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Thank you for this new article, which fills a gap.
Re: "The demand for formal dress would ... ensure that only a well-off audience would attend". The context here is Victorian society, when class was defined by culture, and not primarily by money. There were, of course, some titled folk who were poverty-stricken. At the same time, the nouveau riche were despised by the upper classes, because they had money but frequently lacked culture due to working-class roots and consequent deficiency of a classical education. The popular archetype of the nouveau riche or arriviste was the self-made industrialist of northern England, and this attitude continued until the mid 20th century - simple examples of gentle mockery of arrivistes being Mr Bott in Cromptom's William books, and Jack Woolley, a previous character in The Archers radio series.
It would make sense for a cultured group to want to exclude the uneducated and uncultured from a high-level discussion of the arts and sciences, and it so happens that higher education was in the 19th century most frequently the privilege of those who had access to dinner dress. I don't have full access to the source, but I think that the above line from the article is misleading. Could we find a more accurate source, do you think? Or could the source have been misinterpreted? Thank you. Storye book (talk) 14:13, 4 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
