ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines the relationship at the end of the late century between fictional realism and social class. It examines the work of novelists who wrote from a world-view that was outside the middle-class world-view most often expressed in mainstream nineteenth-century fiction, and who thus were able to ask previously unasked questions about class in their work. The book then focuses on the George Gissing's The Nether World, a novel that focuses on London's poverty problem. It also examines the relationship between class and gender in Thomas Hardy's Tess ofthed'Urbervilles. The book focuses on the Wells's novel Tono-Bungay as it chronicles the changes taking place in the English class system in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first years of the new one.
