The class quiz
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Charles Dickens (1812-70) was the most popular novelist in Victorian England. Many of his books, such as Oliver Twist (1837) and Great Expectations (1860-1), show a real sympathy with the poor. This satirical, and deeply conservative, verse is recited by Lady Bowley (who has had it set to music and sung by the men and boys in the village to whom she has given a ‘nice evening employment’) in ‘The Chimes’ (1845), one of Dickens’ Christmas stories. Keeping to your ‘proper station’ in Victorian times meant being content with the social class into which you were born. However, in the latter half of the 19th century, social pioneers such as Henry Mayhew (1812-87) and Charles Booth (1840-1916) were studying the working classes systematically for the first time and had uncovered the social mobility of people from one class to another.
