The Skin Game first appeared less than two years after the end of the First World War and although not mentioned, some see it as hanging over the drama.
He was also signalling change in the depiction of the daughter Jill who is modern in her outlook and who, at the beginning of the play, argues for an accommodation rather than a standoff with the Hornblowers.
Galsworthy’s magnum opus known as The Forsyte Saga was being completed at around the same time that he was writing The Skin Game and there are similar themes of social change and the breakdown of conventional class structures in both.
So whilst the main characters are deliberate caricatures this allows an unequivocal conclusion that Galsworthy was not taking sides in the dispute – even wanting to put a plague on both their houses.
The young people (Jill Hillcrist and Rolf Hornblower) are the most rational and conciliatory characters and one feels comfortable that the future belongs to them and not to their prejudiced parents.
For some the 1920s might be seen as the last stand of the “Gentleman” before this notion was swept away by the forces that (for example) Evelyn Waugh was to describe in Brideshead Revisited.