Masculinity and the English working class, 1837--1908 (Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Kingsley)

This thesis examines representations of working-class masculine subjectivity in Victorian autobiography and fiction. Placing specific emphasis on ideas of domesticity and the male body, I demonstrate that working-class masculinities differ substantially from those of the widely studied upper classes because of fundamental differences in their connections to traditional areas that together constitute masculine identity, such as work, leisure, and relationships with women and other men. My analysis of domesticity takes into account different generations of feminist scholarship that establish, then subsequently challenge, an ideology of middle-class domesticity. The question of corporeal identity is one that persistently reasserts itself because the body is central to most forms of working-class labour.; This dissertation also recognizes the relationship between two trends: the first is the early nineteenth-century efflorescence of published working-class autobiographies, which offers an opportunity to investigate the ways in which working men construct their identities for a broad readership; the second is a contemporaneous surge of public interest in "the lower orders" that finds reflection in the depiction of working-class characters in popular novels by middle-class authors. The structure of the thesis mimics this point of convergence and pairs three working-class autobiographies with three middle-class novels. Such genre-crossing is not without precedent: the roots of autobiography and the novel are inextricably linked, and their parallel consumption by a nineteenth-century readership suggests that contemporary understandings of working-class identity were shaped by both autobiographical and fictional sources.; Each chapter focuses on a particular type of work: domestic service, manual (not artisanal) labour, and literary labour (and the opportunities it offers for social advancement). I consider the specific ways in which classed and gendered consciousness emerges autobiographically and its significance in the writing of working-class subjectivity for public consumption. I then re-read mainstream novels by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Kingsley from the perspective of these autobiographical pressure points. The study concludes with a brief consideration of other marginalized forms of masculine identity that attempt to defy the taxonomy of the English class system.