Quote Originally Posted by Adrian II
It is a pity that no one addresses Stephens' view of American society as being separated along class lines much more than British society. Now that is remarkable, right? There is clearly a difference of traditions ar work here. Maybe class boundaries in British society used to be so water-tight that different classes could meet in the same place without any chance of intermingling, whereas in the US with its greater social mobility classes had to be physically delineated.
As you allude, I suspect it is quite difficult to equate the two. Class means something quite different in Europe and the UK.

American writers tend to use class as a differentiator of income bracket. In Europe, it is a differentiator of breeding, that is education and culture - which has a correlation with income, but that is not a main driver.

It has always been almost impossible to move within classes in Europe, except over several generations. It is both possible and a normal aspiration to move through the classes in the USA.

There are shared attributes in both systems of course, and the disenfranchised working class has similar characteristics in poverty/lack of choice, but on this side of the pond, the newly well-off will always be arriviste. Crikey, I know people that would describe any family ennobled post-Charles I as trade.