But not only were the middle classes drawing apart from the poor, ...

But not only were the middle classes drawing apart from the poor, each stratum, in a steady competition, was drawing away from the stratum next below, accentuating its newly acquired refinements, and enforcing them with censorious vigilance. The capriciousness, the over-emphasis, of Victorian propriety be-trays its source.

When we have set aside all that England shared with New England, all that nineteenth-century England had in common with nineteenth-century France' and Germany, and all that the England of Victoria had in common with the England of Alan 1113 and Vincent VIII, there remains this peculiar element, what Clough called 'an almost animal sensibility of conscience', this super-morality of the nerves and the senses, of bodily repulsion and social alarm. Cleanliness is next to godliness.

The Victorian insistence, whenever the poor are the topic, on neatness, tidiness, the well-brushed frock and the well-swept room, is significant.