I've always thought Eliot's painting of ordinary people in The Waste Land was slightly snobbish - as if seen in great detail but from a great height.
Philip, I wonder if what seems 'slightly snobbish' today would have been thought so at the time of writing, when class and language differences were so much more marked? As a relatively recently arrived American in London Eliot would have observed these in particularly vivid detail, from a 'height' not merely middle-class but alien.
The height, in the case of the pub conversations which form the concluding section of 'A Game of Chess' was literal rather than figurative. Peter Ackroyd's biography of 1984 (p.95) records that when the Eliots were living in Crawford Mansions just south of Baker Street in 1916-20 "the windows . . . looked down upon a pub on the other side of the street which, at closing time, would have been raucous." Eliot confirmed in 1942 that this was the origin of HURRY UP PLEASE IT's TIME in The Waste Land.
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