The English class system and the Marlows in't

[tabouli.livejournal.com]

Being one of them iggerant colonial types, I don't really understand the English class system. I have seen the Marlow family described as both 'upper middle class' and 'landed gentry'. Some questions:

1. What is the difference between 'upper middle class' and 'landed gentry' in terms of typical profile, assets/income, attitudes and behaviour?

2. Seeing Trennels is a large farm entailed to the Marlow line, the family is presumably 'landed', but does this necessarily make them 'gentry'?

3. Whereabouts do senior naval officers stand in the grand scheme of social status and income?

Tell all, ye wise and knowledgeable...

Comments

[richenda.livejournal.com]

Well, you have to be introduced (to the cake and the Ball : D) by someone who's already been introduced. If you didn't know that it still existed, presumably you didn't know anyone who had?

And I agree that there are immense variations and gradations, and that it was very different in the 70s than in the 40s and 50s - but, in my view, the strongest argument is that the author says that they were yeomanry in Elizabethan times, when they owned the same land, and that, to me, discounts them completely from the genre. Yeomanry might and often were considered gentry, especially still owning the same land for four centuries, but to be regarded as landed gentry I think that they'd have had to make a lot more social and ownership progress than they seem to have made.

An argument that I didn't bother with last time is much weaker - would their grandmother have been so discouraging of the marriage and so supercilious of the family if they were regarded as landed gentry?

[mrs-redboots.livejournal.com]

Oh, I think my parents knew plenty of people, they just didn't want it for us. Nor would I have wanted it, I don't think.

Don't forget that just having been there for 500 years, or whatever, would make the Marlows pretty much viewed as "landed gentry" in the eyes of the village people, even if not among their own social circle. Although "our" Marlows, in point of fact, would have been viewed as "incomers" since they had been living in London.

And I think the grandmother would have been supercilious about _anybody_ wanting to marry Pamela at that stage - I think she was too young, wasn't she?