Thank you for this. I've been working on a steampunk series and when I started out with my worldbuilding, I thought of my friend who writes Regencies and how we noted that most (but not all) of those stories center on the ruling class especially in a romance.

So when I went to the Victorian Age, I was thinking far more along the lines of Sherlock Holmes, where you do get a sense of London as a dangerous place with glass differences and serious social problems. (Not perfect, of course, but at least Doyle was writing about his contemporary world, not a romanticized view of it.) The annotated versions of Doyle's stories point out these things. The existence of the Baker Street Irregulars and several lower-class clients in Holmes' stories seem deliberate.

Hopefully, my world touches on a lot of the class and racial differences not only because that's my inclination but because why take out stuff that can create such lovely story conflict. Who's got all the cool gadgets? Only the rich kids? Who is benefitting from all these great science inventions? Are more people being fed or are they just being used to create dirigibles? And what if you happen to be a talented scientist at heart but your father is in a debtor's prison?