Though these factory workers and shop girls could hardly be said to be forming a new elite, they were carving out spaces where social hierarchy was determined by the number of sixpences in your pocket—in other words, by how much money you had. Birth and breeding, the great protectors and promoters of “sound” but dim chaps like Bertie Wooster, had begun their final decline into irrelevance. As Priestley had seen, the Americanization of the ancient English hierarchies was under way.
