¶ … it survive in the 21st century?
"Class is to Britain what sex is to teenagers -- more talked about than practiced" (Willetts 1995:1). The fact that Britain is a class-conscious society is taken as a universal given; when virtually any author wishes to use an example of class-stratified society, they look to the UK. The famous play by George Bernard Shaw entitled Pygmalion immortalized the nation as a world in which one's accent could determine one's entire fate. In popular culture, slang and stereotypes relevant to class abound. But should this be taken as a sign that social class still exists, or should it merely be interpreted as vestiges of an older era, ironically translated into 20th century terms? This paper will examine dueling perspectives on class, and finally assess its material reality.
First of all, what is meant by class? According to David Cannadine's work Class in Britain, one model of class-consciousness is hierarchical, whereby the upper classes are seen to have more wealth, status, and power (and sometimes superior morals) to the lower classes. A second model is one of class enclosures, where each class has its own standards and values. This is often advanced by middle-class authors who see the middle class as the "repository of wisdom and prudence," not bowed down by economic concerns like the lower classes nor self-indulgent like the 'upper crust" (Willetts 1995:1). A third, Marxist conception of class sees class as eternally polarized in a dialectic between the haves and the have-nots.
However, if Great Britain's cultural references are class-obsessed; this does not necessarily mean that real, historical evidence bears out the concept of the durability of class and its current significant in British society. In fact, even during the Middle Ages, traditionally thought of as the highly segmented and class-bound age of feudalism, class may have been far more fluid than is usually conceptualized. "Even in the Middle Ages Britain was not a traditional peasant society, but an individualistic one in which cash transactions were very important" and where it was fairly easy, compared with other European nations, to shed one's class within a generation, or to leave one's village and...
Great Britain has always possessed a rigid class structure with few chances for upward mobility. However, in modern times, class structure has received a new face-lift. Instead of the traditional three tiered social class structure, instead is in place a seven tiered class structure that has various ways to measure class that include social, cultural, and economical. Therefore, class within British society, is not just categorized through how much money
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