GEI LIT19 2019 2020 Tema 6 Changes Modern World PDF

Unit 6
Social Changes
and Problems:
Silver Fork,
Industrial,
Historical,
Regional
Unit 6
1. The Modern World
1.1. Social Changes
1.1.1. Political Reform & the Middle Class
1.1.2. Industrialization.
1.2. Mental Changes: Modernity & Progress
1.3. Attitudes and Reactions
1.3.1. The “Science” of Political Economy (& Utilitarianism)
1.3.2. The Moral approach of the Writer: Thomas Carlyle as model
1.4. The Cultural-Literary world
1.4.1. The book industry
1.4.2. Serialization: strategies, techniques & attitudes
1.4.3. Concerns
2. Novelistic Genres and Social Reality:

2.1. Silver Fork
2.2. Social-Problem & Industrial
2.3. Historical
2.4. Regional-Provincial
Some Relevant Sources, many of them used here
Altick, Richard D. – The English Common Reader (1957)
Bellringer, A. & C.B. Jones (eds.) – The Victorian Age in Prose (1988) [Anthology]
Bodenheimer, Rosemarie – The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction (1988)
Bowen, John – “ The Historical Novel”, in Brantlinger, P & W.B. Thesing (eds.) A Companion to the Victorian Novel (2002)
Brantlinger, Patrick – The Reading Lesson (1998)
Childers, Joseph “Industrial Culture and the Victorian Novel”, in David, Deirdre (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel
(2001) – 77-96.
Copeland, Edward – The Silver Fork Novel. Fashionable Fiction in the Age of Reform (2012)
Davis, Philip (2004) The Victorians [OELH]
Duncan, Ian – “The Provincial or Regional Novel”, in Brantlinger, P & W.B. Thesing (eds.) A Companion to the Victorian Novel (2002)
Fleishman, Avrom – The English Historical Novel: Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf ( (1971)
Gallagher, Catherine. The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative form 1832-1867 (1985)
[Garcha, Amanpal - From Sketch to Novel. The Development of Victorian Fiction (2009)]
Gilmour, Robin – The Novel in The Victorian Age (1986)
Guy, Josephine – The Victorian Social-Problem Novel (1996)
Hilton, Boyd – A Mad, Bad, Dangerous People? England 1783-1846 (2006)
Keating, P.J. – The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction (1971)
Keep, Christopher – “Technology and Information: Accelerating Developments”, in Brantlinger, P & W.B. Thesing (eds.) A Companion to
the Victorian Novel (2002)
Ledger, Sally – “Radical Writing”, in Shattock, Joanne (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1830-1914 (2010) – 127-146
Matthew, Colin (2000) The Nineteenth Century [SOHBI]
Mays, Kelly, J – “The Publishing World”, in Brantlinger, P & W.B. Thesing (eds.) A Companion to the Victorian Novel (2002)
Poovey, Mary - “Disraeli, Gaskell, and the Condition of England” (1994) in Columbia History of the British Novel (508-532)
Rance, Nicholas – The Historical Novel and Popular Politics in 19th Century England (1975)
Rose, Jonathan – “Education, Literacy, and the Victorian Reader”, ”, in Brantlinger, P & W.B. Thesing (eds.) A Companion to the Victorian
Novel (2002)
Sanders, Andrew – The Victorian Historical Novel 1840-1880 (1978)
Williams, Raymond - Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (1960)
1. The Modern World
1.1. Social Changes
1.1.1. Political Reform & the Middle Class
The 1832 Reform Act / The First Reform Act

A) Context (of problems):
- Evidence of corruption in the political system.

