Posted by John Wilson on August 15, 2013 at 02:46:23 user hugo.
In Reply to: Re: Re Ransome's working-class characters and the use of certain words posted by Mike Jones on August 11, 2013 at 05:17:49:
To restate the first of my original questions, can we add the Mastodon (Don) in SW to AR’s working-class characters? Is he the son of the farmer where they get milk from, or of the Witches Quay people?
Tenant farmers like the Dixons, Jacksons and Warriners are classed as lower or working class in England. Farmers generally have a higher status in Australia and New Zealand, although there were the poorer “cockies” on a small patch of land (which they owned) in the Dad & Dave stories by Steele Rudd about Dad and Dave from Snake Gully. Neville Shute’s “Requiem for a Wren” is about a British Wren who finds that the Australian farmer’s son who she was going to marry was not the son of a poor “cockie”.