19th June
In June 1917 he was thinking about patriotism and snobbery. In a letter to Cambridge don Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, he opined that 'you can remain a patriot if you will become a snob’. The particular target is the middle class: 'Officers, stockbrokers, politicians, grocers – they run us, but they are not England numerically, and their self-righteousness is not our national characteristic’. By choosing the 'lower class’ as the 'typical Englishmen’, he felt it was easier to feel patriotic attachment. Playfully, he describes the lapse in tolerance: 'We used to pretend we shrank from no one. But it’s no good. Middle-class people smell’. (Source: Selected Letters of E.M. Forster, ed. Mary Lago and P.N. Furbank (London: Collins, 1983-1985), letter of 25 June 1917)
