This chapter examines an array of antebellum American literary texts for their constructions of working- and middle-class identities during the emergence of market capitalism. While establishing historical and cultural context for a number of popular novels published in the early 1850s, this case study compares the middle-class discourses of moral reform and individual responsibility expressed in conventional novels like The Old Brewery (1854) and the working-class discourses of artisan republicanism and cross-racial sympathy in sensational novels like Hot Corn (1854) and Walt Whitman’s recently discovered serial Life and Adventures of Jack Engle (1852). The analysis reveals the ways that class-accented sensational novels develop a counternarrative to American exceptionalist ideology that was championed by the middle class through documenting the impact of larger socioeconomic forces on the lived experience of the working poor, challenging prevailing stereotypes leveled against the white working classes, and insisting that class matters.