Books like Jane Austin or Dickens but about middle class people?

[Girasoli]

I like books set in Regency/Victorian times but everyone is usually either a member of the landed gentry (Austin) or very poor (Dickens).

I'd love to read some books about people more in the middle (like a Dr or a clerk or something) if anyone has any recommendations.

Thanks 😊

Another vote for Diary of a Nobody

Thanks mumsnet, I knew you'd be good at this. Have downloaded the Brachester Chronicles to get started 😊

When ever I see the name of Jane Austin I am reminded of her amazing career change from writing to motor manufacture. Like William Morris and Ford Madox Ford I suppose?

LOL
And Mrs Gaskell invented the gasket, didn't she?

Longbourn? I enjoyed that too.

I liked Wives and Daughters by Gaskell. Has a doctor's daughter as the main character, has comedy and crosses the class divide (to a point). Set right at the end of the Regency.

Or what about Mayor of Caster bridge?

Middlemarch is the ultimate. There are characters in it who are doctors, vicars, farmers, land agent, a servant etc as well as the poshos. It does begin with poshos though so you have to get through that bit.

The middle classes featured heavily in some of HG Wells' non-science-fiction novels, e.g. Anna Veronica, Kipps, The History of Mr Polly, Tono-Bungay, etc

😀 I would read the hell out of a novel in which JA and Co invented motor manufacturing,

(On a sadder note, I always wish Mrs Gaskell had stayed in closer touch with Charlotte Brontë after her marriage — she says in a letter that if she’d known CB’s life was in danger (from hyperemesis gravidarium) she’d have been able to make her miscarry and potentially save her life…😰)

Some good recommendations.

I’m not sure you’ll find many novels about middle class people during the Regency period. At that time, the middle class was fairly small (I think). The majority of the population were either farmers/landowners, merchants, or poor, as in very poor. During the Victorian period, the middle class grew in both size and influence. If you read Henry Fielding, for example, who wrote almost exactly a hundred years before Dickens (1740s), the whole tone and feel is different. It’s a different flavour or atmosphere - more brutal, coarse, instinctive and wild. Between Fielding and Dickens you get middle-class respectability.

As for recommendations, there have been some really good ones (I second George Gissing and Arnold Bennett). Dickens doesn’t just write about the poor. (Orwell said his real subject isn’t the working class but the lower middle class.) I’d give him another try. He’s very sympathetic and broad minded, but I’ve never thought of him as a working class writer. He is solidly middle-class in his morality and outlook. Oliver Twist and Pip, for example, remain weirdly middle-class even though they grow up in poverty.

How about H G Wells? He didn’t just write science fiction. The Sherlock Holmes books are wonderful as well, and don’t just deal with crime - many of the characters are middle-class (as is Holmes himself). Oscar Wilde does write about the upper classes, but his fiction is more concerned with a particular branch of the upper class - the educated, refined, art-loving type, not the oafish, heavy drinking fox hunters. D H Lawrence might be worth a look. He is a 20th-century writer, but Sons and Lovers deals with a fairly ordinary family - not poor exactly, just ordinary. That was written around 1910 (ish) and has a Victorian feel. Or how about Madame Bovary?

There are lots of middle class people in Dickens!

But I definitely agree with the Trollope recommendations and hope you enjoy the Barchester Chronicles. If you like the books, see if you can get hold of the BBC adaptation of the first two books, starring a young Alan Rickman.

One of the helpful things about Trollope is that he wrote so much, so there is plenty to keep you going. As well as the Barchester and Palliser ones. I recommend The Vicar of Bullhampton, Dr Wortle's School, The Claverings, He Knew He Was Right and The Way We Live Now. You might enjoy The Three Clerks too.

I also recommend George Eliot and just about anything by Thomas Hardy.

Oh, I know what wanted to recommend, Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows and its sequels, This Real Night and Cousin Rosamund. TFO is about a childhood based on West’s own — the Aubreys are shabby-genteel, living in south London in the first decade of the 20thc and socially nowhere, the father a gambler and brilliant political journalist, disowned by his family, the mother a former concert pianist, the narrator and one of her sisters destined to be pianists also. It’s both brilliantly realist about the detail of domestic life in pre-WWI England, really psychologically acute, and has bits of batshit craziness, like a completely realist treatment of poltergeists.

Has anyone said EM Forster?

All of these - but including all of Mrs Gaskell's books. I am a huge Trollope fan (see user name) but I think Miss Marjoribanks by Mrs Oliphant is one of the funniest books I ever read ("a white frock cut high")

Cranford

Something later, set in the 50s/60s would be Barbara Pym novels. They are wonderful, always have clergy, and middle class characters, usually set in a parish. They are beautifully observed, deliciously sly and make me laugh aloud with joy when I read them.

Longbourne. I really enjoyed this book.

These suggestions are great, I loved diary of a nobody some am keen to try out the others.

Arnold Bennett is my favourite of that era for the very reason that he writes about ordinary people. The Old Wives' Tale tells the story of two sisters whose lives follow very different paths. Constance stays in her provincial home town in the Potteries and marries the young man who works in her parents' drapers shop whereas Sophia escapes to Paris and ends up living in a city under siege. Clayhanger is another good one of Bennett's.
Love Trollope too. And Middlemarch.
I so prefer the straightforward narrative style of the old classics. Start at the beginning, tell a good story with interesting characters and finish at the end. No messing about with time shifts, multiple narrators and - above all - no writing in the present tense!

The Romance of a Shop by Amy Levy, about a photographer's daughters who set up a shop together is a lovely story, written in the late 1880s.

Another vote for North and South - think I may have to re-read it.

Diary of a Provincial Lady is great, but published in 1930. Mollie Panter-Downes’ books - just after the Second World War.

following

I would suggest some of the great French novels of the 19th century - English translations widely available. For example Madame Bovary by Flaubert (about a provincial doctor's wife), Cousin Bette or Le Pere Goriot by Balzac or Germinal or L'Assomoir (sometimes translated as The Dram Shop) by Zola. The works by Zola are about working rather than middle class people.

@GladiatorSandals I love that Rebecca West trilogy too, but perhaps a bit too modern for the OP.

I also love The Return of the Soldier, also by Rebecca West, and I highly recommend it if you haven't read it.