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² The series, “Is Marriage a Failure?” in the Telegraph ran from 9 August to 29 September 1888. For discussion, see Knelman, Judith, “She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not: Trends in the Victorian Marriage Market,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 18, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 80–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Robson, John M., Marriage or Celibacy? The Daily Telegraph on a Victorian Dilemma (Toronto, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁴ Ibid., p. 87.

⁵ For example, Wells, H. G., Kipps (London, 1905)Google Scholar, The History of Mr Polly (London, 1910)Google Scholar, The Wheels of Chance (London, 1896)Google Scholar, Love and Mr Lewisham: The Story of a Very Young Couple (London, 1900)Google Scholar; Forster, E. M., Howards End (London, 1910)Google Scholar.

⁶ The two classic pioneering texts were Lockwood, David, The Blackcoated Worker: A Study in Class Consciousness (London, 1966; rev. ed., Oxford, 1989)Google Scholar; Crossick, Geoffrey, ed., The Lower Middle Class in Britain, 1870–1914 (London, 1977)Google Scholar. Other significant early texts are Anderson, Gregory, Victorian Clerks (Manchester, 1976)Google Scholar; Crossick, Geoffrey and Gerhard-Haupt, Heinz, eds., Shopkeepers and Master Artisans in Nineteenth-Century Europe (London, 1984)Google Scholar; Winstanely, Michael, The Shopkeeper's World: 1830–1914 (Manchester, 1983)Google Scholar. More recently Chris Hosgood has produced valuable cultural analyses of different white-collar occupational groups, esp. “The ‘Pigmies of Commerce’ and the Working-Class Community: Small Shopkeepers in England, 1870–1914,” Journal of Social History 22 (1989): 439–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar, “‘A Brave and Daring Folk’: Shopkeepers and Associational Life in Victorian and Edwardian England,” Journal of Social History 26, no. 2 (Winter 1992): 285–308CrossRefGoogle Scholar, “The ‘Knights of the Road’: Commercial Travellers and the Culture of the Commercial Room in Late-Victorian and Edwardian England,” Victorian Studies 37, no. 4 (Summer 1994): 519–47Google Scholar. The social and cultural world of London clerks is explored in Pennybacker, Susan, A Vision for London, 1889–1914: Labour and Everyday Life and the LCC Experiment (London, 1995)Google Scholar.

⁷ McLeod, Hugh, “White Collar Values and the Role of Religion,” in Crossick, , ed., The Lower Middle Class in Britain, pp. 61–88Google Scholar.

⁸ Copelman, Dina, London's Women Teachers: Gender, Class and Feminism, 1870–1930 (London, 1996)Google Scholar; Young, Arlene, “Virtue Domesticated: Dickens and the Lower Middle Class,” Victorian Studies 39, no. 1 (Summer 1996): 483–511Google Scholar, uses literary analysis to explore class and gender associations in the early Victorian lower middle class.

⁹ McLaren, Angus, The Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries, 1870–1930 (Chicago, 1997), pp. 39–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰ The seminal work on all these issues is Davidoff, Leonore and Hall, Catherine, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle-Class, 1780–1850 (London, 1987)Google Scholar. On middle-class masculinity, see Tosh, John, “Domesticity and Manliness in the Victorian Middle Class: The Family of Edward White Benson,” in Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800, ed. Roper, Michael and Tosh, John (London, 1991), pp. 44–73Google Scholar. On working-class masculinity and femininity, see Clark, Anna, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley, 1995)Google Scholar.

¹¹ Tosh, John, “What Should Historians Do with Masculinity?” History Workshop 38 (1994): 191–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar, discusses lower-middle-class masculinity in terms of their enthusiasm for imperialism and patriotism.

¹² In a sociopolitical analysis, Arno Mayer speculates on the reasons for neglect of the lower middle class and suggests that academics have avoided dealing with the class from which so many of them originated “and from which they seek to escape.” Mayer, Arno, “The Lower Middle Class as Historical Problem,” Journal of Modern History 47, no. 3 (September 1975): 409–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹³ On distinctions between the “classic petty bourgeoisie” of small shopkeepers and businessmen and salaried white-collar workers, see Crossick, Geoffrey, “The Emergence of the Lower Middle Class in Britain,” in Crossick, , ed., The Lower Middle Class in Britain, pp. 11–60Google Scholar. Copelman, , London's Women Teachers, pp. 34–36Google Scholar, discusses class heterogeneity. Most work on white-collar workers has been London-based, and as yet there is no clear foundation for establishing regional differentiation, especially in relation to gender and cultural differences. For an early text on Liverpool clerks, see Orchard, B.G., The Clerks of Liverpool (Liverpool, 1871)Google Scholar.

