She reads his clothes as ‘such as any gentleman wears’; but then wonders, ‘Was it a bad sign that he carried neither gloves nor walking-stick?’ (p. 38). At a later meeting she answers her own question reassuringly: ‘After all, he was not a companion to be ashamed of. She looked with pleasure at his white hairy hands with their firm grip; and then at his boots—very good boots indeed. He had gold cuff links in his white shirt cuffs, and a gold watch-guard chosen with a ‘gentleman’s taste’ (p. 48).

But this Balzacian detail is not morally neutral. It is sharply judgemental in the pointed contrast it makes between the lifestyles of the relatively affluent and the poor. In Mary Barfoot’s ‘pleasant, old-fashioned drawing room’ Monica spells out the details of a shopgirl’s life: twenty minutes or less for each meal; ‘no sitting down behind the counter’; one week’s annual paid holiday; a sixteen-hour Saturday; only Sunday free which must be spent away from shop premises; the ‘very scantiest’ of meals. The physical consequences of poverty are coolly underlined: varicose veins for shop assistants caused by too much standing and ill-health already for the Madden sisters by their thirties. Alice Madden is clay-coloured, pimply, inclined to corpulence, and subject to headaches, backaches, and other disorders. Virginia at 33 has an unhealthy look because ‘the poverty, or vitiation of her blood’ manifests itself in signs of ageing; and she has become a secret drinker (p. 14). Her visit to Rhoda shortly after these descriptions counterpoints them against the physical signs of wealth in her host: ‘a vigorous frame’ and ‘brisk movement’ (p. 25).

Accounts of such inequities in social groups at this time lacked a generally accepted justificatory framework and so there developed new explanatory discourses. These often took a sanctimonious tone in which to suggest that progress upwards was available to all who exerted themselves. An instance of this is found in Samuel Smiles’s popular Self-Help (1859) which made the now familiar claim that ‘the spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual’.3 This is amplified by his assertion that ‘opportunities fall in the way of every man who is resolved to take advantage of them’.4 Versions of Smiles’s theories had the bonus of validating the developing notion that the working classes could be neatly divided into the deserving and the undeserving poor. The new taxonomy paralleled the division between middle and working classes in an apparently natural symmetry. The idea was later in the century given a fashionably evolutionary tinge by the theory of ‘degeneracy’. This theory was based on the argument that the natural process of weeding out the unfittest human individuals had been hindered by medical and sanitary improvements in recent decades. These had kept alive ‘thousands of persons who would have died even fifty years ago’.5 Generations bred in urban slums had been allowed to evolve into physical and moral degenerates incapable of improvement. They constituted ‘the residuum’, the dregs of society.

At the same time as the self-help theory spread, there was much discussion about the nature of the working classes when contrasted with the middle class. Were they a different species—fish as opposed to higher forms of life? The prevailing perception that they were was thoughtfully considered by the liberal economist Alfred Marshall in 1873. To define both middle and working classes he examines the working man, that Other to his superiors. He sees him characterized not by the work he does but by the effect of hard physical labour upon a human being. Such labour makes a man rude and coarse. These qualities are shown by his lack of social ease, his inability to anticipate the feelings of others or to avoid giving pain or annoyance to others over trivialities. These defects are not culpable since they are the inevitable result of the ‘lowering influences’ of physical work. Fatigue makes the mind ‘dull and sluggish’; and in extreme cases causes cravings for ‘the coarser pleasures—drink, ignoble jests and worse’.6 The absence of this coarseness and the presence of social ease, delicacy of feeling towards others, and an unsluggish mind, theoretically, in the paradigm case, characterize the middle class.

All Gissing’s writing is invested with these discourses: at times they are embraced; at times rejected in an oscillation reflecting his own fluctuating attitudes and capturing the ambivalence of the period. In his early novels the empathy with the working classes displayed in the logistics of The Odd Women is strongly expressed. But by the time of Demos (1886) the narrator reveals a distaste for the coarse and mindless workers.