Great quotation

I've just found this wonderful quotation from the novel Arlington by Thomas Henry Lister (1832):

"No man can study the feelings and character of another class so well as those of his own. The educated rich cannot read the innermost thoughts of the uneducated poor; nor will the poor be better able to fathom the characters of the rich. Every man is to those of another class as a foreigner among them; and the utmost knowledge he can acquire will, as compared with what he can gather in his own, be like a foreigner's information respecting other countries, compared with that which he may obtain at home. Mix with the poor as much as you will, you are not, and cannot be as one of themselves. You will be as a spy among them; and there will be much in the recesses of their minds, which, owing to your position, you will never know. Much will be presented to you under a distorted aspect—partly because your associations are not as theirs, and you view things through a different medium—partly because you are treated as a stranger, and often purposely misled. Writers will sometimes profess to exhibit the feelings, habits, and language of the poor, upon the strength of a few cruises of mere curiosity. Of the intrinsic character, they know little, but they catch the phraseology, which is easy enough, and take note of a few externals; and this is sufficient for them, and perhaps for certain of their readers, who think they have found a fine ' bit of nature,' when they have got nothing but a mouthful of slang."

Personally I find it rather surprising that an author in 1832 was expressing such scepticism about the possibility of accurately capturing the language of the poor.