¹⁴ See Felski, Rita, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), pp. 91–97Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Scott, Joan W., “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17 (Summer 1991): 779–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶ By 1898, e.g., one of the Daily Telegraph's regular correspondence series, running from 13 August to 13 September, was titled “Should Wives Work? Partners or Lovers?”

¹⁷ Light, Alison, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (London, 1991), p. 8Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Town Talk (3 December 1887): 4–5Google Scholar; Bailey, Peter, “Ally Sloper's Half Holiday: Comic Art in the 1880s,” History Workshop 16 (1983): 13CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Walkowitz, Judith, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago, 1992), pp. 43–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁹ Town Talk (3 December 1887): 4–5Google Scholar.

²⁰ Trollope traces the disreputable risks facing youthful clerks through the career of Charley Tudor. Trollope, Anthony, The Three Clerks (1857; reprint, Oxford, 1989)Google Scholar.

²¹ Town Talk (3 December 1887), pp. 4–5Google Scholar.

²² See Bailey, , “Ally Sloper's Half Holiday,” p. 9Google Scholar.

²³ Tosh, , “What Should Historians Do with Masculinity?” p. 191Google Scholar; see also Gillis , John, Youth and History: Tradition and Change in European Age Relations, 1770–Present (New York, 1981)Google Scholar.

²⁴ Bailey, Peter, “Conspiracies of Meaning: Music Hall and the Knowingness of Popular Culture,” Past and Present, no. 144 (August 1994), p. 164Google Scholar.

²⁵ Gilbert, W. S. and Sullivan, A., Iolanthe (London, 1882), act 1Google Scholar.

²⁶ Zimmeck, Meta, “Jobs for the Girls: The Expansion of Clerical Work for Women, 1850–1914,” in Unequal Opportunities: Women's Employment in England, 1800–1918, ed. John, Angela V. (Oxford, 1986), pp. 153–77Google Scholar; Lewis, Jane E., “Women Clerical Workers in the Late Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” in The White Blouse Revolution: Female Office Workers since 1870, ed. Anderson, Gregory (Manchester, 1988), pp. 27–47Google Scholar. For a vivid example of the complex meaning of white-collar work for lower-middle-class women, see Thompson, Tierl, ed., Dear Girl: The Diaries and Letters of Two Working Women, 1897–1917 (London, 1987)Google Scholar.

²⁷ There is a vast literature in these areas, but on suburban development, see Dyos, H. J., Victorian Suburb: A Study of the Growth of Camberwell (London, 1966)Google Scholar; Jackson, Alan A., Semi-Detached London: Suburban Development, Life and Transport, 1900–39 (London, 1973)Google Scholar. On consumerism, see the discussion below.

²⁸ For example, Jerrold, Douglas, “Mrs Caudle's Curtain Lectures,” Punch, vols. 8–9 (1845)Google Scholar. In Little Dorrit (London, 1857)Google Scholar, Charles Dickens portrayed lower-middle-class male pretentiousness, at least, in ways that more closely foreshadowed Charles Pooter; see Young, , “Virtue Domesticated,” pp. 483–511Google Scholar.

²⁹ Grossmith, , Diary of a Nobody, pp. 45–46, 200, 220Google Scholar.

³⁰ Pain moved in a close-knit circle clustered around Jerome K. Jerome, J. M. Barrie, and Robert Barr, all regular contributors to Jerome's increasingly risque literary periodical of the nineties, The Idler. Pooterism was a prime target for such groups, as it was on the stage generally, because of its seemingly bogus assumption of modern lifestyles, its inherent gender ambiguities and the potential for mock inversion of gender roles. Grossmith, Pooter's creator, played some of the best comic roles in Gilbert and Sullivan's operas and was a popular solo piano entertainer; see Joseph, Tony, George Grossmith: Biography of a Savoyard (Bristol, 1982)Google Scholar.

³¹ Pain, Barry, Exit Eliza, in his Eliza Books (London, 1931), p. 196Google Scholar.

³² Barry Pain, Eliza's Husband, in ibid., p. 116.

³³ Pain, Eliza, in ibid., p. 67.

