We spoke before of the intersecting concepts teaching/learning strategy (ethics/freedom/morality; spirit/soul/mind). Let’s do that again with: social pretense/acceptance/slumming. One of the important keys in media literacy in the world of today is non-standard comparisons. If you can engage with a book, why not also a song? For example:

(1) William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1848): “O ladies! how many of you have surreptitious milliners’ bills?” (mocking hidden extravagance and social pretense).

In context, it appears in a passage about Becky Sharp (the novel’s ambitious, scheming anti-heroine). She possesses fine diamonds and other luxuries that her husband Rawdon knows nothing about; they come from her social maneuvering (including attention from the powerful Lord Steyne). Thackeray turns directly to the reader with the line: “O ladies! how many of you have surreptitious milliners’ bills?” He continues by asking how many have gowns, bracelets, or lace they conceal or wear nervously, smiling and coaxing a husband who fails to notice the new items while the unpaid milliner (a maker or seller of fashionable clothing, hats, and accessories) sends dunning letters for the money.“ Surreptitious” means secret or stealthy.

The point is not merely debt, but pretense: women (and, by extension, people in “Vanity Fair”—Thackeray’s metaphor for a materialistic, status-obsessed society) hide the true costs of their display to project an image of respectability, wealth, or fashion beyond their means or their spouses’ knowledge. It mocks the gap between public face and private reality—the vanity, deception, and keeping-up-with-the-Joneses that drive the novel’s world of social climbers, gamblers, and pretenders. Vanity Fair is a broad satire of English society’s moral emptiness and obsession with appearance over substance; this aside is a classic Thackerayan direct address that implicates the reader in the same follies.

(2) Relation to “Everyday People” (Sly and the Family Stone, 1968)

Sly Stone’s hit is a buoyant, inclusive anthem of equality and authenticity. Its core message is that people are fundamentally the same (“I am everyday people”; “I am no better and neither are you / We are the same whatever we do”) and must live together despite differences. It uses playful, nursery-rhyme-like imagery to call out prejudice and forced conformity: a “blue one who can’t accept the green one / For living with a fat one, trying to be a skinny one”; a “yellow one that won’t accept the black one”; long-hair vs. short-hair; rich vs. poor. The refrain “different strokes for different folks” and the call “We got to live together” reject ranking people by appearance, status, race, or lifestyle.

The connection lies in the shared critique of social pretense and the artificial hierarchies it creates:

Thackeray’s ladies with secret milliners’ bills are performing status. They hide debt and true circumstances to appear more fashionable or affluent than they are—exactly the kind of image-conscious striving and judgment based on surface that Vanity Fair skewers. Their “trembling” display is a form of trying to be (or seem) something other than their everyday economic reality.

“Everyday People” answers that impulse by celebrating the ordinary and authentic. It dismisses the need to police others’ looks, means, or choices and affirms that no one is superior for conforming to a fashionable ideal (skinny, rich, “acceptable”). Where Thackeray exposes the hypocrisy and anxiety of keeping up appearances in high society, Sly’s song offers the antidote: drop the ranking and the façades; accept people as they are because we are all everyday people.

In short, the Victorian satire reveals the costly, secretive performance of social vanity; the 1960s soul-rock anthem rejects the whole game of judging or transforming people according to external standards. Both puncture the idea that worth is measured by polished surfaces or hidden extravagances.

(3) Pulp’s “Common People” (1995) extends the same themes of social pretense, class performance, and inauthentic claims to status or authenticity that run through the Thackeray quote and “Everyday People.”

Quick refresher on the prior elements

• Thackeray’s Vanity Fair line (“O ladies! how many of you have surreptitious milliners’ bills?”) satirizes hidden extravagance: people (especially women in that society) secretly run up debts for fashionable clothes and accessories to maintain a public image of respectability or higher status, while concealing the true costs from husbands or society. It mocks the gap between appearance and reality in a status-obsessed world.
• Sly and the Family Stone’s “Everyday People” affirms genuine equality and shared humanity (“I am everyday people”; “different strokes for different folks”). It rejects prejudice and the pressure to conform or judge others by surface differences (race, body type, wealth, style), insisting we must simply live together as ordinary people.

How “Common People” fits

Jarvis Cocker’s song is a sharp, danceable satire of “class tourism” or “slumming.” A wealthy young woman (inspired by a real encounter at art college) announces she wants to “live like common people,” “do whatever common people do,” and even “sleep with common people.” The working-class narrator takes her through the motions—pubs, supermarkets, a rough flat—but repeatedly undercuts the fantasy: she can never truly experience it. When the roaches climb the walls or life slides out of view, “if you called your dad he could stop it all.” Privilege provides an exit that actual common people lack. The song exposes the romanticization of poverty by those who can treat it as a temporary, exotic adventure.

Key connections:

• Shared satire of class performance and pretense. Thackeray skewers upward pretension—secretly buying the trappings of higher fashion/status while hiding the bills. Pulp skewers downward pretension—wealthy people claiming they want the “realness” or coolness of working-class life as a lifestyle choice or thrill. In both cases the performance is hollow: one group conceals the costs of appearing elevated; the other cannot escape the safety net of privilege no matter how hard they try to “act common.” Both reveal how class is maintained through carefully managed appearances rather than lived reality.
• Contrast with the ideal of “everyday/common” authenticity. “Everyday People” celebrates the possibility of genuine commonality and acceptance across differences. “Common People” is more skeptical and angry about claims to that commonality when they come from above. The rich girl’s desire to be “common” is presented as naïve or exploitative tourism, not true solidarity. Where Sly’s song says we are all everyday people and should drop the judgments, Pulp’s song insists that structural privilege makes some people’s claim to “common” experience impossible and often patronizing (“Everybody hates a tourist”).
• Vanity, display, and the costs of image. Thackeray’s milliners’ bills are the secret price of looking the part in high society. In “Common People,” the “price” of the rich girl’s experiment is zero in real terms—she can always leave—while actual common life involves permanent lack of control, failure, and limited options (“dance and drink and screw / Because there’s nothing else to do”). Both works puncture the idea that surface behavior or temporary immersion equals authentic belonging.

In short, the Thackeray quote and “Everyday People” together highlight the absurdity and hypocrisy of social façades around status and difference, while advocating (in the song) for real equality. “Common People” sharpens the critique by showing the reverse move: the privileged performing downward mobility for authenticity or amusement, only to reveal that true common experience is defined by the absence of an escape route. All three target the ways people use (or claim) class markers—fashionable display, egalitarian rhetoric, or romanticized poverty—as performance rather than lived truth.

Takeaway:

As the, to use Ahern’s phrase, cultural physician Nietzsche noted someone is no more happy because they are rich than miserable because they are poor. The question is whether you have a healthy approach to life or a sickly one. A prisoner can dance in his chains like in the Oscar winning movie Life is Beautiful, just as a successful attorney can be miserable,