Kingsley was a master of simple, clear prose and was considered a reformer.
I spent a few days in Edinburgh with an educator there and learned a little of the urchins who inhabited the city before the turn of the century. One reformer sent out men with nets to capture them for his school. The separation of people into gentry and near-animals as sugggested by Malcolm Douglas was a fact of life in major centers in Europe and, to a lesser extent, in America. In the New World, slaves had the worst position in the colonies, from Dutch times until emancipation; in the British West Indies about 1840 and in the States in 1865. After that, conditions for a short time in the major cities approached conditions in Europe.
In New York, areas where the upper layers of the gentry lived were patrolled to keep out the lower strata; unless they had proof of work there.