bourgeois Betts

Perhaps it's because I haven't read any Betts for about a year, but I was struck by how bourgeois and cliched the book is (I read part of Britannia all at Sea today). Here are examples from the chapter I read:
Britannia is not wealthy, but she notices her companions' "long evening gowns, beautiful garments such as she had often gazed at in Fortnum and Mason's windows or Harrods". I admit I've gone and looked at the gowns in Fortnum and Mason and in Harrod's, but I find it odd that a nurse would do so "often" when her family isn't wealthy. It seems pointlessly aspirational, or like some weird self-torment.
Of course, Jake's family eats off "exquisite china" with seventeenth-century silver for a formal dinner. This dinner hits almost every cliche from the mid-twentieth century that I can think of: lobster soup, roast leg of pork with spiced peaches (served on "a great silver dish" and carved amid what must have been the most banal carver/surgeon jokes imaginable), and then mangoes in champagne as a sweet, served with champagne. All they needed was caviar and, perhaps, baked Alaska, and we could have had a food cliche BINGO.
In other bourgeois, upper-middle-class news, Britannia and Jake play Chopin on the piano, and Britannia receives a Gucci scarf from Jake.