[John Wade: The Black Book, or Corruption Unmasked! Being an Account of Persons, Places,
and Sinecures. [1820 > 1835]
- Unfair representation in demographic terms: some big cities in the North
unrepresented (Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds …) [Remember the Peterloo Massacre]
- Corrupted representation in small constituencies (rotten/pocket boroughs / voting was
public!) [487 out of 658 MPs returned by nomination]
- Different franchise criteria throughout the country (but basically voting rights
associated to land property: several properties = several voting rights)
- Radical/Whig pressure held during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars
- Tory party unable to stop changes & internal division despite the victory in the 1830
general election.
1.1. Social Changes
B) Proposals / Solutions:
- Rhetorical-philosophical strategy: new political structures for new times
“Rapid and prodigious changes … have occurred in the state of society (...) The social revolution of the
last sixty years has altered the whole condition of mankind more than did the three centuries before”
(James Macintosh, 1831)
- Redistribution of the franchise in territorial terms
- Extension of the franchise through a more homogeneous and “generous”criterion:

value of your property or of leased property above 10 pounds
- Controversy among historians concerning the benefits for social groups & parties
C) Main electoral consequence: From about 400-500.000 voters to about 650-800.000

voters. Can we call this democracy?
“No more than 4 per cent of the male population was entitled to vote, and most of those either didn’t
vote, or voted according to how much they were bribed or patronized.” (Michael Foot, 2005)
1.1. Social Changes
D) Main social consequence of the Reform:
- A new ‘respectable’ middle class is born.
- Strong sense of entitlement of this new

group: “a post-aristocratic period” (Davis)
[Most of the literary products of the time

represent the taste and worldview of this
group, since most of the writers belong to
this group and address this group]
1.1. Social Changes
E) Social-class identity becomes a more slippery phenomenon:
- Positions more a matter of self-definition and tastes than legal (and, of course,
money).
- Importance for middle clases of “gentility”, gradually inserted, ackowledged and

made prominent to mark them off from lower strata.
“Social superiority as demonstrated by polite and respectable manners, behaviour,

or appearances” (OED)
[confusing mixture of reputation, moral propensión and manners, not too different
from the old aristocratic myth (remember Michael MacKeon!)]
1.1. Social Changes
F) A new, internal, borderline is added to the old ones:
… the middle class was itself divided, at the very least, into upper and lesser strata,
and the boundary between upper middle class and landed society was blurred, as
was that between landed society and the aristocracy
- Criterion of ability to invest (over 250 pounds) separates upper and lower middle
classes.
- With 150-200 pounds you could enjoy a “respectable” lifestyle.
- Social position (respectability) in some circles did not only depend on how much
money you had: do you have to work or does your income derive from rented land
property (or bank deposits)? Shifting opinions & “rise” of some professions].
The Social Ladder
1.1. Social Changes
G) Limits of the Reform: innovations basically to dispel tension & revolution
1832: First Reform Act: middle-class males

1834: New Poor Law: From Parish-based outdoor relief to workhouse “relief”
1839: First Chartist Petition rejected (12th July: 235 n– 46y) Riot in Birmingham.
1842: Second Chartist Petition rejected
1844: Joint Stock Companies Act
1846: Repeal of the Corn Laws
1847: Factory Act
1848: Third, and last, Chartist Petition rejected
1848: Public Health Act
1855: Limited Liability Act
1856: Joint Stock Companies Act
1867: Second Reform Act: urban males + secret ballot [1872]
1870: Elementary Education Act
1884-5: Third Reform Act: rural males & more proportional constituencies
1886: Irish Home Rule
1.1. Social Changes
Balance between measures
A) Measures designed to
“manage” (stop & delay) the
extension of the franchise (red)
B) Measures designed to
“protect” the rights of working
classes during moments of
tension (green)
C) Measures designed to
liberalize the economic system
(blue)
A Digression on Political Life: Parties & Interests
Whigs-Businessmen for economic advancement

Tories-Aristocrats for agricultural privileges
Beware of oversimplifications:
The case of Cardiff
Long feud between the Conservative Lord Bute and the

Liberal, Nonconformist John Batchelor
- Corn Laws
- Control of Docks & Railways
- Sanitation
- 1852 election & revenge
- Death & controversy about statue
Low clases betrayed by the First Reform: Chartism
& the First National Petition (1838)
“It was the fond expectation
of the people that a remedy for the
greater part, if not for the whole, of
their grievances, would be found in
the Reform Act of 1832
(…)
The Reform Act has
effected a transfer of power from
one domineering faction to another,
and left the people as helpless as
before.”
1.1. Social Changes
Ambivalent reactions
A) Ugliness & poverty in the country
[The Black Country] is like another world. In the midst of so much wealth, there seems to be
nothing but ruin. As far as the eye can reach, one sees nothing but chimneys, flaming
furnesses, many deserted but not pulled down, with wretched cottages around them ... Add
to this a thick & black atmosphere ... and you have but a faint impression of the life ... which a
3rd of a million of my poor subjects are forced to live [Queen Victoria]
B) Ugliness & poverty in the new cities: Problems of the new model more visible at first than
benefits
“Dense urban population, inadequate housing and sanitation, irregular employment”