³⁴ For a useful discussion of the gendered associations with modernity that are inverted here, see Felski, , The Gender of Modernity, pp. 1–5Google Scholar.

³⁵ Pain, , Eliza, p. 11Google Scholar.

³⁶ For a similar turn of the century satire, also modeled on The Diary of a Nobody, which explicitly parodied the “dismal and dreary solitude” of lower-middle-class suburbanism, see Andom, R., Martha and I: Being Scenes from Our Suburban Life (London, 1898)Google Scholar.

³⁷ Masterman, C. F. G., The Condition of England (London, 1909), pp. 80–94Google Scholar.

³⁸ Ibid., pp. 94–95.

³⁹ For discussion of the range of attitudes to suburbia among satirists and novelists of the period see, Keating, Peter, The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel, 1875–1914 (London, 1991), pp. 319–29Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ For an extended treatment of Crosland's writing in the context of satirical criticism, see Hammerton, A. James, “The English Weakness? Satire and ‘Moral Manliness’ in the Lower Middle Class,” in Gender, Culture and Identity: The British Middle Classes, c. 1780–1940, ed. Kidd, Alan and Nicholls, David (Manchester, in press)Google Scholar.

⁴¹ Brown, W. Sorley, The Life and Genius of Thomas William Hodgson Crosland (London, 1928), pp. 33–36Google Scholar.

⁴² Texts like Nordau's, MaxDegeneration (New York, 1968)Google Scholar, translated from the German in 1895, had a powerful influence on fin de siècle ideas of physical decline, which could easily be linked to eugenic and other ideas focusing on racial and social deterioration; see Chamberlin, J. Edward and Gilman, Sander, eds., Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress (New York, 1985), chap. 9Google Scholar.

⁴³ Crosland, Thomas, The Suburbans (London, 1905)Google Scholar. For some brief references to Thomas William Hodgson Crosland's work, see Crossick, , “The Emergence of the Lower Middle Class,” p. 32Google Scholar; Price, Richard N., “Society, Status and Jingoism: The Social Roots of Lower Middle Class Patriotism, 1870–1900,” in Crossick, , ed., The Lower Middle Class, pp. 93, 101Google Scholar; and Young, Arlene Diane, “Class, Domesticity, and the English Novel” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1994), pp. 189–90Google Scholar. Crosland pursued the same themes in a succession of books, organized around categories of ethnicity and gender, esp. The Unspeakable Scot (London, 1902)Google Scholar, The Egregious English (London, 1903)Google Scholar, Lovely Woman (London, 1903)Google Scholar, The Lord of Creation (London, 1904)Google Scholar, The Wild Irishman (London, 1905)Google Scholar, and Taffy Was a Welshman (London, 1912)Google Scholar. Some of these were first serialized in the Gentlewoman. For a satirical response to Crosland, see Farrow, George E., Lovely Man (London, 1904)Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ Crosland, , The Suburbans, pp. 138–39Google Scholar. Crosland's depiction of the early-nineteenth-century domestic idyll closely resembles in outline Davidoff and Hall's elaboration of the idea of the middle-class home as refuge from the workplace.

⁴⁵ Crosland, , The Suburbans, pp. 69–70Google Scholar, and Lovely Woman, p. 126.

⁴⁶ Crosland, , The Egregious English, pp. 42–61Google Scholar, and The Suburbans, pp. 55, 69.

⁴⁷ Felski, , The Gender of Modernity, pp. 63–74Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ This is evident even in those cases where the husband escapes from his wife's hostility, as in Mr. Polly's desertion of Miriam, who symbolizes the narrowness of his shopkeeper's world. See Wells, History of Mr Polly.

⁴⁹ Daily Chronicle (29 September 1898).

⁵⁰ Ibid. Pierre Coustillas reproduces the letter to the Chronicle and its leader, and lists the contemporary reviews, in Gissing, George, The Town Traveller, ed. Coustillas, P. (Brighton, 1981), pp. 315–18, 321–24Google Scholar.

⁵¹ The most famous are Wells's Kipps, Mr Polly, and Mr Lewisham and Forster's Leonard Bast; see Wells, Kipps, History of Mr Polly, and Love and Mr Lewisham; also see Forster, Howards End.

