The Universe of Disco

Social classes identified by letters

Looking up the letter E in the Big Dictionary, I learned that British sociologists were dividing social classes into lettered strata long before Aldous Huxley did it in Brave New World (1932). The OED quoted F. G. D’Aeth, “Present Tendencies of Class Differentiation”, The Sociological Review, vol 3 no 4, October, 1910:

The present class structure is based upon different standards of life…

A. The Loafer
B. Low-skilled labour
C. Artizan
D. Smaller Shopkeeper and clerk
E. Smaller Business Class
F. Professional and Administrative Class
G. The Rich

The OED doesn't quote further, but D’Aeth goes on to explain:

A. represents the refuse of a race; C. is a solid, independent and valuable class in society. … E. possesses the elements of refinement; provincialisms in speech are avoided, its sons are selected as clerks, etc., in good class businesses, e.g., banking, insurance.

Notice that in D’Aeth's classification, the later letters are higher classes. According to the OED this was typical; they also quote a similar classification from 1887 in which A was the lowest class. But the OED labels this sort of classification, with A at the bottom, as “obsolete”.

In Brave New World, you will recall, it is the in the other direction, with the Alphas (administrators and specialists), at the top, and the Epsilons (menial workers with artificially-induced fetal alcohol syndrome) at the bottom.

The OED's later quotations, from 1950–2014, all follow Huxley in putting class A at the top and E at the bottom. They also follow Huxley in having only five classes instead of seven or eight. (One has six classes, but two of them are C1 and C2.)

I wonder how much influence Brave New World had on this sort of classification. Was anyone before Huxley dividing British society into five lettered classes with A at the top?

[ By the way, I have been informed that this paper, which I have linked above, is “Copyright © 2020 by The Sociological Review Publication Limited. All rights are reserved.” This is a bald lie. Sociological Review Publication Limited should be ashamed of themselves. ]

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