expensive watch that requires no winding. She has nowhere to be except at Diana's beck and call, and never leaves Diana's mansion without her. Emily Jeremiah uses this as an example of how Tipping the Velvet fits Judith Halberstam's declaration that homosexual historiographies "produce alternative temporalities". Gay and lesbian stories do not use the same rites of passage that most mainstream stories do, leaving aside the importance of birth, marriage, reproduction, and death. This transcendence of time is evident in the narration of the novel. It is Nan's first-person account of her own past, told many years later. When Nan divulges her past to Florence, Waters uses the first line of the novel to signify where she begins, cycling the story. Even the novel's language bridges this divide. Waters often employs the word "queer" to describe the unusual or remarkable, instead of its post-1922 connotation to refer to homosexuality. She also uses the term specifically to highlight what is unusual as it applies to gender, or Nan's own emotions toward Kitty. Nan's father uses the symbol of the oyster, what he calls a "real queer fish" that exhibits both male and female characteristics, and compares it to Kitty who sits before them in feminine attire though they have seen her on stage dressed as a man. The landlady of the boarding house where Kitty and Nan are staying appraises Nan's first male costume, and is troubled by the "queerness" of it because she looks too much like a man, instead of a woman pretending to be a man. Donna Allegra suggests that by using the contemporary term for prostitutes, "gay girls", Waters is winking at her readers. Class Starting as a working-class girl and experiencing music halls, prostitution, luxury, and a socialist struggle for utopia, Nan's journeys through the class system in Tipping the Velvet are as varied as her gender portrayals and love affairs. Aiobheann Sweeney in The Washington Post notes, "like Dickens, [Waters] digs around in the poorhouses, prisons and asylums to come up with characters who not only court and curtsy but dramatise the unfairness of poverty and gender disparity in their time". Paulina Palmer sees the reading material available in the various locations of Nan's settings as symbols of the vast class differences in Victorian London. Specifically, Diana keeps a trunk full of pornographic literature which she and Nan read to each other in between sexual