This dissertation concerns nineteenth-century British novelists’ representations of unachieved aspirations. Through a blend of affect theory, materialist literary criticism, and formalist analysis, I examine a particularly frustrating problem addressed by these writers: the gap between a dream of social mobility and a reality of class paralysis for many working-class people. I am interested in the tropes of imprisonment, constraint, and confinement through which Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, and Arthur Morrison pondered this problem. I take into account these writers’ own limitations and imperfect social-progress ideology of melioration. These metaphors highlight the exploitation of impoverished people by the very institutions purportedly meant to encourage and mobilize them. In this project, I draw on Lauren Berlant’s theory of cruel optimism, Carolyn Lesjak’s study of the depleasurization of work in the Victorian novel, and Bruce Robbins’s theory of mobility and welfare as frameworks for interpreting what Victorian middle-class fiction writers do with the lived experience of poverty.