Posted by John Wilson on August 18, 2007 at 15:23:45 from 202.154.148.72 user hugo.
In Reply to: Re: Amazons Toffs? posted by Jock on August 18, 2007 at 23:14:16:
Re the GA’s visit to meet Mrs Walker, John realises that his mother didn’t like the GA, but the Walker family may have been acceptable to the GA, making the visit a sort of success. We don’t know.
The Turner family seems to have been reasonably well off; also as CF was sent to Oxford, presumably not on a scholarship! But having just one or two servants indicates that they were middle class but not rich.
And the Crossley family was certainly well off according to the description by Iain Hobbs, but this does not mean that they were upper class – they could have been ‘noveau riche’ (like the Peter Bowles character in the sitcom “To the Manor Born" with Penelope Keith).
Jane Austen’s heroines are gentry not nobility; they are well off (one of them inherits twenty thousand pounds, in the early 1800s) and they don’t think much of “tradesmen”.