From: joe_f@verizon.net   
      
   Martha Bridegam  writes:   
      
   > Hard in fact to think of any English literature that doesn't involve   
   > the tragedies of class stratification. What I'm wondering is whether   
   > Orwell accepted class as immutable and tried to make himself an   
   > exception to it, or whether he thought class differences   
   > could/should be made obsolete for everyone. That line about "We have   
   > nothing to lose but our aitches" in *Wigan Pier* sure sounds like he   
   > wanted to do away with class difference, but when it came to the   
   > visceral as opposed to the cerebral, did he really?   
      
   From the same paragraph:   
      
     ...our plutocracy will not sit quiet under a genuinely   
     revolutionary government.  And when the widely separate classes   
     who, necessarily, would form any real Socialist party have fought   
     side by side, they may feel differently about one another.  And   
     then perhaps this misery of class-prejudice will fade away, and we   
     of the sinking middle class -- the private schoolmaster, the   
     half-starved free-lance journalist, colonel's spinster daughter   
     with £75 a year, the jobless Cambridge graduate, the ship's   
     officer without a ship, the civil servants, the commercial   
     travellers and the thrice-bankrupt drapers in the country towns --   
     may sink without further struggles into the working class where we   
     belong,....   
      
   And earlier on:   
      
     It has got to be brought home to the clerk, the engineer, the   
     commercial traveller, the middle-class man who has "come down in   
     the world," the village grocer, the lower-grade civil servant and   
     all other doubtful cases that they _are_ the proletariat....   
      
   From these lists, it would seem that the middle class, from (say) the   
   lower upper down, is to join the working class -- politically at once,   
   and socially only after the victory of Socialism.  (What is to become   
   of the plutocrats, he perhaps is too tactful to mention, or doesn't   
   care very much.)  Accordingly he excused himself from dropping his   
   aitches & drinking tea out of the saucer.  Very sensible as far as it   
   goes.   
   --   
   ---  Joe Fineman    joe_f@verizon.net   
      
   ||:  Epitaph on a waiter:  By and by, God caught his eye.  :||   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)