This dissertation examines a distinctive Victorian phenomenon that I call “historical middleness.” Middleness is a mode of periodization that identifies the present as the penultimate phase of history, rather than its pinnacle. The act of postulating a developmental stage beyond the current one redefines the present as an ambiguous interregnum—a middle—between an antiquated socio-historical order and an emergent one. Middleness thus provides an ambivalent counternarrative to the triumphalist “Whig theory of history” for which the Victorians are notorious. It holds out the prospect of a new epoch in which the political, technological, and aesthetic dynamics of modernity achieve a satisfying—and definitive—resolution. In sum, middleness represents a peculiar combination of rigorous historicism and teleology, resistance to presentism and psychic containment.

In chapters on Thomas Carlyle, Karl Marx, Matthew Arnold, and George Eliot, I argue that working through the paradigm of historical middleness leads each of these authors to transform his or her approach to practice. Specifically, recognition of the “middling” character of Britain's present compels these writers to renounce their ideals of aesthetic and political praxis and to create alternative, diminished forms of agency. Ironically, these “alternative” practices prove to be decisive to these authors' literary achievements and reputations, and ultimately, to the evolution of several of the nineteenth century's central discursive modes: cultural critique, political economy, literary criticism, and the realist novel. I dedicate particular attention to Carlyle's Chartism and Past and Present , Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and Capital, Arnold's Essays in Criticism, and Eliot's Middlemarch.

Wandering Between Two Worlds endeavors to contribute to both our understanding of nineteenth-century cultural history and to literary history more broadly conceived. It eschews a differential approach that pits the “rising middle class” against the apostles of culture, even as it recognizes the powerful hold the topos of the middle exercised on the Victorian social imaginary.