⁵² See especially the wide social spectrum of characters evident in a recent collection of Gissing's short stories; Gissing, George, The Day of Silence and Other Stories, ed. Coustillas, Pierre (London, 1993)Google Scholar. The same social heterogeneity is evident in census enumerators' forms, indicated in a survey of two streets, in 1881 and 1891, in each of the suburbs of Hackney (Ellingfort and Eleanor Roads) and Clapham (Freke and Marmion Roads). For further elaboration, see Copelman, , London's Women Teachers, pp. 34–36Google Scholar, and Pennybacker, A Vision for London.

⁵³ On the other hand, a minority of those who experienced a socialist upbringing, like Malcolm Muggeridge, could be brought up to scorn their own lower-middle-class suburban origins as “mean and foolish, like the Pooters in The Diary of a Nobody.” See Muggeridge, Malcolm, Chronicles of Wasted Time, Part I: The Green Stick (London, 1972), p. 21Google Scholar.

⁵⁴ Robson, Marriage or Celibacy? discusses the social context of these Telegraph debates in a detailed analysis of an early one in 1868.

⁵⁵ Gissing, George, In the Year of Jubilee (1894; reprint, London, 1994), pp. 57–61Google Scholar; on readership of the new journalism, see Cranfield, G. A., The Press and Society: From Caxton to Northcliffe (London, 1978), pp. 216–21Google Scholar; Brown, Lucy, Victorian News and Newspapers (Oxford, 1985), p. 50Google Scholar; and Engel, Matthew, Tickle the Public: One Hundred Years of the Popular Press (London, 1996), p. 52Google Scholar.

⁵⁶ Bullen, Frank T., Confessions of a Tradesman (London, 1908), p. 78Google Scholar.

⁵⁷ For examples, see Dark, Sidney, Not Such a Bad Life (London, 1941), p. 15Google Scholar. Jerome, a former clerk, spoke “feelingly” of his resentment against critical reviewers who crowned their savaging of his work with the epithet, “bank-clerk”; see Jerome, Jerome K., “The Idler's Club,” Idler 2 (August 1893): 108Google Scholar. The repute of the authors and publication dates of autobiographies drawn on here vary so widely that it is impossible to make reliable estimates about their intended or actual readership, but writers like Bullen, whose book appeared in Edwardian years, undoubtedly spoke of his bitter experiences to a lower-middle-class audience, among others.

⁵⁸ Harris, Jose, Private Lives, Public Spirit: Britain, 1870–1914 (London, 1994), pp. 8–10Google Scholar.

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⁶⁰ For example, see FLWE, cases 63 and 161.

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⁶² Robson, , Marriage or Celibacy? p. 262Google Scholar.

⁶³ Frost, Ginger, Promises Broken: Courship, Class and Gender in Victorian England (Charlottesville, Va., 1995)Google Scholar.

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⁶⁹ Ibid., pp. 101–203; Bullen wrote of enjoyable family outings and, during a short period of residence at East Ham, of his delight in the garden.

⁷⁰ Church, Richard, Over the Bridge (London, 1955), pp. 3–7Google Scholar, passim. For a fuller account of the Church family, see Hammerton, A. James, Cruelty and Companionship: Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Married Life (London, 1992), pp. 139–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁷⁴ For some of the most innovative work on gender and the city in these terms, see Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight; and Wilson, Elizabeth, The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women (London, 1991)Google Scholar. For discussion of the issue, see Nava, Mica, “Modernity's Disavowal: Women, the City and the Department Store,” in Modern Times: Reflections on a Century of English Modernity, ed. Nava, Mica and O'Shea, Alan (London, 1996), pp. 38–76Google Scholar.

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⁸¹ Ibid., pp. 29, 34, 46, 48, 50, 57–66. But see his later experience with the chaffing baker in Oxford, p. 137.

⁸² Ibid., pp. 110–11.

⁸³ Ibid., pp. 86–88.

⁸⁴ Ibid., pp. 113–15.

⁸⁵ Ibid.

⁸⁶ For a similar but more restrained account of clerks' street life, which attributes the writer's own “poor success” to shyness, see Jerome, Jerome K., My Life and Times (London, 1926), pp. 48–51Google Scholar.

⁸⁷ Ibid., pp. 96–97, 133–53, 172–73, 199.

⁸⁸ McLeod, , “White Collar Values,” p. 78Google Scholar.

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⁹⁷ Ibid.; preface by John Royal Goffin, added September 1973.

⁹⁸ Ibid., pp. 191–92.

⁹⁹ For example, see Frank Mort, “Social and Symbolic Fathers and Sons in Post-War Britain,” in this issue.

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