Going by James Nestor’s observations and research in his book ‘Breath’: he relays that a Victorian dentist notes “the better the school, the worse the teeth”. Teeth straightness and overcrowding are ‘upper-class’ issues. Poorer people, in the authors claims, are exposed to tougher food. The increased chewing they do actually causes the palate to grow correctly and without crowding. Soft food does the opposite.
I've heard this before, but it isn't really true any more. We all eat soft, processed foods now with little differences between classes. Although we also have much more advanced dentistry, so it isn't necessarily very obvious either
That is definitely not true now as poor people get the overcrowding as well, not to mention that I'm too lazy to see if this class line is actually true.
But more to the point, this person would have been biased. Like today, poor people had some trouble affording the dentist. They would have seen more rich than poor in other words. Like today, good teeth would have been a sign you were wealthy - depending on which country you live in (For example, Brazil has an excellent national dentistry program, and folks tend to go to the dentist regularly as it is cheap-to-free)
