A Sense of Their Duty: Middle-Class Formation in Victorian Ontario Towns

What did it mean to be middle class in late nineteenth-century Ontario? How did the members of the middle class define themselves? Though simple, these questions have escaped the attention of social historians in recent writing about Canada. The Victorian middle class, referred to as the backbone of economic change, the motor of political reform, and the source of one set of moral standards, has eluded systematic study. A Sense of Their Duty corrects this and reconstructs the identities that middle-class Victorians made for themselves in an era of economic change.

Andrew C. Holman teaches in the Department of History and in the Canadian Studies Program at Bridgewater State College, in Massachusetts.