Essay: The Book of Snobs

Overview
William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Book of Snobs (1848), first serialized in Punch and collected the following year, is a brisk, mock-encyclopedic tour of British pretension. Subtitled “By One of Themselves,” it adopts the voice of a confessional “snobographer” who claims intimate knowledge of the species he anatomizes. Thackeray popularized a now-classic definition, “a Snob is one who meanly admires mean things”, and he applies it across ranks and professions to argue that snobbery is not the monopoly of the rich or the poor, but a universal temptation rooted in vanity, servility, and the worship of false idols: rank, money, fashion, and celebrity.

Scope and Structure
The book unfolds as a sequence of sketches, each chapter targeting a milieu: Court and aristocratic circles, Parliament and public life, the Church, the Army and Navy, universities, clubs, theaters and opera boxes, shops and countinghouses, and domestic drawing rooms. Thackeray’s method is to mingle observation, anecdote, and satire, producing miniature character portraits, the tuft-hunter who fawns on a coronet, the club-room backbiter, the dinner-table bully, the provincial grandee, the literary toady puffing patrons in print. No group escapes censure. The “Great Snobocracy” of titled dullards is lampooned alongside City men who measure worth by ledgers, clergymen who court patrons, and reviewers who barter praise for position.

Narratively, the book maintains a playful fiction of moral crusade: the narrator proposes to catalogue snobbery for the public good, addresses “dear brethren” with mock sermons, and periodically confesses his own failings. This self-implication is central to the design. By insisting he writes as “one of themselves,” Thackeray aims to disarm readers who would confine snobbery to other people and classes.

Themes and Targets
Two vices anchor the satire. First is flunkeyism, the ingrained deference to titles and the pomp that attends them. Thackeray delights in tracing how a coronet on a carriage or a noble name at a guest list transforms ordinary judgment into abasement. Second is tuft-hunting, the social sport of attaching oneself to the well-born or well-placed, a practice he tracks from undergraduate halls to London salons. Both are outward shows of a deeper moral error: confusing symbols of distinction for real merit.

Snobbery also surfaces as cruelty disguised as refinement. The book’s dinner scenes showcase the snob’s pleasure in slighting dependents, humiliating the shy, or snubbing unglamorous guests. In the professions, it appears as cant, pious talk paired with worldliness, patriotic bluster masking venality, and literary “genius” bustling for dedications and dinners. Abroad, the narrator finds the same species thriving under other uniforms and etiquettes, proving that snobbery is portable and adaptive.

Against these, Thackeray sketches a counter-ideal. True gentility is a moral quality, not a heraldic one. It resides in kindness, honesty, and sympathy; it is tested in how one treats subordinates and strangers, not how one bows to the great. If a definition is needed, the book implies that a gentleman is gentle, and a lady is humane, irrespective of purse or pedigree.

Style and Legacy
The Book of Snobs blends genial humor with ethical sting. Its voice is confidential and bustling; its scenes are crowded and vivid; its aphorisms are quotable. By scattering confession amid censure, Thackeray forestalls priggishness and turns satire into social self-examination. The work helped fix “snob,” “tuft-hunter,” and “flunkeyism” in the Victorian vocabulary, and its critique of status-worship remains legible in modern consumer and celebrity culture. Beneath the laughter lies a steady argument: societies rot when they admire the wrong things, and reform begins with the mirror.