ABSTRACT
The many idioms that have over the years gathered round the idea of work fall into two main kinds. The more recent group, though it is already much more than a century old, comes from the overwhelming predominance of mass-industrial labour; the other recalls by contrast an older idea of craftsmanship, perhaps carried out at home or in small workshops. In vastly different but related ways, working-class people were before the war conscious of class divisions all the time. That heavily weighted word 'respectable' is used so much because it suggests a different scale of values from that of social class. For those who have been at 'Public' and other private schools, the sense of class-division is, behind all the bland protestations, still generally alive. Top-drawer academic life was in a class of its own. It is surprising now to remember how often the concept of 'good manners' appeared in pre-war working-class speech, especially among the 'respectable'.
