You should read road to wigan pier lol. this sentiment is age old. I do understand that you may disagree but its clear George orwell didn't! And our society is becoming increasingly feudal.
'I was born into what you might describe as the lower-upper-middle
class. The upper-middle class, which had its heyday in the eighties and
nineties, with Kipling as its poet laureate, was a sort of mound of
wreckage left behind when the tide of Victorian prosperity receded. Or
perhaps it would be better to change the metaphor and describe it not as a
mound but as a layer--the layer of society lying between L2000 and L300 a
year: my own family was not far from the bottom. You notice that I define
it in terms of money, because that is always the quickest way of making
yourself understood. Nevertheless, the essential point about the English
class-system is that it is not entirely explicable in terms of money.
Roughly speaking it is a money-stratification, but it is also
interpenetrated by a sort of shadowy caste-system; rather like a jerrybuilt
modem bungalow haunted by medieval ghosts. Hence the fact that the upper-
middle class extends or extended to incomes as low as L300 a year--to
incomes, that is, much lower than those of merely middle-class people with
no social pretensions. Probably there are countries where you can predict a
man's opinions from his income, but it is never quite safe to do so in
England; you have always got to take his traditions into consideration as
well. A naval officer and his grocer very likely have the same income, but
they are not equivalent persons and they would only be on the same side in
very large issues such as a war or a general strike--possibly not even
then.
Of course it is obvious now that the upper-middle class is done for.
In every country town in Southern England, not to mention the dreary wastes
of Kensington and Earl's Court, those who knew it in the days of its glory
are dying, vaguely embittered by a world which has not behaved as it ought.
I never open one of Kipling's books or go into one of the huge dull shops
which were once the favourite haunt of the upper-middle class, without
thinking 'Change and decay in all around I see'. But before the war the
upper-middle class, though already none too prosperous, still felt sure of
itself. Before the war you were either a gentleman or not a gentleman, and
if you were a gentleman you struggled to behave as such, whatever your
income might be. Between those with L400 a year and those with L2000 or
even L1000 a year there was a great gulf fixed, but it was a gulf which
those with L400 a year did their best to ignore. Probably the
distinguishing mark of the upper-middle class was that its traditions were
not to any extent commercial, but mainly military, official, and
professional.
People in this class owned no land, but they felt that they were
landowners in the sight of God and kept up a semi-aristocratic outlook by
going into the professions and the fighting services rather than into
trade. Small boys used to count the plum stones on their plates and
foretell their destiny by chanting, 'Army, Navy, Church, Medicine, Law';
and even of these 'Medicine' was faintly inferior to the others and only
put in for the sake of symmetry. To belong to this class when you were at
the L400 a year level was a queer business, for it meant that your
gentility was almost purely theoretical. You lived, so to speak, at two
levels simultaneously. Theoretically you knew all about servants and how to
tip them, although in practice you had one, at most, two resident servants.
Theoretically you knew how to wear your clothes and how to order a dinner,
although in practice you could never afford to go to a decent tailor or a
decent restaurant. Theoretically you knew how to shoot and ride, although
in practice you had no horses to ride and not an inch of ground to shoot
over. It was this that explained the attraction of India (more recently
Kenya, Nigeria, etc.) for the lower-upper-middle class. The people who went
there as soldiers and officials did not go there to make money, for a
soldier or an official does not want money; they went there because in
India, with cheap horses, free shooting, and hordes of black servants, it
was so easy to play at being a gentleman.
In the kind of shabby-genteel family that I am talking about there is
far more consciousness of poverty than in any working-class family above
the level of the dole. Rent and clothes and school-bills are an unending
nightmare, and every luxury, even a glass of beer, is an unwarrantable
extravagance. Practically the whole family income goes in keeping up
appearances. It is obvious that people of this kind are in an anomalous
position, and one might 'be tempted to write them off as mere exceptions
and therefore unimportant. Actually, however, they are or were fairly
numerous. Most clergymen and schoolmasters, for instance, nearly all Anglo-
Indian officials, a sprinkling of soldiers and sailors, and a fair number
of professional men and artists, fall into this category. But the real
importance of this class is that they are the shock-absorbers of the
bourgeoisie. The real bourgeoisie, those in the L2000 a year class and
over, have their money as a thick layer of padding between themselves and
the class they plunder; in so far as they are aware of the Lower Orders at
all they are aware of them as employees, servants, and tradesmen. But it is
quite different for the poor devils lower down who are struggling to live
genteel lives on what are virtually working-class incomes. These last are
forced into close and, in a sense, intimate contact with the working class,
and I suspect it is from them that the traditional upper-class attitude
towards 'common' people is derived.;