| Between 1840 and 1860, as the rapid growth of cities led to increasingly visible social and economic differences between classes in England, many middle-class Victorians became deeply concerned with the "problem of the poor." This dissertation examines the proliferation of discourses that emerged to address this problem and provide solutions to it. My focus is less on representations of the poor as on discourses about the poor that the middle-class produced and on the relation between these discourses and middle-class identity. The central argument of this dissertation is that middle-class identity was produced in relation to the poor and questions of poverty. I examine three discourses--investigative/legislative reporting, philanthropic writings, and social-problem novels--and argue that in writing about the poor each of these discourses coalesced and established themselves as disciplines or "professions" that had the authority and expertise to speak on a wide range of social issues.; The dissertation examines Edwin Chadwick's Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population, texts by a number of women in charity from Sarah Trimmer to Elizabeth Gurney Fry to Anna Jameson, and social-problem novels by Benjamin Disraeli (Sybil), Elizabeth Gaskell (Mary Barton), Charles Kingsley (Alton Locke), and Frances Trollope (Michael Armstrong) and demonstrates that these discourses competed and collaborated, borrowed and disputed one anothers' representations and solutions to poverty. The differences and conversations between them helped to formulate and fix the boundaries of each discipline.; Even as middle-class Victorians worked within and shaped their disciplines, they also drew up and produced specific gender and class identities. These identities emerged, not only by representing the poor, but also by inscribing differences between one another, particularly differences of gender, approaches to discovering the "truth," and relation to the state. The "poor" and their expertise over the poor were, thus, the backdrop against which middle-class women and men established their authority vis-a-vis one another and their identities. |
