Social class

One of the sources of the British class system, as in France, Germany and perhaps the Soviet Union and every society in the world, is the desire of parents to do well by their children. It can be a question of handing on property - a landed estate or a family business - but, more deeply, it is the handing on of education, social attitudes, self-confidence. Moreover there is in Britain some social mobility, with parents who have been disappointed in their own lives seeking to fulfil ambitions through their children. These are the marks of any dynamic industrial society as opposed to a static one based on traditional forms of agriculture. At the same time, however, the majority do remain within the socio-economic groups in which they were born. One test which shows strongly in sociological surveys is that those who live as adults in the localities in which they were born tend to remain in the same social class; those who rise or fall are those who have moved away.

If such things as the peerage and public schools attract myths at one end of the British social scale, so do the lower classes, generally termed the working class, at the other. English literature is the most widely-read of any literature in the world and the main tradition in it, from Shakespeare onwards, is to present the working class as at best figures of fun and at worst as villains.

Brian Harrison: Britain observed. 1945 to the present day; Ernst Klett Verlag, Stuttgart, 1984, page 181