Women, Jews and Bourgeois Hegemony

Abstract

The increase in Britain’s population and overall wealth that occurred in Eliot’s lifetime meant the ranks of the middling classes, who formed the vast bulk of the readership and with which she was most directly concerned, expanded enormously. In effect this had at least two important consequences: people in those classes became much more conscious of, and anxious about, subtle demarcations between different levels of the broad social category Marx termed the bourgeoisie; and that group as a whole demanded greater political power than they had been previously granted. The expansion of industrialization, with its concomitant shift to urban living, was the mainspring of middling-class economic power — which itself created the motivation for political change.