Mike, At 12:22 13/10/02 -0600, you wrote: (KH) >"Yes, this was the irony of the times! In the course of the century, the old >land-owning aristocracy had been largely shouldered aside as a political >force by the industrial lobbies (separate ones: owners and workers), yet >the second and third generation of the nouveau riche became eloquently >aggressive (otherwise known as Romanticism) against the very source of >their wealth. Talk about disloyalty! Nobody (to my knowledge) has yet >adequately explained the massive shift in attitude that occurred between, >say, the 1851 Exhibition when we were (rightly) so proud of our innovative >abiliuties, and the anti-science, anti-engineering, anti-commercial >attitudes of the establishment by the turn of the century. We still feel >the anti-science effects today, a century later -- mainly by a galloping >shortage of science teachers."
(MH) >I suspect it had to do with the fact that being a landed gentleman was >regarded as the highest aspiration. The English aristocracy had a strategy >of accepting the merchants and industrialists into their ranks in a modest >way as a means of controlling them. After 1850, this really accelerated. >because the Repeal of the Corn Laws and new grain supplies from America, the >Argentine and Australia knocked the bottom out of the grain market, the >source of their wealth. Strangely, the repeal didn't affect the price of corn at all in England for 20 years! But then -- you're quite correct -- big imports started pouring in and the price dropped. (MH) They married their first sons to the daughters of >plutocrats in order to hang on to their land and their lifestyle. For the >English industrialist, industry was simply a stepping stone to gentility, >rather than an end in itself. And of course, they and especially their >sons, who went to public schools, aped the values of the gentry. Yes, this certainly happened. But I wonder whether this was the only cause. But then, fashions (in this case, a bias against science -- particularly strong in England between about 1870 and 1920) don't need much to feed on once they're initiated by the upper classes. (Curiously, most of the lifestyle fashions in the western world since WWII have been initiated by the working class -- but acceptable by the chattering classes to prove their egalitarian credentials I suspect. Even the hitherto high-faluting art and music critics programmes on BBC radio now give themselves over in raptures about pickled sheep and pop muisc.) Keith ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------- Keith Hudson,6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England Tel:01225 312622/444881; Fax:01225 447727; E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ________________________________________________________________________
