‘A MERE CLERK’: REPRESENTING THE URBAN LOWER-MIDDLE-CLASS MAN IN BRITISH LITERATURE AND CULTURE: 1837-1910. DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Scott Douglass Banville, M.A. ***** The Ohio State University 2005 Approved by Dissertation Committee: Professor David G. Riede, Adviser Adviser Professor Clare Simmons English Graduate Program Professor Amanpal Garcha ABSTRACT My dissertation explores the various ways in which the lower middle class is represented in the Victorian period. 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 I 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 and its representatives to represent the lower middle class as dangerous and thus 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 and as a result will over shadow the middle class. Often times this middle-class anxiety is cloaked in moral concern. As the century progresses, the threat the lower middle class poses changes. Texts like The Suburbans by T. W. H. Crossland depict the lower middle class as a threat to both the cultural and the physical landscape of Great Britain. ii 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 that is independent of middle class influence. The dissertation also shows how Charles 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 ongoing 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. Through a discussion of the shape of the literary field I show how and why this answer to the problem of the lower middle class becomes the accepted way for writers of fiction to represent the lower middle class. I show how Anthony Trollope in The Three Clerks and Shan Bullock in Robert Thorne take up this Dickensian template in their own novels about the lower middle class. 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. All three novels are able to do so because of changes in the literary field that included the demise of the three volume novel, the rise of the newspaper novel, and the advent of the single volume novel. Gissing’s novels highlight the futility of using cultural means like authorship to rise in the iii social hierarchy. In allowing the vulgar Jasper Milvain to succeed as a man of letters New Grub Street shows the literary profession not as the ennobling profession that David Copperfield does, but as no different than any other profession where it is the vulgar who succeed. Gissing’s novels represent the lower middle class as both dangerous and as pitiable. The Diary of a Nobody breaks with the Dickensian template by having its protagonist be content with his lower-middle-class status. Unlike Dickensian protagonists who struggle to escape their lower-middle-class origins, Charles Pooter expresses no desire to escape his lower-middle-class suburban home or leave his lower-middle-class friends. The Diary of a Nobody, while poking fun at the lower middle class does not represent the lower middle class as dangerous nor as pitiable but rather as figures who deserve some amount of recognition as legitimate cultural actors. It is this recognition that lies at the importance of how the lower middle class is represented. Recognition as legitimate cultural actors precedes recognition of the lower middle class’s right to engage in the political process. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank my adviser, David Riede, for his help, encouragement, and patience. David consistently encouraged me to think about the connections between high and low culture, between the literary and the non-literary aspects of Victorian culture. David’s scholarly and professional advice has been invaluable to me throughout my time at Ohio State. He has steadfastly steered me through the various stages of earning my Ph.D. with good grace and a gentle touch. Clare Simmons, whose enthusiasm for the project has always been an inspiration along with her keen eye for the nuances of class and style has helped see this project to its completion. Clare’s often insightful questions and comments helped me to delve beyond the surface and see the cultural work that the texts at hand were doing. Amanpal Garcha’s encouragement and enthusiasm for the project has played an important role helping me finish this project. His astute career and personal advice has been invaluable. Aman always had encouraging words when I needed them most and for this I am extremely grateful. To Barry Faulk goes a deep debt of gratitude for introducing me to Victorian music hall and popular culture. It was Barry who first encouraged me to think and write about Victorian popular culture and to place it within the larger tradition of Victorian Studies. Barry’s on going friendship has been instrumental to my development as a scholar and as a person. I would also like to thank my parents Jack and Marie Banville as well as the rest of v my family for the emotional and financial support without which I would never have been able to contemplate, let alone complete graduate school. Rebecca Dingo’s friendship and companionship during those long days and early mornings at the library is greatly appreciated. Kalenda Eaton-Douglas’s friendship, encouragement, and good cheer were instrumental in the success of this dissertation and helped keep me going. I would also like to thank Ben McCorkle who in addition to being a fine chauffer is a good friend and companion. Our wide-ranging conversations provided much needed respite from the complexities of Victorian culture and literature. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Lori Bailey, Jennifer Camden, Theresa Kulbaga, Dana Oswald, James Weaver, and Susan Williams who all read earlier drafts of this project and offered much fine advice. I would also like to thank the Department of English for the two quarter-long fellowships and other research grants that allowed me research and write this dissertation. The College of Humanities also provided funding to visit the Harvard Theatre Collection. The librarians and staff at the Rare Books and Music Reading Room at the British Library were especially helpful. Their expertise helped me locate many a valuable book and song sheet. I would also like to thank the librarians and staff at the Harvard Theatre Collection who generously opened their collection of music-hall song sheets, newspaper clippings, photographs, and other materials to me. And finally I would like to thank Cheryl Hindrichs without whose love and friendship this would have been a much more difficult task. vi VITA January 6, 1969………………………….…Born, Piscataway, N.J., USA 2000………………………………………...M.A. English, The Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA 2000—Present……………………………..Graduate Teaching & Administrative Assistant, Department of English, The Ohio State University FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: English vii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT….…………………….….………………………………………………….ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS………….….………………………………………………….v VITA………………………..……………………………………………………………vii INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………..…….1 Chapters 1. The Making of the (Dangerous) Victorian Lower Middle Classes: From Dickens, to Albert Smith, and Beyond……………….……………………15 2. Queen of the Drag Kings: Vesta Tilley and the Challenge to Heteronormativity on the Victorian Music-Hall Stage………………………..73 3. Authorizing the Lower Middle Class in the Novels of Dickens and Trollope………………………………………….116 4. Rejecting the Dickensian Template, the Vulgarization of Authorship, and the Return of Uriah Heep…………………………………..177 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………212 viii INTRODUCTION “Peddlers,” and “Boats,” and “Wagons!” Oh! ye shades / Of Pope and Dryden, are we come to this? --George Gordon, Lord Byron So bemoaned Lord Byron over what he saw as the depths to which English poetry had been reduced by the works of William Wordsworth. By the end of the nineteenth century many of Byron’s late contemporaries would make similar complaints about the influence of the masses, specifically the Board School educated lower middle classes, had not just literature but on the whole of British culture. This dissertation shows how and why a range of Victorian cultural elites represented the lower middle class as laughable, dangerous, and pitiable. Despite their ubiquity in Victorian novels, music hall songs and sketches, comic newspapers, social reform literature, and a whole range of popular cultural texts there exists a real lack of modern scholarship concerned with the lower middle class.