ABSTRACT
Although the middle class and aristocracy set the tone and fashion of the later nineteenth century, about 75 per cent of the population belonged to the working class; and for many of them their priorities of life were different from those of their social superiors. The business of making a living was for thousands of craftsmen, tradesmen, labourers, farm servants, factory hands, miners, engineers, mill and foundry workers, shipbuilders, rail-waymen, laundresses, domestic servants and a host of others the central experience of life. Perversely these are the people usually left out of history. They have been largely ignored because it was thought they did not matter, since they did not make important national decisions. But for that very reason they are the ones who experienced the true values of late Victorian society, not its pretensions.
