ABSTRACT
Chapter Four examines and contextualizes the third major element of respectability’s map, the notion of a hierarchy of moral standing laid atop other conceptions of social stratification. It demonstrates the importance of this notion particularly through a discussion of the relationship between respectability and constructions of class and gender in the public sphere. The discussion includes analyses of Thomas B. Macaulay’s presentation of the middle class in his parliamentary speeches supporting the British Reform Act of 1832, the interaction between class and moral standing in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, the answers which Elizabeth Gaskell suggests to the “social question” in her novel North and South, and the claims made by the German writer Gustav Freytag in his best-selling novel Soll und Haben for the centrality in a modern nation of a middle class characterized mainly by its respectability.
