Author: Frank Brownlow

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Brownlow / Essays

19 Oct, 2015

The Missing Middle Classes, Part III: The Great Secession

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  The one absolutely essential feature of middle-class psychology is confidence.  If father ran a successful hardware store, then as long as they live his sons must treasure an understanding of the finer points of the hardware business.  If the old boy designed and built houses, they must be sure to have some grasp of the arts of brick-laying, carpentry, and plastering.  If he was a respected local attorney or solicitor, they must rejoice in the knowledge that he was the impenetrable vault of the town’s secrets. They must never allow themselves to start saying things like, “Well, the old...

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Brownlow / Essays

14 Oct, 2015

The Missing Middle Classes, Part II: War, Taxes, And Socialism

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What happened to the middles classes?  Three things happened to them: war, socialism, and what we can call, borrowing a term, the great secession. We can start with war.  All governments routinely soak their citizens or subjects to pay for their wars, and that is why the first income tax was introduced into England in 1798 to pay for the war with revolutionary France.  It was rescinded on the signing of the Peace of Amiens, but reinstated with the renewal of hostilities a year later.  A year after the Battle of Waterloo it was repealed again, in 1816.  Then the...

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Brownlow / Essays

5 Oct, 2015

The Missing Middle Classes, Part I

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It is not so long since any time historians wanted to explain something—the wealth of medieval Europe, the disappearance of bubonic plague, the Reformation—they would trot out the middle classes as the uncaused cause of all effects.  Others—the more prophetically-minded—took a gloomier view of the middle classes, and attributed all the things they disliked to them.   Bad taste in art, for instance.  How does one explain that?  Or the general stodginess and frumpiness of all those people commuting into work on the train in the morning?  Their refusal to be impressed by free-verse poetry, twelve-tone music, and abstract expressionism? ...

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Brownlow

1 Sep, 2015

P.G.Wodehouse and the Word-Warriors of WW II

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When the German army overran France and Belgium in the spring of 1940, it acquired a fair number of surprised aliens, among them Mr. and Mrs. P.G. Wodehouse.  After the outbreak of war, the Wodehouses had stayed on at their home in Le Touquet, P.G. working on a book, Mrs. P.G. doing her bit for the war effort by entertaining the members of the local RAF squadron.  The British military and civil authorities in the area had assured them there was no immediate cause for fear, and so, refusing to imitate what seemed to them unworthy panic in those who...

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Brownlow / Essays

28 Jul, 2015

Humanities—R.I.P.

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Humanities — R.I.P. Frank Brownlow I have a lingering affection for the University of Western Ontario because I taught there many years ago, and enjoyed the experience. The students were good, and my colleagues were not only congenial but remarkably tolerant of my inexperience. They had an excellent curriculum and a well-trained faculty. Any Western student in those days who paid attention and did the required work emerged with a degree that meant something. Things, apparently, have changed. There is trouble at Western. The humanities there, as everywhere, are in a death-spiral, and someone called Dr. Ross Bullen, Teaching–Intensive Stream...