Marx on northern Church of England clergymen, 1873
In late 1873 Marx was staying (health reasons) at the Old Swan Hotel in Harrogate. It opened in 1840, is Grade 2 listed and remains open.
While staying he came across a vicar. Given the views of the Archbishop of York on Englishness and metropolitan elites in the Telegraph (8.8) one can understand that the clergy and class prejudice are not new things:
When we arrived, the season had already gone, so that we occupied our hotel ‘in single blessedness’, being only disturbed and somewhat amused during the last days of our sojourn by the dropping in of a Church of England parson, a worldly wise old man, with no smack of cant about him, of fluent and trivial talk, with conventional varnish of manners and caring indeed for nothing save his belly. He was the true model of a modern Christian, using that word itself only with respect to the dishes our hotel-keeper provided and saying for instance: this is no Christian mutton chop, if that same chop happened to lack some virtue or other. The man had overrun most countries of Europe and was in himself a recording office of all the merits and demerits of its several hotels, always hunting in vain for that paragon of mankind—a perfect man—cook. At the same time he never tired of bitter sarcasms against the overstrained pretentions and the extravagant living of the miners of the black country, being himself an incumbent at Durham
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