(Poovey, 508)
“problems of housing and the use of space; problems of public health, sanitation, sewerage,
ventilation, paving and water supply, in the face of cholera, typhus, and consumption;
problems concerning working conditions …” (Davis, 13)
1.1. Social Changes
C) Pride because of overall material success: “national prosperity”
During five-and-twenty years every influence that can develop the energies and resources of a nation
had been acting with concentrated stimulation on the British Isles. National peril and national glory;
the perpetual menace of invasion, the continual triumph of conquest; the most extensive foreign
commerce that was ever conducted by a single nation; an illimitable currency; an internal trade
supported by swarming millions whom manufacturers and inclosure-bills summoned into existence;
above all, the supreme control obtained by man over mechanic power, these are some of the causes
of that rapid advance of material civilisation in England, to which the annals of the world can afford no
parallel [Disraeli (1844)]
[Can you perceive any manipulation?]

Workers affected: expelled from the traditional agricultural model, forced to become “hands” in
factories
D) However, success was perceived as “unintentional, unplanned, and unanticipated”:
An important part of British uncertainty ... sprang from the absence of precedent for the extraordinary
transformation the country found itself experiencing. No precedent in any country existed for the
economic dominance of industries such as iron, steel, and manufacturing, or for the extent of
urbanization which accompanied them [Matthew 3]
1.1. Social Changes
E) Controversy concerning political intervention: social engineering vs. liberal approach:
- Political economists (Manchester School): market forces, free competition, releasing of all
restraints [See section 1.3.1]
- Progressive Reformists (James Kay-Shuttleworth): National laws on public health and town
planning, use of inspectorate [Workhouses]
F) Muddled social thinking: ‘cruel’ progressives versus ‘humane’conservatives
- Modern “solutions” based on public regulation perceived as unfair and inhuman

- Old models [charity] perceived as “friendly” and "natural“.
- Paternalism:
The revival of social paternalism was a dominant feature of the Victorian effort to counteract the
consequences of a competitive market economy. Paternalist ideology reasserted a belief that relations
between employers and workers should be constituted in moral as well as economic terms and that
society was properly seen as a hierarchical order in which the wealthy and powerful would protect the
poor in return for their deference and duty [Bodenheimer, 21]
[Nostalgic images of the kindly squire and the wise parson]

[Factory owners claiming the status of old gentlemen]
“a whole new order or disorder” [Davis, 13].
A) Change has become inevitable, and uncertain
“The first of the leading peculiaritiesof thepresentage is thatit is an age of transition. Mankind
haveoutgrown old institutions and old doctrines, and havenot yet acquirednew ones” (John
Stuart Mill)
[Coining of “Zeitgeist” (“Spirit of theAge”) 1835? 1848?]

[Assumptionthatthings move in history, and thinking maycome later]
[distinction-correlation-misadjustments between structures and ideas]
B) Disorder is connected:
“There is no sort of fixity in any of the institutions of society, no sort of continuance in any of its
orders. No order keeps to itself; they all interlock and interpenetrate”
[J. Baldwin Brown - First Principles of EcclessiasticalTruth 1871)]
C) Industrial life involves an autonomous human reordering of life, away
from natural cycles & seasons (and partly from the idealized Nature of
Romantics).
D) Speed, mobility & uprooting as necessary qualities of modern life
- “Railways are shifting all towns of Britain into new places, railways have set all
the Towns of England a-dancing. Reading is coming up to London, Basingstoke is
going down to Gosport or Southampton, Dumfries to Liverpool and London”
(Carlyle)
[6.000 miles of railway built between 1830 and 1850/ 18.000 in 1900]
- Destruction of traditional communities and personal identities. Raymond

