Things aren't made easier by the fact that resources on Victorian England tend to be like Victorian Emporium, full of admiration for the rituals of the upper classes of that era but with little examination of the social realities underlying a system where the lower classes were considered beneath notice, or be like the Victoria Research Web, concentrating on scholars and providing no real help to the novice. This is also true of available books and library materials for the most part.

The problem is chiefly that Victorian writers were very prolific and typically suffered from the pecuiliar affliction of Victorian upper classes, the illusion that the lower classes (and indeed, the rest of the world) didn't exist except in relation to themselves. Nearly all novels and literary depictions of Victorian England (and all that are identified as "Victorian") concern themselves exclusively with the doings of the upper classes. Servents exist in the same way as flowers, which is to say, when they are no longer in costume they are no longer noticable. Menials and other lower class denizens that have no reason to interact with the genteel classes are regarded rather like native wildlife.

The overwhelming (and rather silly) impression that this tends to convey is that everyone in Victorian England was independently wealthy and had access to the highest circles of society as long as they were polite company.

Even Dickens (who's stories are so far outside the ordinary run of Victorian literature as to deserve its own catagory--Dickensian), always has his protagonist a child or family that by birthright belongs to the upper classes but is forced to live as menials by economic or political upheaval. In fact, the world of Dickensian fiction is closest to the reality for the majority of urban dwellers in Victorian England, but without any possibility that a cameo portrait in a locket or other such development would bring about a sudden elevation to the upper classes.

Good luck to you!