Whatever Happened to Class?

To identify Felix Holt’s class position troubles the very notion of stable class distinctions.  In his mother’s own words, Felix is the issue of “man from Lancashire, with no trade nor fortune but what he’d got in his head” (55).  That Mr. Holt comes from Lancashire but without trade or fortune suggests his working class status; he comes from industrialized country not as a failed bourgeois master, who might have no fortune but would have at least some trade.  To support himself and his family, Mr. Holt takes up the trade of a quack doctor who “believed [his medicinal recipe] was sent him in answer to prayer” (55).  Further, Mrs. Holt’s dialogue contains certain linguistic markers that separate her from a better-educated class; for example, she frequently begins sentences with conjunctions and regularly drops word-initial vowels.  His parentage, then, suggests that Felix Holt issues from the lower classes.  However, as Esther thinks on her visit to the Holt residence, “Felix chose to live in a way that would prevent any one from classing him according to his education and mental refinement” (221).  In fact, Felix’s educational trajectory—from doctor’s apprentice, to university at Glasgow, and finally to become “journeyman to Mr. Prowd the watchmaker” (57)—indicates his general class trajectory:  not a product of birth but of his own choice.  That Felix can opt to live as the lower classes positions him as outside the lower class despite his protestations against upward mobility.

           

In the case of Esther, parentage again would seem to serve as the primary indicator of class status.  Not quite a foundling, Esther all the same fills the role of the orphaned child of the aristocracy raised by one of the lower classes:  “Esther’s own mind was not free from a sense of irreconcilableness between the objects of her taste and the conditions of her lot” (76).  The child of aristocratic parents, Esther appears to belong intrinsically to a class above that of Mr. Lyon, her stepfather.  Still, Esther, as the daughter of a Dissenting preacher, inhabits the lower middle class of his congregation.  While her appearance and tastes might reach beyond her position, one cannot forget that “she saved nothing from her earnings” in acquiring her finery (77, emphasis mine).  Esther works for what she has.  Though she does not work at manual labor, she also cannot afford to be entirely idle as she might do had she been the daughter of a Church rector.  (Perhaps instead of considering her at the fringe of the middle and working classes, we might instead think of Esther as part of the lower clerical class.)  Of course, the foundling must eventually be found, and here we find in Esther’s trajectory one similar to Felix’s:  Dissenter’s daughter to surviving heir to Felix’s wife.  Esther, too, may opt to live outside the aristocratic class that is thrust upon her.  Again, this self-conducted mobility offers in Esther something outside the working class that she ultimately claims.

In both Felix and Esther, Eliot offers the reader individuals whose class(es) blur(s) distinct lines.  In fact, Eliot presents class as a complex, constructed, non-natural identity marker.  Is she offering instead of economics a better means for classifying people?  As Esther says, “I never knew what nobleness of character really was before I knew Felix Holt” (418).  Might Eliot, then, shift the use of class from external to internal?  No matter the social position of Felix and Esther by the novel’s epilogue, they retain their character—their class.