Professor Henry Higgins makes a bet with his friend, Col. Pickering, that he can train a bedraggled Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, to pass for a duchess at an elegant upper-crust event by training her in the external trappings of gentility, the most obvious evidence of which is perfect enunciation and speech. The play, much more than a simple romance, is actually a scathing critique of the rigid British class system of the day as well as a commentary on the inequality of economics and gender.