Class by Jilly Cooper
Requirements: ePUB reader, 1.5 MB
Overview: Have the class barriers broken down in England? That was the question Barbara Cartland, romantic novelist and step-grandmother of Britain’s future queen, was asked on the "Today" show in New York. Her answer was a magnificent illustration of the fuzziness that obscures the issue in Britain:
"Of course they have," she told Sandra Harris, "or I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to someone like you."
Jilly Cooper wrote this book in 1979, and republished it in this edition in 1999 with an additional foreword. She is convinced that class does, in fact, still exist and has a book full of anecdotes to prove it. There’s the very grand old woman who was told a friend was trying to attract her attention. "’That’s not a friend," snorted the old lady, ‘he’s a doctor.’" And there’s the cleaning woman whose daughter stopped speaking to her when she married into "the professional classes." What did new son-in-law do? " ‘Oh,’ said the daily woman, ‘he’s an undertaker.’" Any Britons who managed to convince themselves that class doesn’t exist must have shaken by the census form that divides the population into five "social classes" according to occupation. Jilly Cooper, on the other hand, has divided her fellow countrymen into six categories and invented a typical family to represent each group.
Ms. Cooper manages to be funny, entertaining, and informative, though only too often she is also "cheeky" or "rude" in the lower-middle-class sense — "a bit risque." Those on the very top and the very bottom — where nobody bothers to be pretentious — are Ms. Cooper’s favorites, though they don’t escape her sharp tongue. Among those at the top is the Marquess of Londonderry, who threw soup at a fly "that was irritating him in a restaurant"; and an "imperious peer" who missed a train and "ordered the station-master to get him another one." As for those at the very bottom, "Traditionally working- class virtues are friendliness , cooperation, warmth, spontaneity, a ready sense of humor and neighbourliness. . . . That ‘love’ is still the most common form of address really means something."
Genre: Non-Fiction, social study, humour
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