Just before the earth opened up, Sir Keir Starmer said of his deputy: ‘Angela came from a very humble background, battled all sorts of challenges along the way, and there she is proudly.’ We all know what pride comes before.
Humble seemed a genteel word to use. Deprived would have sounded harsh; poor too Victorian; working-class too Your Party. Anyway, the humble background had to be thrown off. Hers was not the professed outlook of the writhing Uriah Heep (seen as a ‘red-headed animal’ by David Copperfield). ‘“Be umble, Uriah,” says father to me, “and you’ll get on. It was what was always being dinned into you and me at school; it’s what goes down best. Be umble,” says father, “and you’ll do!” And really it ain’t done bad!’ But it was not enough, and Uriah turned to self-enrichment by falsifying documents.
But Mr Dick, the engaging simpleton in David Copperfield, counts humility as a virtue when talking of the schoolmaster Dr Strong, who is ‘Not proud in his wisdom. Humble, humble – condescending even to poor Dick’. Here condescending bears a meaning different from today’s. It acquired the sense of ‘betraying a feeling of superiority’ a little after the publication of David Copperfield in 1850.
Mr Dick, who makes kites, honours the Doctor’s name with a ritual. ‘I have sent his name up, on a scrap of paper, to the kite, along the string, when it has been in the sky, among the larks. The kite has been glad to receive it, sir, and the sky has been brighter with it.’
Confusion of pride and humility is a common reaction to success. Katie Price, brought up in Hove, of modest if not humble stock, has just had a record in the charts. ‘No. 3… thank you everyone!’ she said. ‘I am so humbled.’
Uriah refers to humiliation as ‘eating humble pie’, a jesting play on numble pie, made from the innards of a deer. Numble is from the Latin lumbulus, ‘part of the loin’. Humble itself went without an aspirated aitch until the 19th century. Perhaps Uriah was one of the last to leave it off.
Comments