Albert D. Pionke is the William and Margaret Going Endowed Professor of English and Associate Dean of General Education and Academic Affairs in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Alabama.

Essential reading for Victorianists, this book gives a powerful and illuminating account of the novel’s role in defining the middle class. Set against birth and wealth, force and fact, desire and authority – the middle class, Pionke shows us, was knowable only by way of its others

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction: Victorian Middle-Class Status and the Negative Assertion of Value Chapter One: The Orphan Narratives of a Class Lacking AntecedentsChapter Two: Repudiations of Wealth in Victorian Financial FictionChapter Three: The Violence at the Heart of the Social Problem Novel Chapter Four: Social Domination, Social Scientific Empiricism, and Novelistic Distrust of the Modern Fact Chapter Five: Legitimizing the Subjection of Middle-Class Women in Mid-Victorian Fiction AfterwordBibliographyIndex