[Vwoolf] Inclusivity

[Stuart N. Clarke]

Wasn’t some reviewer/commentator quoted on this list not long ago, saying that great writers were never inclusive, or some such rubbish?

What we do have to remember that inclusivity as we understand it nowadays is a very recent way of looking at the world (pace Mrs Swithin and Prof Godbole).  Previously, distinguishing people one from the other – exclusivity – was how one looked at life.

“*doct(o)ress.* It is a serious inconvenience that neither form (-tress would be the better) has been brought into any but facetious use as a prefixed title” (H. W. Fowler, “A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), p. 120a

“What has given Jenufa this strange idea, that her dress is so plain and sombre on her wedding day?”
“What, Jenufa?  All the finest gentry dress plainly and simply when they go to the altar!”
“Gentle folk have their own fashions and customs, but we are only simple people!  I’d never dream of being wed without my bridal crown and ribbons never!  Never!”
(Libretto to Janacek’s opera)

Of course, in 3G Woolf deplores the uniforms and badges of distinction that set men off from one another.  Of course, she writes: “it seems to me the wrong way to live, drawing chalk marks round ones feet, and saying ... you can’t come in” (L no. 3111).  But she’s a long way from inclusivity in the modern sense.

I’m was reminded about isolated people were from one another, when I was reading recently two collections I’ve had for 45 years, “My Cambridge” and “My Oxford” (I hadn’t realised how miserable Nigel Nicolson was at Balliol).

“it was not till my first term at Cambridge that I spoke to my first Jew and met my first black man (from Blackpool and Jamaica respectively)” (John Vaizey (1929-84), went up to Queens’ in 1948).

There could be an advantage if you were gay: “I think I can safely say that, until I went to Oxford, I had never known anyone of working-class background. There had, of course, been my London promiscuous sexual encounters.  Many of these had been with cockney working-class young men.  But this life which had begun before I was sixteen was a world as separate from my daily life as were my dreams ... Apart from that, the only working-class people I had known were servants – and, given my family’s near penury, these were not many.  I had never known anyone well who came from north of the Home Counties; and, apart from one visit with my father to Scotland ... I had never penetrated into England north of Hampstead” (Angus Wilson (1913-91, went up to Merton in 1935).

Stuart
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