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permanently within the upper middle class and remove them from the ambiguous status of doctor’s daughters and potential governesses” (Langland, Nobody’s Angels, p. 134). Cynthia often threatens to become a governess, a position that was considered a last resort for genteel but poor girls. The status of a governess, who occupied a strained position between the family and the servants, replaced the status into which one was born. The genteel woman who was working to sustain herself in the homes of middle- and upper-class families would have had little opportunity to benefit from marriage, the primary conveyor of higher status for women in the nineteenth century.
    The character of the land agent—one who manages the day-today affairs of a large estate—in Wives and Daughters has a large role, as does the land agent in Middlemarch, Caleb Garth. The difference between the two characters could not be wider, for Mr. Preston in Wives and Daughters is a romantic adventurer and disrespectful of women and rank, while Garth is the model for the moral and intelligent man. Another character type within the social web of the novel is the London lawyer (specifically, barrister), of which there are two representatives: Cynthia’s uncle, and one of Cynthia’s suitors, Mr. Henderson. These professionals have a fixed status within their London orbits, which someone like Lady Cumnor deprecates, but which affords them a high standard of living. The vast majority of Hollingford’s denizens belong to the classes of servants, laborers, and townspeople. For the most part, the townspeople consist of “ladies,” and indeed it can sometimes feel as one reads the novel that it is a town made up almost entirely of unmarried older women; the Miss Brownings, who are genteel but relatively without means, are at the forefront of this category. Servants and laborers appear in Wives and Daughters, as if to fill out the fabric of the social web being described, but they are not at the center of any of the narrative strains. When servants and laborers do appear, their speech is recorded in dialect, to underscore their difference, as Old Silas’s is here: “ ‘Them navvies—I call ’em navvies because some on ‘em is strangers, though some on ’em is th’ men as was turned off your own works, squire, when there came orders to stop ’em last fall—they’re a-pulling up gorse and bush.... I thought I should like to tell ye afore I died’ ” (p. 334). Those who are outside the social web are those who are not English, their foreignness defined by difference of religion and nationality. The scrupulousness with which membership in the social web is defined is what drives the novel’s primary tragic narrative. And yet that which is most foreign—Africa, where Roger travels on a scientific excursion—is represented as so different as not even to earn the distinction of difference; the Africans whom Roger encounters are so outside the social fabric of Hollingford and England that they do not figure in its conception of itself, but rather are spoken of slightingly in a crude racial comedy.
    Perhaps the position that affords the most fluid rank is that of the marriageable girl, which the novel’s most central characters, Molly and Cynthia, personify. Although the rank of the marriageable girl depends in part on her father’s status, the novel presents female beauty as a kind of independent currency on the marriage market. The fluidity of the marriageable girl’s rank is one of the novel’s most sustained topics, and drives much of the narrative interest. Cynthia’s particular talent for pleasing and her beauty result in multiple admirers and suitors; this furthers the plot and supports the premise of the fluid status of the marriageable girl. The novel forecasts a number of possibilities for Cynthia’s future rank by showing how possible it is for her to attract attention from men of a number of different classes—including the landed