ABSTRACT
The possibilities for economic and social mobility during the Victorian period generated persistent anxieties about social identity, which were manifested in debates about the true qualifications of the gentleman or lady, as well as in the tactical use of charges of vulgarity to keep in their places those who encroached upon significant social boundaries. In such border disputes, a command over and appropriate deployment of particular types of knowledge, taste, and behavior – in short, cultural capital – often played a more powerful role than money in establishing status, which helps explain the tight controls on access to education, the most important formal conduit of cultural capital during the period. For much of the century, perhaps the most significant ideological battles were waged between the professional and business middle classes and the traditional gentry, with compromise and incorporation worked out in large part through shared educational ideals, particularly in the late-Victorian public school. The spread of larger incomes, higher literacy, and more diverse educational opportunities to the lowermiddle classes in the last third of the century created new threats to the borders of gentility, as these groups sought to use cultural and educational accomplishments to leverage their way into higher social as well as occupational positions. This essay will examine the ways in which attacks on lower-middle-class vulgarity in the fiction of George Gissing reflect the complicated rhetorical relationship between education, cultivation, and class position in the late-Victorian period. Although owing much to the biographical idiosyncrasies of his own life, Gissing’s treatment of the intersections between class and cultivation also illuminates ideological contradictions operating more widely in late Victorian discourse to justify and to protect elite cultural and social power against an insurgent lower-middle class seeking to use educational credentials to advance its own claims to status.
