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Reverse Slumming: Cross-Class Performativity and Organic Order in Dickens and Gaskell
- Victorian Studies
- Indiana University Press
- Volume 55, Number 3, Spring 2013
- pp. 471-499
- 10.2979/victorianstudies.55.3.471
- Article
- Additional Information
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.