The idle unemployed, not workers, were labeled the dangerous classes.

Evidence

Just exactly who respectable England was referring to with this phrase is rarely clear. It seems generally to have covered everybody in dire economic straits, and in the early industrial city, that was quite a crew. Of this group, those who actually worked, when they worked, could hardly have been very dangerous. Descriptions of employment conditions at the time make very clear that anyone holding down a job would have neither the time nor the energy for “revolution.” 10 But, as we have seen, not everybody was working. The potential work force of the early industrial city greatly exceeded the system’s capacity to absorb it. In the cities of the period, the organizationally unaffiliated, the “floaters” were highly visible, and they must have seemed very dangerous indeed. Not only did these wretches have the effrontery to endanger that most holy of holies-private property, not only did they begin to show every indication of their willingness to radically alter the distribution of wealth, 11 but they had the gall to deny to the developing petit bourgeois the respect and status that the latter felt they deserved. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 330

Categorization

• XREF: The identification of strangers/‘floaters’ as morally dangerous by class anxiety ties into the reader’s project about how city dwellers categorize strangers.