Pygmalion, a play by George Bernard Shaw, portrays the transformation of an English cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, into a ultimate English lady through the work of her "maker," Professor Henry Higgins. Class distinction is prevalent in the play , and the separation of the classes is heavily made aware of by Shaw .The social hierarchy during the 1900‘s in Britain was an unavoidable reality and Shaw had a major disdain for it. A general sense is that the class structures are rigid and should not be tampered with, so the example of Eliza's class mobility is ironic. Pygmalion centers on the class system in which a society is divided, separated by language, education, and wealth.

Discovered by Higgins and Colonel Pickering at Covent Garden, Eliza is caught off guard selling flowers to the Colonel ; meanwhile, the professor realizes Eliza can not speak properly in the ways according to society, as she butchers her words grossly. Later on Eliza visits Higgins to ask for his help with phonetics. She desperately wants to be a real flower-shop girl. Throughout the play, Doolittle eventually is able to achieve her goal phonetically. For Eliza the real test , is to be able to present her new self in public. Shaw uses Eliza's suffering cockney speech as derogatory towards low British society.But this same criticism is cast upon the upper class, whose judgment relies on speech, and where one has grown up. Better off members of English society were able to pick up on different classes based on their speech. Eliza Doolittle rises to a higher ranking not only due to the expertise of Higgins but also through her own development as a woman.

As Shaw portrays London society, it isn’t divided into just two classes , "rich" and "poor." In each group there happens to be a smaller distinction in class. The upper classes stereotyped how the lower classes lived,