British Class System

Recently heard a radio review of a play describing the roles as "Upper Middle Class". Do people still use these terms?

Yeah.

Very much so in the UK.

How do you leap classes? Youb can try marrying a prince. ;)

One thing is certain: class has nothing to do with money.

A pop singer or footballer who grew up in an inner-city slum (working class, a term that dates from the days when only the lower orders had to work since everyone else was independently wealthy), may have had very little education and still speaks with a very rough slum accent, but who has made millions, is not upper class.

On the other hand, there are members of the aristocracy, hereditary peers (earls and so on) who may have virtually no disposable income at all. They are the top of the upper class, but the 17th-century palaces they live in - uncomfortable and almost impossible to heat - belong to the earldom, not to themselves personally, so they can't sell them. The eldest son probably dreads the day he will inherit the family castle, when he would presumably much rather live in a modern suburban house. (This is why some of them open parts of their homes to the paying public.) They may be, in real day-to-day terms, actually a lot poorer than the average office worker, for example, but they are upper-class.

On the other hand, the parents of Kate Middleton, who made a heap of money by their own efforts, are not upper class, even though they most likely have far more disposable income - to do as they like with - than the parents of the late Princess Diana (her father was an earl). People in trade, like the Middletons, are traditionally never considered upper class, no matter how much money they have. In the past there was far more snobbishness about this sort of thing than there is now.

The British class system is very complicated. However, people are far more socially mobile than they were a few generations ago, when it was virtually impossible for anyone who came from a poor family, when poor really meant poor and there was no social security or safety net of any kind, to get a decent education and be able to pull themselves up from the very lowest level of society. It wasn't so long ago that the vast majority of children left school at 14 - which was the legal leaving age until after the Second World War, when it was raised to 15 - even if they and their parents desperately wanted them to continue at school, and even if they were very brainy and could get a free scholarship to help out, but the few shillings they could earn were necessary to help put food on the table.

The different classes eat different foods, call things by different names (although that's probably less true than it was, with TV and the Internet having a levelling effect), have different interests and hobbies, and so on. Nouveau riche (otherwise known as jumped-up working class) would never be mistaken for upper class, or upper-middle class. As a broad generalization, nouveau riche have plenty of money but no taste.

The British reviewer of a biography of Margaret Thatcher in a recent New York Review of /books observes that every new character is introduced with a footnote, invariably beginning by mentioning where the character went to scool (i.e. secondary school). As the reviewer notes, a biographer of a US president wouldn't think of bothering to tell the reader where a minor player went to high school.

I don't know if this says a lot about the importance of class in the two countries or just about the importance of school as a marker of it. But it's hard to imagine an American equivalent to Lord Soames's complaint after being dismissed by Thatcher: he said he would have sacked his gamekeeper with more courtesy than Thatcher had shown him.

This all sounds so insane to me - like a whole superfluous section of existence to waste brain power on - but then I live in a city where, when introduced to a person of the opposite sex, you need to swiftly scan a whole lot of visual clues to decide what kind of religious they are and therefore whether to offer them your hand to shake or not. Well that always seems kind of insane too, actually.

VinnyD, that's disingenuous. It's easy to imagine an American politician saying "I would have fired my gardener with more courtesy than that".

No, it isn't. I've got a pretty good imagination, but I can't imagine that.

class has nothing to do with money

It has a lot to do with money. That's why those Victorian novels are all obsessed with money. If you have the money, and adopt the behaviour, you can change class. If you don't have the money, eventually you can't keep up the behaviour and unless someone rich rescues you eventually you will be lost. But if you only have the money and don't get the behaviour right, like many football players, then you don't change class.

For example, there's a lot of cases in Trollope's novels of people who successfully take themselves into upper class circles through having lots of money in behaving in the right manner. In the Palliser novels, Madame Max Goesler is the widow of an exceedingly rich Jewish banker, who is treated as an equal by them all: a Duke asks her to marry him at one point; because she succeeds in behaving in the right manner. In "The Way We Live Now" Augustus Melmotte is a kind of Robert Maxwell/Conrad Black character who is trying to buy himself respectability, but fails because he doesn't quite get it right and, like Black/Maxwell, is ultimately trying to pay for his extreme extravagance with fraudulent activities.

The British reviewer of a biography of Margaret Thatcher in a recent New York Review of /books observes that every new character is introduced with a footnote, invariably beginning by mentioning where the character went to school (i.e. secondary school).

There's a very telling letter from Bent Flyvbjerg, a famous Danish business studies academic now at Oxford, in this week's Economist, making a point how Britain still has a long way to go to reach the level of classlessness of Scandinavia or the Netherlands. He addresses it "from a medieval high table in Oxford".

is there a "Lower Upper Class"?

That is not a term that is used. But the reality is that within the Upper Class, there are many sub-levels. It was all rather important to them back in the 19th century and rather less so today, but even today there will be some scenarios when it will be remembered that a baronet is a lot lower than an earl.