ABSTRACT
The article presents the ways in which sons of the rich, early nineteenth-century English middle class, as portrayed in Victorian literature, attempted to join the ranks of the landed aristocracy. They were expected to spend their leisure with scions of the nobility and to engage in conspicuous consumption. Although it was tantamount to rejecting the middle-class ethos, which is focused on work, it had the backing of the City class as an investment in social status. The crowning effect of such efforts was marriage into the aristocratic class: indeed, a contract between two families. Such marriages were not mésalliances as both sides considered themselves gentlemen. In the early nineteenth century, this idea was a link between the old-type of estate-based society and the new class society; it was this idea that made a fluid change in the social structure possible. The phenomenon of the gentleman is a good illustration of recognition versus class prestige and the honour of the estate. Unlike the latter two, recognition is an individual reward, as the advancement of a member of the middle class into the gentleman category was at that time individual and not collective as it would be half a century later.
