SOURCE: Langland, Elizabeth. “Material Angels: Wings of Clay.” In Nobody's Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture, pp. 24-61. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995.

In the following excerpt, Langland maintains that English Victorian etiquette primarily provided a means for displaying wealth and social status, for delineating social class, and for preventing the social advancement of undesirables.

Victorian etiquette manuals, management guides, and charitable treatises cannot be taken as straightforward accounts of middle-class life: these nonliterary materials did not simply reflect a “real” historical subject but helped to produce it through their discursive practices.¹ These were documents aimed specifically at enabling the middle class to consolidate its base of control through strategies of regulation and exclusion. They helped to construct an identity for a group that might otherwise seem bound together only by Thomas Carlyle's “cash nexus.”²

In constructing the middle class, particularly the upper-middle class...