This book enacts a literary-historical analysis of some of the major issue concerning the representation and contingencies of class in popular and lesser known late-Victorian works. The book is groundbreaking in its close and historically rooted analysis of the paradigmatic ways of thinking about class and narrative at the close of the nineteenth century in Britain. Included in the analysis of the book are discussions of popular writers such as Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, Somerset Maugham, Jack London, George Moore, and H.G. Wells as well as lesser known--though once popular--writers such as Sir Walter Besant, Arthur Morrison, and Margaret Harkness. This book will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature. It will also be of interest to scholars of Victorian literature who are interested in the social and historical aspects of literary and artistic representation.