jennifer wrote: What gets me is that both Biddy and Rosamund, from working class backgrounds, have their refined manners and attitudes described as coming from their mothers aping their upper class employers. In other words, it's their exposure to their betters that has overcome their natural commonness.
Yes, indeed. That appears to be the difference between Biddy/Ros and Joan for EBD. It annoys me slightly the way that Ros and Biddy (two lovely characters, of whom I am very fond) are portrayed on their arrival at the CS, because I'm not sure I buy the idea that their 'refinement' in CS eyes should be some kind of index of their worth as people.
Biddy is an extremely hungry child runaway who's been begging before showing up at the Tiernsee and being fed on scraps by the Middles, yet we're told they notice she ate 'daintily' nonetheless, as though it's some kind of factor of her deservingness. One finds oneself wondering whether, if she'd eaten like a pig (which wouldn't have been grounds for condemning a hungry child, surely), she'd have ended up being adopted by the school, and eventually, despite being initially consigned to the village school as servant class, making it into the CS and a life as Oxford graduate, mistress and doctor's wife....? There would be a very interesting (if very un-EBD) drabble to be written on Biddy, who is self-evidently no fool, working out the kind of behaviour that was going to force the CS to see her as a CS girl, rather than as a proto-servant, as she's originally viewed.
And Ros, no matter that her mother was a servant, still grew up in a house with a tin bath in the kitchen, and, even if she washed at home (at a sink or washstand) far more regularly than Joan seems to - as we assume - would still have had to adjust to things like the daily CS baths, which are unlikely to have been the norm in a house where there was no bathroom. But while we're shown 'common' Joan resenting the washing and wriggling out of it, because EBD is interested in showing up her 'commonness', Ros is never shown as having adjustment difficulties, because part of the reason (I assume) that EBD chose to introduce them together is to make naturally 'refined' Ros a stick to beat 'common' Joan with.
A more sceptical reader might think that the reason (as we're told in one of the later books) that people remain unsure what to make of Joan, because Ros is from the same place (and implicitly, the same class) and is nonetheless 'one with the rest of them in everything', is because Ros has always been taught by her mother about imitating middle-class virtues, whereas Joan, with her shop girl mother, hasn't, and is less anxious to acquire them as a tool to 'getting on' socially.
Incidentally, I noticed (on Joan's behalf!) in Triplets, that when Maeve Bettany says she's a dud at exams and the 'family dunce', she says that Mummy even says she's going to 'have to go into a shop!' I mean, it's only a light-hearted remark, but clearly 'going into a shop' is shorthand here for being too much of a dunce to do anything else, and it's a joke that the well-born daughter Maeve would do something so lowly - but one thinks of poor Joan having to learn at the CS that the thing she's always been (rather nastily) proud of, that her mother was in a shop while Ros's was a servant, is a thing to be laughed at in her new environment...
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Blimey, if they'd had that for every time Joey produced a sprog... there'd be a special day every year!
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) to put a 'really' working class girl forward (assuming she ever met the girls, working mostly with boys), or just discounted the possibility of their moving in a sphere somewhat above themselves.
), but I'd have always been aware of the latent snobbishness in the school that became apparent in that book. As someone who definitely has two accents (one for work, one for parental home) as a result of both a desire to 'fit in' but also having direct experience of how class bias really does pervade society still, I'd have definitely have toed the line and outwardly come over all CS (like Ros Lilley) but have despised them all internally!!!!
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