Abstract

This essay explores a mode of performativity in Victorian fiction that viewed class dualistically—as a regulative hierarchy constituted by self-fashioning actors. “Reverse slumming” designates a mode of middle- or lower-middle-class performance that mimics upper-class behaviors so as to reaffirm social hierarchy in the very process of denaturalizing it. This cross-class performativity reconciled politically progressive mid-century notions about social circulation and inclusiveness with ideals of organic community. Critics tend to assume that organicism was a reactionary appeal to pre-industrial paternalism, but by examining reverse slumming in works by Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell, this essay argues that performative conceptions of class enabled Victorian novelists to transform organicism into a moderately progressive vision.

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