Opening An Aristocratic Can of Worms

So tonight I was talking over Victorianism and the 1950s with one of my friends tonight (among my crew,  this is our version of sports). And something came up that I know too little to meaningfully comment about, but I find interesting.

The following is the skeleton of an idea I'm having trouble expressing, so bear with me:

Despite advances in cultural and social history, let's be frank, we know far more about the upper classes of the past than we do the lower classes. This can lead to either Marxist repressimism, or a pollyannish love of Gone With the Wind.  Let's take it as granted that we are not landholding aristocrats who love rural communities and hate the city. 

The classical historiographic/sociological move is to say that peasants with money and cities are bourgeoisie, in part since we live on the other side of a change in social structures and economic efficiencies (to wit, the Enlightenment and the Industrial revolutions) that profoundly wipes away rural landholding. But is that really right? What makes a society take on populist values en masse, rather than everyone taking on aristocratic values and being able to fulfill them? How would we tell the difference?

My strong belief is that we're the former, rather than the latter. But what does a shift between them mean, and how would we know? This is the sort of thing that's going to bother me for a while.