Although Pritchett's stories, much like their creator's early life, contain strong elements of social comedy, they also convey elements of social and class realism, as well as at least one significant instance of social protest.

The realism may best be observed in "Sense of Humour" (from You Make Your Own Life, 1938), in which representatives of the middle-class business community work terribly hard to achieve and maintain prosperity, but do not always succeed. Pritchett introduces his reader to three characters who, eventually, reveal a series of complex and often interrelated personal and social conflicts: Arthur Humphrey, the narrator and a socially conscious snob, shares his religion equally with the Methodists and Presbyterians; socially and economically he exists as a middle-class English commercial traveler (modelled after someone Pritchett actually had met in Ireland during his tenure with the Christian Science Monitor). Muriel MacFarlane, an attractive Irish girl with...