The nineteenth-century realist novel offers profound insights into the social processes through which knowledge is constructed. This study views the novel as an experimental forum for interrogating various paths to social incorporation, as the singular protagonist is absorbed into a wider cast of characters. I show how authors (and readers) use the literary imaginary to weigh the balance of power between independent thought and social belonging, between the influence of the one vs. the many, in an atmosphere of gradual democratisation. I argue that fictional representations of professional societies – in science, politics, and the law – provide particularly useful and informative case studies of how individuals are compelled to concede to the collective viewpoint before they can be incorporated. The first three chapters, which look at novels by Trollope, Hardy, and Eliot, illustrate how individuals are inducted into what counts as legitimate knowledge by demonstrating the ways in which authors structure novels as (metaphorical) clubs and societies that mediate, and even dictate, the terms of belonging. The final chapter, examining imperial service in interwar novels by Forster and Orwell, details the breakdown of this associational aesthetic.