To See What It Is 'Like' [Fremlin]

From The Seven Chars of Chelsea by Celia Fremlin, 1940, pp. 1-2.

I can think of no more striking condemnation of present-day society than the fact that there is room in it for books like this. And there are coming to be a good many more of them. It is becoming more and more the fashion for people like myself to come down from a university, or out of Mayfair, and go and work as charwomen, waitresses or whatnot, to see what it is 'like'. And when we have found out what it is 'like', we come back among our old friends and tell them about it.

And the astounding, and sociologically horrifying, thing is that they listen to us; we are considered to have a real function as purveyors of information.

Now it is obvious that any even partially efficient social system would have no use for amateur job-crawlers such as us. In such a social system, if you wanted to know what it was like to be a charwoman, you would read books by experienced charwomen, and discuss the matter with them, not with dilettante adventurers who happen to have done charring for a couple of months.

But one has only to say this to realize that, in our present society, this simple and obvious method would not work. Charwomen don't write books; and you know quite well that (unless you are a very unusual type of mistress indeed) you would have no idea how to set about finding out from your charwoman what it feels like to live and work as she does. You would not know what questions to ask her, and she would not know how to answer them, nor even what you were getting at. Deadlock would be reached in the second sentence.

The trouble is that the two of you speak different languages; you think different thoughts; you live in different worlds. In a word, you belong to different classes in this British society of ours.

This, then, is why people such as myself have a useful function in present-day society (and, naturally, I believe that we do have a useful function). We can act to some slight extent as messengers and interpreters between the two worlds--extremely inefficient ones, but at present we have no efficient competitors, so we enjoy a scarcity-value that we do not deserve. Such is the state of our society.