High SocietyIn Victorian London there was an extreme separation between the rich and the poor. The social segregation between the two accounted for the idealized view rich Victorians were able to maintain about the city they lived. They knew that the poor where extremely there, they just simply choose most of the time to ignore them, adopting Scrooge's mentality: they must go to the prisons and the poor houses.
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Upper class London was often mocked and satirized in Dickens fiction as well as the fiction and plays of other Victorian writers, such as Oscar Wilde (whose play the Importance of Being Earnest, mocks the ridiculousness of the Upper Class and the idea of Landed Aristocracy.
The Middle Class
However in the Victorian Period, the vast changes taking place in industry lead the blurring of lines between the Middle and Upper classes. Many Middle class citizens where gaining wealth and privileged and where therefore able to inhabit a place in the aristocracy of Britain that was never open to them before. Dickens offten used the idea of the Middle class moving into the Landed Gentry as comic relief and to poke fun at the anxiety the "old money" of Victorian England felt at the idea of "new money" and the growing power of the Middle class.