This article discusses Charlotte Bront€ e's Shirley as a response to 'The Hill and the Valley', one of Harriet Martineau's Illustrations of Political Economy. Whereas 'The Hill and the Valley' is informed by a belief that following the rules of political economy can solve all social problems of the day, Shirley, for all its similarities to Martineau's novella, reflects different, less unambiguously affirmative attitudes to capitalism and political economy. Even the novel's happy ending, which brings prosperity and settles social conflicts in Yorkshire, has too much of a fairy tale quality to convince the reader of the beneficial influence of the free market economy.

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Australia features in numerous Victorian novels either as a place of exile or a land of new opportunities, perhaps the most memorable image of the country having been presented in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861). Anthony Trollope’s writing, however, offers a much more extensive and complex presentation of Australian life as seen by a Victorian English gentleman. In his Australian fictions, including Harry Heathcote of Gangoil (1874), Catherine Carmichael (1878), and John Caldigate (1879), he presents Australia both as a land of new opportunities and as a place where social hierarchy as it is known in England is upturned and social boundaries either disregarded or drawn along different lines. The present article is concerned with the ways in which Trollope’s John Caldigate represents differences in the structure of English and Australian society, stressing the latter’s lack of a clear class hierarchy characteristic of social organisation “back home”. The society of Australia is presented as extremely plastic and mobile - both in terms of space and structure. Consequently, it can hardly be contained within a stiffly defined hierarchy, and it seems to defy the rules of social organisation that are accepted as natural and obvious in England. In Trollope’s fiction success in Australia depends to a large extent on hard work, ability to withstand the hardships of life with no luxuries, and thrift, and thus on personal virtues, but the author nevertheless suggests that it is defined solely by economic capital at the cost of cultural capital, so significant in England.

Considering Victorian presentation of women as angelic, that is, spiritual, beings, it is rather surprising how much their presence was manifested by material objects. Baskets of needlework, tea equipage and novels lying around in a parlour were an unmistakable sign of the house being occupied by women. Indeed, my contention is, the objects did not clutter Victorian interiors, either real or imagined, merely for practical reasons or to produce the "reality effect." They are a material representation of the immaterial and function as metaphors for angelic women's spiritual qualities. Rather than functioning merely as details to enhance the illusion of the real (and thus as elements of style) or simply reflecting the Victorian world (and thus as empty forms), material objects are essential in constructing a middle-class (feminine) identity. My paper concentrates on Rhoda Broughton's Not wisely, but too well and Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South with an attempt to show how objects help construct a feminine ideal and, simultaneously, reveal the ideal to be just a construction. Broughton's Kate Chester and Gaskell's Margaret Hale find themselves in situations where their middle-class status might be compromised. Still, they both manage to reassert their position through effectively manipulating the signs of middle-class respectability. The "flimsy and useless" things they surround themselves with point to their "essentially feminine" qualities. Yet, the very superfluity of the objects reveals their relation to the characters' economic status. They are, then, the site where the material and immaterial meet, where the borders between the economic world and the domestic world blur.An angelic woman, "[m]arr'd less than man by mortal fall" (Patmore 1866: 23), man's moral guide and his conscience, whose "privilege, not impotence, / Ex-1

The following article concentrates on the representation of social class in Anthony Trollope’s Antipodean stories, Harry Heathcote of Gangoil (1874) and “Catherine Carmichael” (1878). Although Trollope was aware of the problematic nature of class boundaries in the Antipodes, he nevertheless employed the English model of class distinctions as a point of reference. In the two stories he concentrated on wealthy squatters’ attempts to reconstruct the way of life of the English gentry and on the role of women, who either exposed the false pretences to gentility, as in “Catherine Carmichael,” or contributed to consolidation of the landowning classes as in Harry Heathcote of Gangoil.