Williams: Crisis of the knowable community & the knowable individual [Alone in
the city] [This includes rank-class identity (Great Expectations)]
E) [Marx] Capitalist economy based on a paradoxical sense of stability based on

cyclical spasms: surges of expansion followed by crisis, considered acceptable by
liberal thinkers
Some examples: nostalgia of old travelling
Five-and-thirty years ago the glory had not yet departed from the old coach roads: the
great roadside inns were still brilliant with well-polished tankards,the smiling glances of
pretty barmaids, and the repartees of jocose hostlers; themail still announced itself by
the merry notes of the horn …
In those days there were pocket boroughs, a Birmingham unrepresented in
Parliament and compelled to make strong representations out of it, unrepealed corn-
laws, three-and-sixpenny letters, a brawny and many-breeding pauperism, and other
departed evils; but there were some pleasant things, too, which have also departed. (…)
[T]he elderly man has his enviable memories, and not the least of them is the memory of
a long journey in mid-spring or autumn on the outside of a stage coach. Posterity may be
shot, like a bullet through a tube, by atmospheric pressure, from Winchester to
Newcastle: that is a fine result tohave among our hopes; but the slow, old fashioned way
of getting from one end of our country to the other is the better thing to have in the
memory. The tube- journey can never lend much to picture and narrative; it is as barren
as an exclamatory O! Whereas, the happy outside passenger, seated on the box from the
dawn to the gloaming, gathered enough stories of English life, enough of English labors
in town and country, enough aspects of earth and sky, to make episodes for a modern
Odyssey. [George Eliot. Felix Holt]
Some examples: violence of modern travelling
It was like all other expresses, as every express is and must be. It bore through
the harvest country a smell like a large washing-day, and a sharp issue of steam
as from a huge brazen tea-urn. The greatest power in nature and art combined,
it yet glided over dangerous heights in the sight of people looking up from fields
and roads, as smoothly and unreally as a light miniature plaything. Now, the
engine shrieked in hysterics of such intensity, that it seemed desirable that the
men who had her in charge should hold her feet, slap her hands, and bring her
to; now, burrowed into tunnels with a stubborn and undemonstrative energy so
confusing that the train seemed to be flying back into leagues of darkness. Here,
were station after station, swallowed up by the express without stopping; here,
stations where it fired itself in like a volley of cannon-balls, swooped away four
country-people with nosegays, and three men of business with portmanteaus,
and fired itself off again, bang, bang, bang! [Dickens. The Lazy Tour]
One more example: how to interpret and react to revolutions
I remember well wishing my lot had been cast in the troubled times of the late war and
seeing in its exciting incidents a kind of stimulating charm (...) I have now out-lived
youth; and, though I dare not say that I have outlived all its illusions—that the romance
is quite gone from life—the veil fallen from truth, and that I see both in naked reality—
yet, certainly, many things are not what they were ten years ago (...) I have still no
doubt that the shock of moral earthquakes wakens a vivid sense of life, both in nations
and individuals; that the fear of dangers on a broad national scale, diverts men's minds
momentarily from brooding over small private perils, and for the time gives them
something like largeness of views; but, as little doubt have I, that convulsive revolutions
put back the world in all that is good, check civilisation, bring the dregs of society to its
surface; in short, it appears to me that insurrections and battles are the acute diseases
of nations, and that their tendency is to exhaust, by their violence, the vital energies of
the countries where they occur. That England may be spared the spasms, cramps, and
frenzy-fits now contorting the Continent, and threatening Ireland, I earnestly pray. With
the French and Irish I have no sympathy. With the Germans and Italians I think the case
is different; as different as the love of freedom is from the lust for license. [Charlotte
Brontë]
One example: how to interpret and react to revolutions
- I have now out-lived youth … illusions … romance

- Convulsive revolutions … diseases … [vital energies] … spasms,
cramps, and frenzy-fits
- Continent: French / Irish vs. Germans / Italians: love of freedom vs.
Lust for license. [Charlotte Brontë]
1) Logic (or affectation) of “adjustment”, but ideological bias

