He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Fall & Rise of the English Upper Class: Houses, kinship and capital since 1945, and reported the following:
Page 99 of The Fall & Rise of the English Upper Class:Follow Daniel Smith on Twitter.Stewart realises that the language of gifts – of reciprocity and balance between parties – does not work when the tables of giving and receiving are unequal and unbalanced to begin with (see Graeber, 2011). But the ethic of ‘getting on with it’ only arises when the social relations of status, hierarchy and inheritance are no longer (politically) permissible. Stewart cannot call upon ancestry or paternity to justify his power: he can only do his best. After all, his father never asked what the Queen was, he merely ‘got on with it’ and ‘did his best’.When I noticed that page 99 was the final, short paragraph from Chapter 3 Imperial Melancholia, which is a psychoanalytic reading of Rory Stewart’s The Marches: Borderwalks with my father, I initially thought the Page 99 Test does not work. Upon re-reading the test is completely confirmed here: the themes of inheritance, father-son relations that become invested with socio-political desires, and the underlying melancholy of this process and their failures, are the central concepts in Fall and Rise.
Page 99 is discussing how Rory Stewart has responded to his high birth - heir to be Laird of Broich House in Crieff, Dragon School and Eton College, Oxford to the Foreign Office, rumoured spook, and more - over time: first an obligation to duty, to paying back his country, then on to the resigned realisation that all he can merely do is “do his best” and “get on with it.” The passage recalls an earlier discussion in The Marches between Stewart and his father. Noticing how he and his father refer to each other as if they were nothing but entry’s in Who’s Who, Stewart asks his father how he understood his imperial duties as a colonial officer. He was serving The Queen. Stewart asks “But what is the Queen?” “I never ask that…” replied his father. ‘Serves her country and does her best’ is all he can say.
As page 99 shows, this language of giving back and doing one’s best with what one has inherited reaches an impasse: how can you give back what was not a balanced exchange in the first place? Such an impasse is at the heart of the claims Fall and Rise makes: the inheritances from fathers to sons, mediated by the houses of high privilege in British society, is a model for societal unity which is, at its heart, fragmented and divided. I argue that the upper class of English society are often taken to be the model of social unity and the future of the polity, but such a model - where past informs the future, and traditions dictate what is possible - is founded upon a fundamental melancholia.
While scholars are used to framing Britain’s imperial decline to a failure of mourning, giving us the melancholic longing for lost glories of Empire that infuses our post-Brexit political landscape, Fall and Rise goes one further to say that melancholia is built in to the structure of class and societal reproduction: melancholia is a failure of inheritances, of fathers not being able to inform the present and sons being unable to realise the ideals of the past. Such is the problem of nobility, where fathers and sons become indistinguishable, and its sociological form: the further away one gets from the founding ancestor, the more the dead prevail and haunt the living. The melancholy of the upper classes covered in Fall and Rise shows us what happens when one particular class are invested with the answers of the future: the ideal is impossible to attain and the present appears as unbearable. Trying to find a way out of this problem is the central social and political task for Great Britain.
--Marshal Zeringue
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