In contrast, English people encountering each other by chance were typically reserved, from fear that a casual acquaintance - struck up when travelling abroad for instance - would prove an embarrassment when they returned to the rigidly demarcated social boundaries at home.
Yet the later nineteenth century, the Gilded Age of rapid industrial growth and the formation of vast fortunes, was in America too a period of intense social competition, as waves of nouveaux riches battered down the gates of the old social elites. This is well depicted in the novels of Edith Wharton. Status distinctions became more marked, manners books sold in large numbers to people who wanted to emulate not just the ways of the old upper classes America, but also the manners of the European upper classes. There were even attempts to introduce the practice of chaperoning, though not with much success - egalitarian traditions still retained some force.This period may seem an aberration. With some ?uctuations, the twenti-eth century saw the trend reversed, and 'informalisation' became dominant (Wouters 2007). It is not just a matter of easy 'have a nice day' manners; it also extends to relations between the sexes (Wouters 2004).
It is important to stress that, although the connection is no doubt indirect and complicated, this trend of informalisation ran broadly parallel to trends in the distribution of income and wealth in American society which, from 1913 until the last decades of the twentieth century and with some ?uctuations, became relatively ?atter compared with the Gilded Age. Today, however, we are living in a new Gilded Age, when in America (and to a lesser extent in Britain) the income and wealth of the top one percent particularly has increased astro-nomically, while the poor get poorer and the standard of living even of what the Americans call 'the middle class' (which includes skilled manual workers in steady employment) is static or falling 2 Nor are rates of social mobility as great as is commonly believed: a recent study (Blanden et al. 2005) shows them to be lower in the usa (and the uk) than in Canada, Germany and the four Scandinavian countries. I have spoken of the disparity between perception and reality as 'the curse of the American Dream.