British Character. Many British people are guided by Victorian values and make them the principle of their life

Many British people are guided by Victorian values and make them the principle of their life. Margaret Thatcher has been the ardent champion of them rightly considering them to be eternal values and the way to making a good society. Victorian values teach to work hard, to improve yourself, to live within your income, to give a hand to your neighbour, to respect yourself, to be self-reliant, to be a good member of your community, to take it as duty to help others voluntarily when you get greater prosperity, to have tremendous pride in your country.

The best known and universally marked qualities of the British people, especially English, are coldness and reserve. They do not talk very much to strangers, do not show their emotions openly. But foreigners also confess that English reserve is not unpleasant. And when you get to know the English better they will turn out to be very companionable, friendly and warm-hearted people.

Closely related to British reserve is British modesty. English people hat boastfulness. That’s why A. Mauris advises travellers to Britain to be modest. “If you are a world tennis champion, say «Yes, I don’t play too badly». If you have crossed the Atlantic alone in a small boat, say, «I do a little sailing». An Englishman will say: «I have a little house in the country, when he invites you to stay with him you will discover that the little house is a place with three hundred bedrooms».

Snobbery is not so common in England today as it was at the beginning of the century. It still exists, however, as the British accept and enjoy the distinctions of social class. They love hierarchy and see nothing wrong in the differential attitude that it breeds. The simplest clue to class distinction is accent. George Bernard Show once made the famous remark that an Englishman cannot open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him. For the way English is spoken gives away not only regional identity but class status too. The so-called RP (Received Pronunciation) systematically established through the Public School is the accepted dialect of the national elite. There two kinds of RP: «unmarked» (the language of well-educated people, BBC radio and television) and «marked» RP (the language of high social class). Although spoken by less than 5% of the population, RP has immense influence and those who speak it enjoy a social authority that contradicts democratic ideals. Some job advertisements demand «well spokeness», and some ambitious politicians will hide their regional accents with RP.

The majority of middle class people speak a sort of classless, democratic version of RP, with a slight admixture of a local regional accent. People’s attitude to the various regional accents depends on a whole range of historical and social factors. The Birmingham is considered ugly, cockney is associated with criminals, Scottish is thought of as serious and sensible, Irish as poetic.