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.