The squeeze that the middle classes are enjoying in this frenzy of cuts and taxation is not what the middle classes once liked to mean by the word.
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Owen Matthews
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The squeeze that the middle classes are enjoying in this frenzy of cuts and taxation is not what the middle classes once liked to mean by the word. In mad King George’s golden reign, a squeeze was a thronged party. ‘The heads of all the Norwich people are in a whirl, occasioned by the routs which have been introduced amongst them this winter,’ wrote the bluestocking Anna Laetitia Barbauld in a letter to her brother in 1779. ‘Do you know the different terms? There is a squeeze, a fuss, a drum, a rout; and lastly, a hurricane, when the whole house is full from top to bottom.
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