Respectability

On the anniversary of Roger Scruton's death in 2020, Patrick Kurp:

In England: An Elegy (2001), Sir Roger Scruton aligns himself with one of the summits of the English conservative tradition. If such a tradition were a church, Johnson would number among its saints. ....

Johnson’s life represents a mingling of poverty-induced bohemianism (“the shabbiest of English eccentrics”) and a dignified respect for traditional norms. Scruton identifies an “anti-bohemian respectability” strain among such modern writers as T.S. Eliot, Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, and such composers as Vaughan Williams and Edmund Rubbra:

—all of them respectable citizens, often with conservative, even reactionary, opinions, upholders of the moral order, and unassuming members of the long-suffering middle class. This anti-bohemian respectability was not a novel feature of the national culture. The leading artistic spirits among Englishmen have almost always been prepared not only to belong to the respectable classes, but also to defend the values which make respectability respectable.

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"The Values Which Make Respectability Respectable," Anecdotal Evidence, January 12, 2022.