Poor Gentleman: Vol. II

Poor Gentleman is one of Margaret Oliphant’s many Victorian novels of middle class English life, and this volume is the second of the original two volume publication. Oliphant was one of the most prolific and respected writers of the era, with a working career that produced more than ninety novels and hundreds of articles, all written under the financial pressure of supporting her own children and several extended family members after her husband’s early death.

The novel takes up the figure of the poor gentleman of the title, a man whose social standing is respectable but whose financial situation is precarious in ways that the rigid class structures of Victorian England made particularly difficult. The poor gentleman is a recurring type in nineteenth century English fiction, with his pride, his limited options, and his exposure to the complicated negotiations between class and money giving novelists significant material to work with. Oliphant uses the type with the kind of psychological care that characterizes her best work, and the second volume carries the story toward whatever resolution she has been building across the wider novel.

What distinguishes Oliphant from many of her contemporaries is her unsparing eye for the limitations of the social world she was depicting. Her novels are sometimes funny, often moving, and almost always more morally complicated than their domestic settings would suggest. She was not a sentimental writer despite the sometimes sentimental subject matter she worked with, and her best novels reward the patient reader with insights into Victorian middle class life that drier social histories cannot match. The middle class in particular interested her because she understood the precariousness of its position and the constant performance required to maintain it.

Oliphant’s prose is unhurried in the way Victorian novels often are, with long passages of psychological observation, careful descriptions of social setting, and dialogue that captures the formal rhythms of polite middle class speech in the period. For readers interested in Victorian fiction, in the wider catalogue of Margaret Oliphant beyond her famous Carlingford novels and her ghost stories, or in the women writers of the era who have been overshadowed by their male contemporaries, Poor Gentleman is worth knowing.