In addition to jeers and insults, embarrassments and shocks, and dangers to self and property, it seems likely that the petit bourgeois were also subject to another less threatening, but perhaps no less irritating, form of harassment: they were constantly accosted on the streets by the unemployed, begging, offering services, or asking for jobs. … He adds that he soon found himself becoming irritated by all this "assault" on his self and wanted nothing so much as the right to be left alone (personal communication). The proud but defenseless middle class of an earlier period must have felt much the same way.

XREF: Connects to contemporary dynamics of street solicitation and urban begging, and how discomfort with being accosted shapes attitudes toward the poor.

XREF: Relates to contemporary urban dynamics of panhandling and street encounters by residents.

Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order a…, loc. 341