In Wives and Daughters, the fact that Mr. Gibson occasionally has lunch with Lord Hollingford (the earl’s son) depends entirely upon his personal merit—the two men share an interest in new scientific discovery—and not upon his rank.

The web of rank and class in Wives and Daughters incorporates a varied cast of people and social positions, including the land agent, the second son, the governess, the barrister, the unmarried but genteel woman, the servant, and the laborer. Roger Hamley, as the second son of Squire Hamley, would not have inherited land or title from his father; the laws of primogeniture ensured that land would not be divided among sons but given in its entirety to the eldest, so it is understood that he will have to make his own way in the world. This gives him an entirely different status from Osborne, his older brother, as Mrs. Gibson is quick to intuit and exploit. Mrs. Gibson, who is known as “Clare” at the Towers because that was her name when she was governess there, changes her social position when she marries Mr. Gibson; her position rises in that, as a governess she would have been a dependent in the house of the Cumnors, but it falls in the sense that she loses that intimate relation and sheds the name of her first husband (a clergyman who was himself a younger son) . As Elizabeth Langland has pointed out, Mrs. Gibson in conventional moral terms seems insensitive and lacking in character, but as the household’s “status manager” she is inordinately successful: “Her masterful negotiations of signifying practices—etiquette (including introductions, visiting, calls, and cuts), dining rituals, household decor, and dress make her a key player in the socially prestigious marriages of Molly and Cynthia, marriages that install them permanently within the upper middle class and remove them from the ambiguous status of doctor’s daughters and potential governesses” (Langland, Nobody’s Angels, p. 134). Cynthia often threatens to become a governess, a position that was considered a last resort for genteel but poor girls. The status of a governess, who occupied a strained position between the family and the servants, replaced the status into which one was born. The genteel woman who was working to sustain herself in the homes of middle- and upper-class families would have had little opportunity to benefit from marriage, the primary conveyor of higher status for women in the nineteenth century.

The character of the land agent—one who manages the day-today affairs of a large estate—in Wives and Daughters has a large role, as does the land agent in Middlemarch, Caleb Garth. The difference between the two characters could not be wider, for Mr. Preston in Wives and Daughters is a romantic adventurer and disrespectful of women and rank, while Garth is the model for the moral and intelligent man. Another character type within the social web of the novel is the London lawyer (specifically, barrister), of which there are two representatives: Cynthia’s uncle, and one of Cynthia’s suitors, Mr. Henderson. These professionals have a fixed status within their London orbits, which someone like Lady Cumnor deprecates, but which affords them a high standard of living. The vast majority of Hollingford’s denizens belong to the classes of servants, laborers, and townspeople. For the most part, the townspeople consist of “ladies,” and indeed it can sometimes feel as one reads the novel that it is a town made up almost entirely of unmarried older women; the Miss Brownings, who are genteel but relatively without means, are at the forefront of this category. Servants and laborers appear in Wives and Daughters, as if to fill out the fabric of the social web being described, but they are not at the center of any of the narrative strains. When servants and laborers do appear, their speech is recorded in dialect, to underscore their difference, as Old Silas’s is here: “ ‘Them navvies—I call ’em navvies because some on ‘em is strangers, though some on ’em is th’ men as was turned off your own works, squire, when there came orders to stop ’em last fall—they’re a-pulling up gorse and bush.... I thought I should like to tell ye afore I died’ ” (p. 334). Those who are outside the social web are those who are not English, their foreignness defined by difference of religion and nationality. The scrupulousness with which membership in the social web is defined is what drives the novel’s primary tragic narrative. And yet that which is most foreign—Africa, where Roger travels on a scientific excursion—is represented as so different as not even to earn the distinction of difference; the Africans whom Roger encounters are so outside the social fabric of Hollingford and England that they do not figure in its conception of itself, but rather are spoken of slightingly in a crude racial comedy.

Perhaps the position that affords the most fluid rank is that of the marriageable girl, which the novel’s most central characters, Molly and Cynthia, personify. Although the rank of the marriageable girl depends in part on her father’s status, the novel presents female beauty as a kind of independent currency on the marriage market. The fluidity of the marriageable girl’s rank is one of the novel’s most sustained topics, and drives much of the narrative interest.