Explore "Certain Personal Matters" by H.G. Wells on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Your cultivated man is apt to pity the respectable poor, on the score of their lack of small excitements, and even in the excess of his generous sympathy to go a Toynbee-Halling in their cause. And Sir Walter Besant once wrote a book about Hoxton, saying, among other things, how monotonous life was there. That is your modern fallacy respecting the lower middle class. One might multiply instances. The tenor of the pity is always the same.
"No music," says the cultivated man, "no pictures, no books to read nor leisure to read in. How can they pass their lives?"