English people are hard to write, as an
American novelist. I’ve lived in London now for most of the last 20
years, but I still hesitate to put them into fiction, mainly because
it’s difficult to avoid slotting them into categories. “It is impossible
for an Englishman to open his mouth,” George Bernard Shaw famously
wrote, “without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.” Which
also means there are some advantages to being an American in
Britain—you can operate vaguely outside class-cultural lines.
Of course, British people are also totally capable of despising
Americans. All you have to do is say BernARD, for example, with the
stress on that second syllable, or “Mos-cow,” to rhyme with “how,” and
wait for the flicker of suppressed amusement. I should add that my
exposure to Britishness is really to a fairly specific pocket of north
London, and I don’t want to make grand claims. That’s the trouble. It’s
very easy to get this stuff wrong.
Part of the puzzle of Brexit, for Americans, is that so many of the
main players represent barely distinguishable but traditionally opposed
British types. In American terms, both Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May
would probably belong to a generic upper middle class. Both were raised
outside London, in comfortable country houses, and have a bit of private
schooling in their backgrounds. Corbyn and May also spent time in state
grammars, highly selective public schools, which have become a bone of
contention between left and right wing views of progressive education
policy.
Corbyn represents the borough next door to mine, Islington, which is
the poster borough for a certain kind of cosmopolitan elite. Just the
phrase “North London” tends to serve as code for various
semi-contradictory things. It can mean “Jewish,” but it can also mean
the sort of muesli-eating, Guardian-reading, Labour-voting
lefties whose reasonable objections to Israeli policy sometimes shade
uncomfortably into anti-Semitism. You can see these people in Mike Leigh
movies. They keep allotments, ride bicycles, even into their seventies,
and carry their groceries in Daunts Books tote bags, except that they
would never say “tote,” which is an Americanism. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/parsing-the-endless-nuances-of-british-stereotypes/
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