What is your class status?

[King Henry V]

Ironically, measuring someone's class based on those criteria strikes me as far more elitist than measuring based on wealth. It is entirely possible for a poor person from an inner city or a rural area to become successful, contribute a great deal to society, and yet never have a formal education or travel enough to become 'cultured.' While good manners are perfectly accessible to even the poorest people, the whole concept of manners is defined by what the upper class finds acceptable. The poorer you are, the less likely you are to have been raised in a manner that will be deemed acceptable by upper class standards.

I somewhat disagree. Whilst it requires a lot of luck and hard work to make a fortune from scratch, any person with a bit of ingenuity and free time can affect the habits of the traditional upper classes, just look at some of the famous con men of history. Those qualities which Romanus mentioned are not so difficult to attain; indeed I believe that everyone, rich or poor, should be well-mannered and display an interest in culture.


Middle class is I suppose the category into which I fit most accurately. However, I am interested in high-brow culture and display quite a snobbish view, I admit, of the more popular forms of entertainment. I speak in a manner which in England is decidedly "upper class" (I sound similar to Trevor Howard), probably much more "upper-class" than those of the English upper classes of my generation from what little I have seen or heard of them, but this is not an affectation of mine, merely due to being brought up abroad and having attended a French-speaking school, only receiving the influence of my mother's Received Pronunciation English, which has lead to a kind of fossilised variety of it, unaffected by the increasingly rounded-vowels of modern English, or, Heaven forbid, mongrel International School English, which is what a good deal of my friends speak. I also have a taste for smart clothes of a vintage cut, not to mention the finer things in life, a trait which my forebears have amply had. From a cultural point of view, I would fit into the upper-class bracket.

Nevertheless, from an economic perspective, my present situation is definitely middle class, and lower middle class at that. My mother's living is precarious, depending as it does on rented property; my father has a very good job, but for a myriad of reasons which I shall not go into here, he only gives me what the law dictates and no more (parents are divorced). Money has been tight quite frequently; we almost always have a lodger in the flat. Yet despite this, we (my mother and I) have lived quite well, even perhaps quite beyond our means, which probably does not help financial matters.

As to my socio-economic ancestry, it's a bit of a mixed bag, like many people. My mother's maternal grandmother as well as my paternal grandmother were of the German aristocracy, the latter's family owned a bit of land in Silesia. My mother's maternal grandfather was a German Jew who had worked his way up to own several shoe shops in Berlin before the war, and my paternal grandfather came from a family of career soldiers who had risen to officers only in the first world war. Needless to say, neither my great-grandmother's or my grandmother's family particularly liked these respective unions.
Over on the slim portion of my family that is actually English, they were lower-middle class clerks living in St John's Wood, London. However, my maternal grandmother happened to be rather good at cricket and played professionally for the Marylebone Cricket Club, which back in the day would also tour the great houses, universities and schools of the land. Immersed in the world of the English aristocracy, he quickly copied their speech and habits.

All in all a rather prosperous set-up, one would think. However, in 1933 a little man called Mr Hitler came to power in Germany, and did two things which affected me personally. First of all he made it a bit unpleasant for the Jews, so my maternal grandmother and her parents had to hop it to Blighty in 1938, leaving all that they had behind, of course. Secondly he went off and did a silly thing like starting a second world war, which, though it started off quite swimmingly for Germany, didn't quite work out as well as he had planned, with the result that it came second. The Allies decided to amputate a rather large chunk of its territory, which unfortunately for my family included Silesia, handed to Poland, who, blasted commies that they were, even if they hadn't expelled my father's side of the family along with all the other Germans, would have disposessed them for being aristocrats. The ancestral abode was dynamited as testimony to the glory of the triumphant proletariat.

So, as well as packing my grandmother off to England, thus indirectly making me English (by temperament if not entirely by blood), old Adolf robbed me of my rightful place as a heel-clicking Prussian Junker. I hope the bastard is burning in hell as we speak (that and of course for all the other nasty things that he did which haven't effected me directly).

So there you go, the social class of King Henry V explained.