“What use did it serve to emphasise the unbridgeable gap between the lives of these people and people of our kind? It only consoled and comforted the middle classes that their lot was better. They will tell you that they want to know the details of the daily hardships of rural life in order to be aware, in order to be moral, but the appetite really was for propping up their idea of themselves as people with sympathetic souls and sensitive social consciences. It was not awareness they were after, it was the reinforcement of the separation between ‘us’ and ‘them’.”