Re: 'Toff' ruled out (was Amazons Toffs?


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Posted by andyb on August 22, 2007 at 23:11:22 from 86.156.155.211 user beardbiter.

In Reply to: Re: 'Toff' ruled out (was Amazons Toffs? posted by Peter H on August 20, 2007 at 15:43:43:

"When I use a word", Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."
This particular Humpty used the term "upper classes" to signify that the upper class can be divided into two or more sub-classes, there is the aristocracy/landed gentry as per Peter H's list the plutocracy of the Crossleys who form what might be called the "upper upper classes" but there are or were also "good families" and "gentlemen of independent means" (I'm not sure what their contemporary equivalents would call themselves). I'd call this the "lower upper class" if it didn't sound silly. These gentlemen and ladies did/do go to the same schools and universities as the aristos and to know each other; the GA is asserting such connections when she makes her visitations.
As for the "run down house" where do you get that from? I thought Mrs B was busy having it decorated in PP. Bob Blackett was local? Who says? He "rescued" the future Mrs B to climb the Matterhorn but that doesn't make him "local" does it? If he bought Beckfoot after WW1 for "a song"whom did he buy it from? It seems to be the consensus on Tarboard that the GA brought up CF &MB at Beckfoot but I'm not sure that it ever actually says this in the text. Perhaps he bought it from the Turners and CF lives there as his sister's guest. This would fit my current favourite theory that CF was actually a ship's steward, which would explain his absences and the stickers on his trunk...
BTW I don't buy the 'Blacketts as landowners' theory either, can't see a scrap of evidence for it, Beckfoot doesn't sound like an old hall or country house, more like the kind of place a medium rich industrialist might have built. Nor is there, as far as I'm aware, any reference to the Blacketts or Turners doing anything agricultural except living in the country and knowing the locals. I'm afraid the deference shown by the farmers to the Blacketts can be explained as that due from farmers and their wives to their "betters" although they would probabaly have seen it as the polite respect due to members of a "good family"
As for what is or is not done by the genuine upper class, well I wouldn't know, I'm not even upper middle class!


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