In The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), George Orwell delineates the varieties of prejudice ranged against the working class by its middle and upper class overseers. In a passage that was often used by his enemies to suggest, quite wrongly, that he was a closet snob and no friend of the people whose cause he championed, Orwell notes in particular the role of smell in class relationships. As he puts it:
Here you come to the real subject of class relations in the West – the real reason why a European of bourgeois upbringing, even when he calls himself a Communist, cannot without a hard effort think of a working man as his equal. It is summed up in four frightful words which people nowadays are chary of uttering, but which were bandied about quite freely in my childhood. The words were: The lower classes smell. [More here.]
Here you come to the real subject of class relations in the West – the real reason why a European of bourgeois upbringing, even when he calls himself a Communist, cannot without a hard effort think of a working man as his equal. It is summed up in four frightful words which people nowadays are chary of uttering, but which were bandied about quite freely in my childhood. The words were: The lower classes smell. [More here.]
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