcage shop. Yet of all the businesses on the block this is the one which is most typical of the peculiar big-city flavour of the quarter. It is an example of pure, bedsitter-entrepreneurism; you import a functional object from a distant place or period, make it both useless and decorative with a lick of paint, then sell it at a fancy price as a status-enhancer. If the bottom falls out of the birdcage market, no doubt the shop can quickly adapt to selling cracked 78 rpm rock-and-roll records, 1940s Aztec-fretwork radio sets, or glass liquid-gas jars for growing miniature gardens in. The market in fashion is omnivorous in this improvisatory, make-do-and-mend way; it transforms junk into antiques, rubbish into something rich, strange, expensive and amusing. It is solely concerned with effecting arbitrary changes of value; its raw material is the continuous stream of waste products which we leave behind us in our crazes. It is cyclical and self-sufficient, replenishing itself as demand dictates, from the reservoir of refuse from which we have temporarily averted our eyes. One blink, and we are making out a cheque to pay for some objet d’art which we tossed into the garbage can only last month. The Moroccan birdcage syndrome is a useful model for a certain kind of urban industrial process – a process which both supplies a demand for commodities whose sole feature is their expressiveness of taste, and becomes, by virtue of its laws of economic transformation, the ultimate arbiter of that taste. The stylistic entrepreneurs who make their living out of this curious trade go, along with gangsters and dandies, into the bracket of people possessed of a special kind of city knowledge.
What they have grasped is a fundamental change in middle-class attitudes towards possessions. Traditionally, the working class are supposed to be the major consumers of society; the middle class, adept at looking after their own, are investors – the commodities they purchase, like houses, antiques, pictures, are, according to the theory, durable, capable of being passed on to the next generation, likely to accrue in value. It is left to the East End hoods and barons to swill down astronomically priced cocktails, smoke fat cigars, and buy American-styled chromium cars which rust away as soon as purchased. In the myth of middle-class thriftiness, neither moth eats nor rust corrupts; and everything in the drawing-room gains steadily in value. But for our contemporary entrepreneurial class, for whom the pyramid is no longer sufficiently real and enticing as a social mode, and whose position is determined more by skill than by property, no such comfortable conviction of continuity, of the reality of the future, is possible. Their gains are temporary, increasingly for now – the gains of chronic jugglers . . . in short, gains of taste, and the value of taste rather than the value of property.
Thorstein Veblen was the first chronicler of this new, lavish, non-investing class, and from the 1920s onwards, its heroes appear regularly in American fiction (in England, Evelyn Waugh’s Margot Metroland valiantly spends for her country, but she has few rivals): in Nathanael West’s novel of Hollywood, The Day of the Locust, for instance, the most telling symbol of a film producer’s mighty wealth is the repulsive dead horse, made of inflatable rubber, which he keeps in his swimming pool. And in Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is The Night, Nicole Diver became the exquisite, deranged heroine of consumption carried to the point of moral principle. Already in The Great Gatsby Fitzgerald had drawn the
portrait of a bewitched immigrant to the city who lived out a tragic fantasy of possession: Gatsby’s ‘yellow bug’ of a motor car, his wardrobe of shirts so beautiful that Daisy weeps over them, his patent gadget for gutting oranges – these are the perishable constituents of a dream which is bound to crack up, carrying the dreamer in the wake of its disintegration. With Nicole, Fitzgerald pursues the theme a stage further. Harder, more alive to her own desperation than Gatsby, she commits herself to her shopping with the serious frenzy of a determined suicide:
Nicole bought from a great list that ran two pages, and bought the things in windows besides. Everything she liked that she couldn’t possibly use herself, she bought as a present for a friend. She bought coloured beads, folding beach cushions, artificial flowers, honey, a guest bed, bags, scarfs, love birds, miniatures for a doll’s house, and three yards of some new cloth the colour of prawns. She bought a dozen bathing suits, a rubber alligator, a travelling chess set of gold and ivory, big linen handkerchiefs for Abe, two chamois leather jackets of kingfisher blue and burning bush from Hermes – bought all these things not a bit like a high-class courtesan buying underwear and jewels, which were after all professional equipment and insurance, but with an entirely different point of view. Nicole was the product of much ingenuity and toil. For her sake trains began their run at Chicago and traversed the round belly of the continent to California; chicle factories fumed and link belts grew link by link in factories; men mixed toothpaste in vats and drew mouthwash out of copper hogsheads; girls canned tomatoes quickly in August or worked rudely at the Five-and-Tens on Christmas Eve; half-breed Indians toiled on Brazilian coffee plantations and dreamers were muscled out of patent rights in new tractors – these were some of the people who gave a tithe to Nicole and, as the whole system swayed and thundered onward, it lent a feverish bloom to such processes of hers as wholesale buying, like the flush of a fireman’s face holding his post before a spreading blaze. She illustrated very simple principles, containing in herself her own doom, but illustrated them so accurately that there was grace in the procedure . . . (my italics)
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