ABSTRACT
The Census of 1921 assigned households to one of five occupational classes. The professional person belonged to Class I; the unskilled manual worker to Class V. Life was more complicated than most social scientists’ classifications suggest. The upper classes were not homogeneous. In October 1918 the shy but daring Virginia Woolf, born into the intellectual aristocracy of late-Victorian England in 1882, reflected on ‘the gulf between respectable mummified humbug’ of the Kensington she had been brought up in and ‘life crude & impertinent’ in the ‘Bloomsbury’ she helped to shape. In ‘Bloomsbury’ it was possible to mention both ‘copulation’ and W[ater] C[loset]s. Gait, dress, manners, accent even more than occupation or income were the cultural markers that distinguished ‘them’ from ‘us’. In Lancashire in the 1930s women were divided into the hatted elite and the wearers of shawls-a shawl did double service as headgear and coat-and could accommodate a child in arms too. As a small girl, Phyllis Noble, a Londoner born in 1922, the daughter of a jobbing builder, recognised her mother’s categories: ‘rough’, ‘respectable’ and ‘posh’. As her son Alan (born 1934) recalled, Lilian Bennett, a Leeds butcher’s wife, pigeonholed her acquaintances as ‘better off’, ‘well off’, ‘refined’, ‘educated’, ‘ordinary’ or ‘common’. In the 1950s the Yorkshire broadcaster Wilfred Pickles (born 1904) contrasted ‘good neighbourly fowk’ with ‘stuck-up fowk’. The examples of ‘People Like Us’ and, even more, of the people ‘we’ aspired to resemble were prime influences on conduct. The thumbnail sketch of Rosamond Lehmann (born 1901) that appeared in the Penguin edition of her novel Dusty Answer in 1936 exuded glamour.
