Classes and the Masses in Victorian England
Despite the aspirations of Disraeli and others for 'one nation', the dynamics and disparities of Victorian society inexorably sharpened the sense of class identity and its verbal expression.
By the time that John Wade published his History of the Middle and Working Classes in 1833, the use of such class terminology had become ever more common in Britain. Only two years previously the National Union of the working Classes had been founded, while the year before that the Birmingham Political Union was formed as:
...a GENERAL POLITICAL UNION between the Lower and the Middle Classes of the People.
These were heady days in British political life, and times of social and political crisis diffuse words which have spread more slowly in the years before. Witnesses before parliamentary inquiries spoke a language of class with increasing comfort – in front of the Select Committee that investigated public libraries in 1849 people of widely varying political opinions talked with ease of 'working classes', 'middle class', 'lower classes', and so on.
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