Victorian Fictions of Middle-Class Status: Forms of Absence in the Age of Reform

Victorian Fictions of Middle-Class Status recovers the novelistic pervasiveness of a Reform-Era rhetorical form, the negative assertion of value, which grounds middle-class claims to social authority in repudiations of such conventional warrants as birth, wealth, numerical preponderance, command of fact and, specifically for women, the symbolic phallus. Bringing together historical, literary and sociological theory, this study recaptures the Victorians’ broad sense of epistemological uncertainty about their rapidly changing society, reconstructs novelists’ specific attempts to legitimate their traditionally low-status genre and offers fresh readings of novels by Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, William North, Anthony Trollope, William Makepeace Thackeray and Charlotte Yonge, among others.

Albert D. Pionke is the William and Margaret Going Endowed Professor of English at the University of Alabama. He is the author of Teaching Later British Literature: A Thematic Approach (Anthem Press, 2019), The Ritual Culture of Victorian Professionals: Competing for Ceremonial Status, 1838-1877 (Ashgate Publishing, 2013), and Plots of Opportunity: Representing Conspiracy in Victorian England (Ohio State University Press, 2004); coeditor of The Socio-Literary Imaginary in 19th and 20th Century Britain: Victorian and Edwardian Inflections (Routledge, 2020), Thomas Carlyle and the Idea of Influence (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2018), and Victorian Secrecy: Economies of Knowledge and Concealment (Ashgate Publishing, 2010); and general editor of the COVE edition of William North’s The City of the Jugglers(COVE Editions, 2021). In addition, he is co-editor of the Victorians Institute Journal and founding director and principal investigator of Mill Marginalia Online.