Education Quote by James Payn

England’s most charming vice may be its insistence on sounding well-read, and James Payn aims straight at that soft spot. “Literary pretence” isn’t just people enjoying books; it’s the social performance of culture, the reflex to treat reading as a badge of breeding. Payn’s bite comes from how casually he calls it “more universal,” as if the habit is as English as queuing, and as if everyone is in on the act.

The key move is blame-shifting: not to individual snobs, but to “our method of education.” That phrase drags pretension out of the drawing room and into the classroom. Victorian schooling, especially for the aspiring middle class, trained students to revere canonical authors, memorize, paraphrase, and signal refinement. It rewarded the appearance of taste as much as taste itself. Payn is suggesting that when education becomes a system for manufacturing “cultured” citizens, it also mass-produces people who can talk like they’ve read what they haven’t, or who read to be seen reading.

As a novelist and editor working inside the literary marketplace, Payn would have recognized the economics behind the posture: prestige sells. Publishers, reviewers, and polite society all benefit when literature is treated as a gatekeeping device. The subtext is quietly democratic and quietly ruthless: if pretence is universal, it’s not an elite flaw but a national technique, a country teaching its citizens to confuse intellectual life with intellectual display.