Culture, Class and Gender in the Victorian Novel

Gentlemen, Gents and Working Women

A. Young

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 1999
• Print ISBN: 9781349409624, 9780333740170
• eBook ISBN: 9780230377073
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

This book examines class and its representation in Victorian literature, focusing on the emergence of the lower middle class and middle-class responses to it. Arlene Young analyses portraits of white-collar workers, both men and women, who laboured under disparaging misperceptions of their values, abilities, and cultural significance, and shows how these misperceptions were both formulated and resisted. The analysis includes canonical texts like Dickens's Little Dorrit and Gissing's The Odd Women as well as less well-known works by Dinah Mulock Craik, Margaret Oliphant, Amy Levy, Grant Allen, H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, and May Sinclair.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Culture, Class and Gender in the Victorian Novel
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 A Kind of a Sort of a Gentleman’: the Gentleman’s Progress from Sir Charles Grandison to John Halifax
• 2 The Literary Evolution of the Lower Middle Class: The Natural History of the Gent to Little Dorrit
• 3 Voices from the Margins: Dickens, Wells and Bennett
• 4 Bachelor Girls and Working Women: Women and Independence in Oliphant, Levy, Allen and Gissing
• 5 Modern Prometheus Unbound: May Sinclair and The Divine Fire
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index