As I was thinking over this, in walking up Fleet Street the other day, my eye caught the title of a book standing open in a bookseller’s window. It was — On the necessity of the diffusion of taste among all classes. ‘Ah,’ I thought to myself, ‘my classifying friend, when you have diffused your taste, where will your classes be? The man who likes what you like, belongs to the same class with you, I think. Inevitably so. You may put him to other work if you choose; but, by the condition you have brought him into, he will dislike the work as much as you would yourself. You get hold of a scavenger or a costermonger, who enjoyed the Newgate Calendar for literature, and ‘Pop goes the Weasel’ for music. You think you can make him like Dante and Beethoven? I wish you joy of your lessons; but if you do, you have made a gentleman of him: — he won’t like to go back to his costermongering.’
John Ruskin, Unto this Last, and Other Writings235 (Clive Wilmer, ed. Penguin Classics 2005) (1862).
In the event, it was tastes that diffused, and diffused up rather than down, and taste that disappeared, instead of classes.