Huh, that's a neat one. I'd like to find a copy some time.

ABE Books has a few copies at moderate prices, from battered paperbacks for $1 to a first UK edition hardcover for $85. It's always better to check down the list, though... one of the dealers will almost certainly be offering the same first edition for substantially less. Just a few entries down I see a copy for $40.

http://www.abebooks.com/

http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=Fleming&sortby=2&tn=The+Flying+Visit&x=34&y=5

I'll have to check it out.

I haven't made a study of it, but I think the Fleming family would be what the English call "middle class." We might call them "professional class" -- the unofficial group that's still middle class in our parlance, but as lawyers, doctors, college professors and so on they make a lot more money than the rest of us... but aren't quite rich.

Historically, the English middle class springs out of merchants, jewelers, bankers and other sorts of people who were not labouring on farms or in workshops. They were often very well-heeled, but it wasn't money that distinguished them. What made them middle class was that they weren't nobillity and hadn't a title. They were in the middle between the gentility and peasants.

In North America, though, the term was applied merely to income, since we don't (officially) have a class system.

I'm proud to say that the cartoonist David Low was originally from New Zealand

His cartoons during the war were so good that Low was actually on Hitler's "arrest on sight" list in the event of a successful German invasion of Britain...

That's true, he was... and he was. Hendrik van Loon, only the other hand, was a popular writer of histories and on the arts, rather like the Isaac Asimov of his day, and quite critical of he Nazi regime. But he only imagined he was on Hitler's "wish" list.