ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on the social and the cultural and on the interplay between received ideas and lived experience. It also focuses on change over time in Victorian Britain not by charting changes in Parliamentary politics, or by demonstrating the growth of manufacturing, but by looking at the changing meanings of a single object, the piano, in both print culture and lived experience. Working-class people finally enjoyed sufficient hours outside of work, and sufficient discretionary income, to participate in consumer culture. Some had been able to join the lower middle-class: the dramatic expansion of education and literacy on the one hand, and bureaucracies on the other, had created a huge number of low-level white collar workers who, a generation before, would have done manual labor.
