Was Emily a posh name before it became popular in the 90s/00s?

I do wonder when names like Susan, Sarah, Jane, Peter, Christopher, Simon etc will all come back.

I’m late 50s. When I was growing up Emily, Olivia and Charlotte were posh/ refined/ ladylike names.

I think for 90-100+ year olds it was a classless name. Plenty of girls in service had it, but also plenty of maiden aunts lol.

50-60 year olds it was definitely a posh name - in the 60s/70s only the slightly bohemian subset of upper-middles and uppers were interested in 'retro' names. I have a similar name and my working-class-made-good grandmother apparently said it was a housemaids name.

Yes definitely.
I'm 50 this year and only ever came across one Emily of my age. Definitely came from an upper class family.

Same with Charlotte and Olivia.
I knew a Charlotte a year older than me who was very well spoken, and the only Olivia I knew as a child was a doctor's daughter.

Emily from Corrie was a good example of an old skool Emily.

Yes, I agree with your colleague. Definitely old fashioned, and slightly posh. Charlotte always posh. Olivia just very very uncommon.

I was at school in the 70s and 80s, private girls school - no Emilys or Olivias but several Charlotte, Annabels (no Isabels), Lucys, Vickys.

When a family member named her daughter Olivia a few years ago some older family members considered it “too posh”

Why the 'who is much older than me'?

FWIW, I was a teenager in the 1980s, and names like Olivia, Emily and Charlotte were names you might find in Jilly Cooper novels, or the names of privately educated girls.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray%27s_a_Laugh

I think it was this

The only Emily that I know went to a very highly academic college in the 90s ,she hasn’t achieved anymore than the Katie’s, Amelia of the same generation !

My nannas middle name was Emily and they had been a well to do family in the late 1890s early 1900s.
My daughter is Emily, she was born 1999 I didn’t know any others and I named her after the little girl from bagpuss.

I’m in my forties and yes, Emily and Charlotte were very upper middle class before the 90s (my parents were middle-middle class and I’d say both names were a social rank above them then - more big houses in the Home Counties and ponies type of names. My parents’ friends’ kids had Seventies names like Sarah, Hannah, Claire, Rachel, Helen and so on. I could only dream of being called Emily, Charlotte, or similar names!

Annabel is another name mentioned on this thread, and was Sloaney and upper-class old-fashioned - a rung above Emily and Charlotte even! And Amelia and Arabella were both very old-fashioned and definitely completely out of style (I only knew the name Amelia via Enid Blyton’s Amelia Jane books).

One name that was ranked with Emily and Charlotte as posh/upper middle/upper class in the 70s and 80s was Chloe! Nowadays it’s not at all posh thanks to a sudden surge in popularity in the 90s (esp on EastEnders), but before then it was definitely super-posh. Similarly Phoebe and Isabella.

Jennifer on the Archers?!

I am a 70s Emily. I think DM was inspired by Bagpuss! I knew maybe one every few years at my school and a very posh one that went to boarding school. My DM said when she called me it, it was an old lady’s name.

In the 50s, 60s, 70s popular names were fairly modern. 50s the een names Maureen, Christine, Pauline. 60s Tracey, Sharon, Debra, Karen. 70s Jacqui, Sally, Lindsey.

Then the revival of old names started - Alice, Daisy, Emily, Amy, Hannah, Charlotte.

To my mother's generation born in the 30s they were the names of their parents or aunties.

As a 60s child I would probably have said Emily was posh as it was like Emily Brontë. I remember when I first heard the name Stella. I thought it was glamorous, my mum thought it was an elderly relative name. Charlotte was for her the name of an elderly aunt. Jennifer was a name to mock having been a character on a radio show. Caroline to me was glamorous and the name of a Monaco princess, to her a posh person who had to be named after an ancestor

I'm in my 50s - agree with those saying these names were posh when i was growing up. Think it's also true that Emily was not a posh name for my grandparents' generation, and think it did have a slight old lady vibe alongside being posh when i was a kid.

Yep. Charlotte was seen by my parents as quite an aspirational/ middle class name. Especially when it was shortened to Lottie. Similarly with Jeremy!

I was born in the sixties. Yes Emily and similar names like Lucy, Charlotte, Olivia, Alice, Chloe, Isabel and Sophie were at the time seen as posh girl names, usually if you knew a girl with one of those names she went to private school.

Remember Bagpuss on TV in the 70s? (well, probably you don't..) 'There lived a little girl, and her name was Emily ...' I think it started becoming fashionable in the 1970s, slowly, and really got going in the 80s.

My classmates at state school had names like Claire, Sarah, Amanda, Louise, Karen, Tracey, Alison. And more traditionally, Jane, Anne, Catherine, Susan.

Actually thinking more about it Emilia is probably even more posh. Also Helena rather than Helen. Caroline seemed posher than Carolyn too.

My mum was an Emily she hated it! She was 88 when she passed away 14 years ago

I’d agree with your granny. And, come to think of it, the housemaid in this house for the 1910 census was an Emily.

Emilys feature heavily in my family history research (although not the direct line), all very much working class!

I know a very posh Emily who is in her 70s - known as Emmo.

I thought amelia and arabella were quite posh until about 2008

Emily and Charlotte were definitely the sort of names upper middle class girls were called in books I read as a child in the 1970s. Think Bronte family too.

Emily was an old lady name when I was at school. Emily and Charlotte were Bronte names so, possibly, cultured at some point. My reference point, though, was Emily Bishop in Coronation Street.

Olivia was seen as posh/middle class whilst Olive definitely wasn't (On The Buses). Not sure when Olivia started to gain traction but, presumably, Olivia Newton John had something to do with it. Grease was 1978 so wasn't immediately after that.