Usually preceded by the definite article, the derogatory phrase chattering classes, also chattering class, designates members of the educated metropolitan middle class, especially those in academic, artistic and media circles, considered as a social group freely given to the articulate, self-assured expression of (especially liberal) opinions about society, culture and current events.
—Cf. also the noun wokerati.
It seems that the phrase chattering classes—as currently used—was coined in 1980 by the British journalist Frank Johnson (1943-2006), and popularised in the early 1980s by another British journalist, Alan Watkins (1933-2010).
In The Chattering Classes, published in The Guardian (London and Manchester, England) of Saturday 25th November 1989 [page 23, columns 1 to 6], Alan Watkins attributed the phrase chattering classes to Frank Johnson, and endeavoured to define it:
There is no doubt about it: the originator of the phrase is Frank Johnson. I am fairly sure that he first used it in conversation with me, in my study, subsequently putting it into print. This would have been some time in the early eighties, in the Times. Almost immediately I took it up and used it in the Observer. Johnson invented the phrase; I popularised it.
In the mid-to-late eighties it became […] part of the language. At any rate, it became part of the language of the Chattering Classes themselves: journalists, television people, media folk generally.
[…]
The Guardian […] appears set on extending the definition. Writing about Oxford’s rejection of Mrs Thatcher’s honorary degree, a contributor continued as follows: “Aligned most closely with the dons were the bishops, but the feeling extended into many reaches of what were loosely termed the Chattering Classes: social London, higher journalism, civil servants in private, the arts establishment, even the softer corners of the city. […]”
This is to cast the net far too wide. “Social London,” or the beau monde, or what in the 18th century was called the ton, is a different group, in many respects antipathetic to that which Johnson and I had in mind […]. Auberon Waugh came closer, when he wrote that Mrs Thatcher would be making a dreadful mistake if she underestimated the destructive power of the Chattering Classes. These he defined by example as “leader writers, opinion formers, cartoonists and suchlike scum.”
Even this is to exalt the category which Johnson and I had envisaged. In its original form it extended from social workers and elementary schoolteachers to television producers and, yes, leader writers. They read the Guardian, the Independent and the Observer. They were metropolitan […].
[…]
[…] What I was trying to do was to popularise a phrase which comprehended the new media intelligentsia of the seventies and eighties, together with their subsidiary—some might say client—groups. There was certainly the need for some such phrase, though I sometimes have the feeling that the whole business has now got quite out of hand.
The following is from Safire’s Political Dictionary (Oxford University Press, 2008), by the U.S. author, columnist, journalist and presidential speechwriter William Safire (William Lewis Safir – 1929-2009):
[page 112, columns 1 & 2]: chattering classes A collective term for journalists, critics, pundits, “talking heads,” and other members of the liberal intelligentsia, regarded dismissively as talkers rather than doers.
[…]
The singular class may also be employed. […]
The precise composition of the chattering classes varies according to the observer. […]
[…]
Chattering classes—a play upon working classes—is inherently derogatory because of its associations with idle chatter, chitter chatter, and chatterbox. The implication is that the chatter of the classes makes as much sense as that of birds or children. Chatter also acquires some additional spin as an attack term from its parallel in sound and sense with natter […].
The term is of British import. Aubrey [sic] Watkins of The Observer, who popularized chattering classes in the 1980s, attributed the phrase in a 1989 article in The Guardian to Frank Johnson, another journalist, who coined it during a conversation with Watkins.
However, the phrase chattering classes, also chattering class, had occasionally occurred from 1840 onwards, that is to say, long before Frank Johnson coined it in 1980. But, in early use, the precise acceptations of this phrase are not always clear.
The earliest occurrences of the phrase chattering classes, also chattering class, that I have found are as follows, in chronological order:
1-: From The Argus. Or, Broad-Sheet of the Empire (London, England) of Sunday 7th June 1840 [Vol. 2, No. 71, page 299, column 2]—the following is about William Roscoe (1753-1831), a Liverpudlian historian, art collector, lawyer, banker, botanist and miscellaneous writer:
Roscoe was a man of whom much good and much indifferent can be said, and nothing at all bad. He was a man who, being a merchant of no great mark in Liverpool, raised himself to some literary eminence by his works on Lorenzo de Medici, and Leo the Tenth, when Italian literature was as great a wonder in England, at least among the chattering classes of England, as Sanskrit is now.
2-: From The present State of England—Agricultural, Commercial, and Industrial, published in the Weekly Dispatch (London, England) of Sunday 29th March 1846 [No. 2,317, page 1, column 1]:
Farming, like other trades, is becoming a wholesale business, and while a few are becoming extensive and wealthy agriculturists, the mass are sinking into hopeless poverty. A notion has, indeed, obtained currency amongst that chattering class of journeymen * political economists whom Cobbett christened “feelosophers,” that although the modern system of culture has dispossessed the smaller tenantry, an ample compensation has been made to the industrial classes by the great increase which improved methods of farming have caused in the employment of and demand for agricultural labour.
