Martin Brookes

« Although racist attitudes were not new to the nineteenth century, the rationale behind the racism had shifted significantly since the days of the Enlightenment. Race, in the Victorian sense of the word, was a broad term that represented differences not just in ethnicity, but in class and social status. In the first decades of the nineteenth century many European thinkers had begun to question why social divisions remained so entrenched in prosperous and progressive nations like Britain and France. Instead of emancipating the people, the industrial revolution had merely reinforced social hierarchies and, in some cases, created new ones. The inner-city slum, for instance, became a potent image of the early Victorian era and a source of great social and philosophical concern. Why did such grinding poverty persist ? Why had progress touched the lives of some people and not others ?
The Victorian solution to this problem was to move away from the Enlightenment view that all men were inherently equal and to assert the exact opposite. In this revised social scheme, the poor could not escape their poverty because they were intrinsically incapable of doing so. » (p. 113)