the quality

alternative the Quality

1. UKarchaicidiomaticpluralplural onlyThe upper class, the high society, the gentry; the people of quality.

   20 July 1713, Joseph Addison, The Guardian I shall appear at the masquerade dressed up in my feathers, that the quality may see how pretty they will look in their travelling habits.

   4 more examples

   The rector kept open house on that day, but by degrees the “quality” gave up going, and the fair, of course, became disreputable, till at last it was put down as a nuisance.

   1887, The, Athenaeum, p. 445

   I would have spoken further, but before I could get under way the door opened, revealing Ma Cream, and [my manservant Jeeves] shimmered silently from the room. Unless expressly desired to remain, he always shimmers off when what is called the Quality arrive.

   1960, P[elham] G[renville] Wodehouse, chapter XIX, in Jeeves in the Offing, London: Herbert Jenkins, →OCLC

   [In 1919 Ireland.] ‘Be quiet, Ripon! It's not nonsense at all. Ripon's father calls us “fish-eaters” and “Holy Romans” and so on. So does Ripon. So will you, Major, when you're among the “quality”. In fact, you'll become a member of the “quality” yourself, high and mighty, too good for the rest of us.’

   1970, James Gordon Farrell, Troubles, 1st edition, page 34

   Yet they did not pretend to be members of ‘the quality’, the people of fashion, the cosmopolitan beau monde or the ton, although they were not above harping on their exalted acquaintances among the nobility or the antiquity of their lineage when they saw fit.

   2006, James Alan Downie, "Who Says She's a Bourgeois Writer? Reconsidering the Social and Political Contexts of Jane Austen's Novels", in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 40, Nr. 1, Fall 2006

1. pluralplural onlyAlternative letter-case form of the quality (the upper class)

   I would have spoken further, but before I could get under way the door opened, revealing Ma Cream, and [my manservant Jeeves] shimmered silently from the room. Unless expressly desired to remain, he always shimmers off when what is called the Quality arrive.

   1960, P[elham] G[renville] Wodehouse, chapter XIX, in Jeeves in the Offing, London: Herbert Jenkins, →OCLC