* Apparently, the noun journeymen was mistakenly inserted into this sentence. In the same article, as reprinted from the Weekly Dispatch by The Bell’s New Weekly Messenger (London, England) of Sunday 29th March 1846 [Vol. 18, No. 819, page 1, column 4], the sentence is: “that chattering class of political economists whom Cobbett christened ‘feelosophers.’”.
3-: From The New Indian Danger, published in The Spectator. A Weekly Review of Politics, Literature, Theology, and Art (London, England) of Saturday 1st July 1871 [No. 2,244, page 790, column 1]:
Up to the Mutiny there was one thing to be said in most parts of India for the white conqueror, that he was a very gentle tax-gatherer, that he let the people’s purses alone, and even wished them to grow rich […]. No tax was new, and it was a rooted idea with the old Viceroys that no new tax could ever be raised. Even Lord Dalhousie, with all his determination, never ventured on that experiment, and the people grew richer, and richer, and richer, till the old burdens seemed imperceptible, and their immense accumulations of specie lowered the purchasing power of coin, and everything seemed to grow dear at once, to the immense disgust of the chattering classes who bought, but to the delight of the peasant who sold, and who found his sales of rice and wheat so profitable that among other changes he refused to grow indigo any more.
4-: In the following, about the Irish politician William O’Brien (1852-1928), published in The Belfast News-Letter (Belfast, County Antrim, Ireland) of Wednesday 29th July 1896 [Vol. 159, No. 25,285, page 5, column 3], the phrase chattering class seems to refer to the people, specifically the politicians, who are much given to talking:
If New Tipperary were the work of Mr. William O’Brien, as is alleged, he ought to retire from politics, and let his voice be heard no more. He seems, however, to belong to the chattering class, and cannot maintain silence.
5-: From Bitter Partisan Attack on a N. C. Cotton Mill, published in the Asheville Daily Gazette (Asheville, North Carolina, USA) of Sunday 10th June 1900 [Vol. 5, No. 106, page 1, column 3]:
Editorially the News and Observer attacked Mr. Carpenter viciously, and other papers of its political following have taken up the refrain in the evident effort to create partisan feeling against the mills. The effort in which the newspapers have been assisted by the chattering class of political roustabouts, has been to represent the Maiden mill man as a rough tyrant with his employes, who would force them to adopt his political views and vote his political preferences or cease to receive employment in the mills.
6-: From the column Old Wine in New Bottles, by Russel M. Seeds, published in The Indianapolis Star (Indianapolis, Indiana, USA) of Monday 4th December 1922 [Vol. 20, No. 182, page 6, column 5]:
If Woodrow had merely told Edwards he would “chew the rag” with him, he might have saved a lot of editors the trouble of rushing to the dictionary to learn how a man collogues, why he collogues and what he collogues about. The word has a bar-sinister parentage anyway and never should have been recognized in society. Born of an unhallowed union of the Latin “con” and Greek “logos,” it tried to take a place in the language that might have been filled by some such honest grandchild of the Latin “loquor” as colloque. It never obtained a fixed meaning, even in the chattering class along with colloquy and colloquialism.
7-: From an article by Frank Johnson, published in NOW! (London, England) of Friday 21st March 1980 [page 48, column 1]—as quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. chattering classes (online edition, March 2002):
The peculiar need for something to be frightened about only seems to affect those of us who are part of the chattering classes.
8-: From Political Diary, by Alan Watkins, published in The Observer (London, England) of Sunday 20th April 1980 [No. 9,843, page 9, column 4]—the following is about the National Council for Civil Liberties:
If the Council sees itself, as it evidently does, as concerned largely with the rights of minorities, then the rights of one of the most important minorities of all, the chattering classes, must take precedence over the rights of the general public.
9-: From Funk and facing up to Russia, by the British journalist Peregrine Gerard Worsthorne (Peregrine Gerard Koch de Gooreynd – 1923-2020), published in the Sunday Telegraph (London, England) of Sunday 3rd August 1980 [No. 1,009, page 14, column 3]:
FEAR, or even funk, are not words much used in the current debate about Britain’s attitude to nuclear weapons. One can unsuccessfully search the columns of the Observer or the Guardian, where this question is being discussed so extensively, for any reference to these basic human emotions. So far as their learned correspondents are concerned, it is overwhelmingly a moral issue—as articulated with great eloquence by the distinguished historian E. P. Thompson—or, at worst, a matter of high strategy, suitable only for defence experts like the redoubtable Peter Jenkins. This is magnificent, but beside the point, rather like discussing sexual morality without reference to lust and lechery, which are also words that never defile those high-minded organs of the chattering classes.
10-: From Political Diary, by Alan Watkins, published in The Observer (London, England) of Sunday 1st November 1981 [No. 9,923, page 11, column 2]:
People—or the kind of people who join the Liberals or the Social Democrats as active members—are no longer prepared to be told what is good for them. The idea is dying that a party exists to secure the election of a member of the political or chattering classes to Parliament, and then to allow him or her to get on with the job.
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