Victorian Fictions of Middle-Class Status

Abstract

Victorian Fictions of Middle-Class Status reconstructs the unusual, at times even paradoxical attempts of Victorian novelists to define the limits of middle-class status. Contrary to the most widely accepted ideas of status—themselves most often reliant upon Max Weber’s Economy and Society and/or Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction—which identify a range of individual and collective practices designed to establish social dominance on the basis of “style of life” or “cultural capital,” this book emphasizes the importance not of presence but rather of absence, not of displays of legitimate possession but rather of repudiations of more conventional rationales for social authority. Bringing together historical, literary, and sociological theory, Victorian Fictions of Middle-Class Status recaptures the Victorians’ broad sense of epistemological uncertainty about their rapidly changing society. Proposing a new and newly historicized theory of status across multiple subgenres of the Victorian novel—including orphan narrative, financial fiction, social problem novels, and domestic realism—the book offers fresh readings of novels by Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, William North, Anthony Trollope, William Makepeace Thackeray, Charlotte Yonge, and others.