Drawing on literary texts by Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and George Gissing and non-literary texts appearing in periodicals, comic newspapers, and music-hall songs this dissertation show how the lower middle class consisting of those members of British society working variously as Civil Service, commercial, and retail clerks, school teachers, and living in the suburbs of London and other large cities is represented as dangerous, laughable, and pitiable. Through readings of self-improvement books by Samuel Smiles, conduct and instruction manuals, and didactic literature I show how middle-class anxieties about its own position vis-à-vis the aristocracy and the working class drive middle-class elites to represent the lower middle class as dangerous, in need of containment, and surveillance. One of the constant fears of the middle class is that the lower middle class will develop a cultural and economic identity of its own.
I then show how the lower middle class poses a threat to the heteronormative order that both underwrites and is underwritten by the bourgeois order. The lower middle class enjoyment of female to male cross-dressing performers like Vesta Tilley highlights how the music hall develops into a place where lower-middle-class men and women can re-imagine their class, gender, and sexual identities. As such, it becomes the locus of an emergent lower-middle-class cultural identity independent of middle class influence.
The dissertation also shows how Dickens in David Copperfield offers up a solution to the socio-literary problem of the lower middle class by deploying the Bildungsroman to allow for the social mobility of some members of the lower middle class. Specifically, David Copperfield enters into the Victorian debate over the nature of the gentleman and proposes that the best way for young lower-middle-class men to rise to the rank of middle-class gentlemen is through authorship. The dissertation then turns to a discussion of how Born in Exile and New Grub Street by George Gissing and The Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith challenge the Dickensian template.