Thompson points to the burgeoning relationships between the upper and middle classes. He states that the “Evangelicals exhorted the upper classes to reform their own manners as an example to the poor.” (403) These class distinctions blend into the “country vs. town” binary. He continues, “the Industrial Revolution, which drained the countryside of some of its industries and destroyed the balance between rural and urban life, created also in our own minds an image of rural isolation and ‘idiocy.’” (405)
The Irish playwright, Oliver Goldsmith, picked up on this dichotomy and put it front and center in his popular 1773 play, She Stoops to Conquer. The sentimental comedy revolves around the Hardcastle’s, a landed gentry family and the bumbling city rake, Marlowe. On his way to woo Miss Hardcastle, Marlowe mistakes their home for an inn and, thus, hilarity ensues. Marlowe changes his outward appearance and behavior depending on his location. He acts austere ad dignified when in “good company,” but becomes brash and haughty when among the lower orders. In addition, Mrs. Hardcastle, the family matriarch, is an example of the idiocy associated with country manners. Though a woman of class as she is a member of the landed gentry, she still strives to become one of the fashionable London elite. She attempts to dress and decorate her home in the latest fashions, but everything turns out overdone and gaudy. She is a symbolic configuration of Veblen’s theory of emulation – “the stimulus of an invidious comparison which prompts us to outdo those with whom we are in the habit of classing ourselves.” She is trying to “keep up with the Jones’” and in doing so, articulates the divisions even further.
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