Highlighting the significance of the insignificant people who constitute most of humanity and its history. See a similar praise of unsung heroes in Eliot’s Middlemarch, and an echoing cry by Vasily Grossman. 

I sense that George Eliot and Vasily Grossman would have enjoyed a chat over a pot or samovar of tea. Playwrights among you, feel free to run with this idea and transform it into a performance. 

Nevertheless, to speak paradoxically, the existence of insignificant people has very important consequences in the world. It can be shown to affect the price of bread and the rate of wages, to call forth many evil tempers from the selfish, and many heroisms from the sympathetic, and, in other ways, to play no small part in the tragedy of life.

Source: George Eliot, Adam Bede (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985 (1859)), p. 111