We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2012
Still I feel that I don't understand the English very well.
(L1, 61)In September 1914, writing from Bloomsbury, just prior to going to study at Oxford, T. S. Eliot gave his cousin Eleanor Hinkley his impressions of the English. In particular, he contemplates their habits of reserve, a sense that their personalities remained in some sense out of sight, partly because they seem to be ‘conventional’. Eliot portrays himself as perplexed by this:
I don't know just what conventionality is; it doesn't involve snobbishness, because I am a thorough snob myself; but I should have thought of it as perhaps the one quality which all my friends lacked. And I'm sure that if I did know what it was, among men, I should have to find out all over again with regard to women.
(L1, 61)Eliot cheerfully admits here to his own ‘snobbishness’, a keen if anxious sense of social superiority, but he is mystified by this other category of ‘conventionality’, with its capacity to make the identity of others inscrutable and to make those who are not conventional (that is, Eliot and his friends, but implicitly Americans in general) unsure about where they stand in relation to these baffling people. Eliot's conclusion is that ‘Perhaps when I learn how to take Englishmen, this brick wall will cease to trouble me.’
Clearly, Eliot does not expect this ‘brick wall’ to disappear but merely to become something he might be able to take for granted.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
