ARLENE YOUNG is Assistant Professor, Department of English at the University of Manitoba.

'Arlene Young's acute and lively book could be subtitled 'The Gent's Revenge'. Her path-breaking study of nineteenth-century and early modern British writing shows how representations of the lower middle class, especially of men, sustained, tested, and altered the ideas of the dominant middle classes about themselves. Young's reading of Dickens and other novelists, some of whom she recalls from unwarranted neglect, demonstrates how literature works as both a register and an agent of social tensions and change.' - Donald Gray, editor, Victorian Studies

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