The Book of Snobs

Thackeray’s narrator announces, with mock solemnity, that the age has been waiting for one man to undertake the definitive study of the Snob — and that he is that man. Chapter by chapter he anatomizes the type across English society: the Snob Royal, City Snobs, Clerical Snobs, University Snobs, Dining-Out Snobs, Club Snobs, and the country gentry entertaining above their means, building a comic natural history out of a word that, before this book, had meant something closer to “cobbler” or “person of low birth.”

The essays ran in Punch magazine through 1846 and 1847 under the title “The Snobs of England, by One of Themselves,” and were collected as The Book of Snobs in 1848. William Makepeace Thackeray’s satire did more than any other single work to fix “snob” in its modern sense — someone who apes the manners of a class above his own, or despises the one below it.

This Bibliomancer edition presents the prefatory remarks, all forty-four chapters, and the notes.