In
, Henry Higgins, a
linguist, happens to run into Eliza Doolittle, a Cockney
flower seller on the
streets on East London. He bets he could pass her off as high-born lady
just
by changing her speech patterns.
The next day, to his surprise,
Eliza
turns up on his doorstep and offers to pay him for elocution lessons.
He laughs at her, but
enters into a bet with his friend Colonel Pickering
that in six months he can convince people
she's an aristocrat. She agrees to
live with him and be trained to speak and act as a lady. He
has her bathed
and dressed in decent clothes and works with her on her accent and
manners.
The comedy in the play is that he is
able to
pass her off as higher classin a scene at his mother's, the other
women are so sure she is a
lady they imitate her when she uses the decidedly
lower-class word "bloody."
Meanwhile, her derelict father has been granted a
yearly allowance from a trust fund and is
upset that he now has to behave
like a middle-class man.
Eliza does pass
muster as a
duchess at a ball, and Higgins wins his bet, showing that class is not a matter
of
genetics.
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