2) Biological analogy makes argument stronger [natural process]
3) Ambivalent attitude of Victorians towards Romanticism
4) Appeal to violence and emotion makes argument stronger
5) Abstract, vague language makes argument stronger
Still another example from Jane Eyre: Charles I and rebellion
This afternoon … I was wondering how a man who wished to do right

could act so unjustly and unwisely as Charles the First sometimes did;
and I thought what a pity it was that, with his integrity and
conscientiousness, he could see no farther than the prerogatives of the
crown. If he had but been able to look to a distance, and see how what
they call the spirit of the age was tending! Still, I like Charles -- I respect
him -- I pity him, poor murdered king! Yes, his enemies were the worst:
they shed blood they had no right to shed. How dared they kill him!“
[Even history is interpreted under the new light]

[consequences for the novel: bildungsroman]
[Appeal to emotions to reject radicalism]
1.3. Attitudes and Reactions.
A) Classical liberal voices created a Science with predictive qualities
- Adam Smith – The Wealth of Nations (1776) [self-interest / market / invisible hand]
- David Ricardo – Principles of Political Economy (1817) [1821: Pol. Eco. Club]
Political Economy: “the science which treats the production and distribution of wealth, so far as they
depend upon the laws of human nature” (J.S.Mill)
Main logic: the economic sphere has a life of its own, and derives from principles of human conduct
In other words:
"… society organizes itself and develops according to its own laws, processes, and imperatives. The vitally
important social institutions do not develop according to plans articulated and instituted by political
decisions, but accordingto underlying and unintended imperatives of group life."
- Authority based on facts & numbers: Manchester Statistical Society (1833) & London (1834)
- Political applications:
- “naturalization” of selfish behaviour & individualism
- to defend self-regulation over intervention (liberalism)
- to appease resistance to industrialization
- to make capitalism (i.e. “progress”) inevitable, irresistible
-Victorian divulgators of Political

Economy:
James Mill – Elements of Political

Economy (1821)
John Ramsay McCulloch - Principles of
Political Economy (1825)
Thomas Malthus - An Essay on the
Principles of Population (1798-1803) &
Principles of Political Economy (1820)
Harriet Martineau - Illustrations of
Political Economy (1832)
John Stuart Mill – Principles of Political
Economy (1848)
B) Utilitarianism: a “scientific” (i.e. empirical and quantitative) & hedonistic ethical
theory to endorse liberal principles
Jeremy Bentham:
- Self-regarding affections predominate over the social.
- Affections based on simple principles:
“Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters,
pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well
as to determine what we shall do”
- Effect on human action: “Felicific calculus”: individuals weigh up the
consequences of alternative courses of action and choose that which promises
the greatest amount of happiness”
[Some limits: (eg. sexual continence and delayed marriage)
- Extension to society: “greatest happiness of the greatest number” to help
everyone’s rational choice to dominate and satisfy everyone
- Role of government: to engineer the self towards the general benefit by the
corrective use of reward and punishment through the agencies of
institutionalised law and social approbation
Obsession with “useful knowledge”, with consequences:
The Utilitarians’ … goal was “the diffusion of useful knowledge.” To them useful
knowledge was of two kinds. In the first place, it embraced whatever sort of information
was necessary to multiply and to spread the blessings of machinery … the good, solid,
employable facts of mechanics and chemistry, metalurgy and hydraulics (…) In addition,
“useful knowledge” was a set of economic and political principles. Possessing an almost
religious faith in the supposedly immutable economic and social laws formulated by
Adam Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Bentham, Mill … the utilitarians were convinced that only
by safeguarding the free operation of those laws could the nation be spared future social
anarchy and economic catastrophe. Once he saw the reasonableness of classical
economics, every man would wholeheartedly support laissez faire and all that that went
with it, and dangerous heresies -socialism, republicanism, Cobbettism, Chartism - would
be extinguished (Altick, 130-1)
[Similarities with Evangelicals, including paradoxes (eg reading)]

[Influence wider than actual following: “the two most potent influences upon the
social and cultural tone of 19th-century England]
Writers critical with the coldness of economists and the cruelty of the system: concern with poverty
[Edwin Chadwick: Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain:
100.000 copies]
Thomas Carlyle’s Chartism (1839): “the light by which the novelists learnedto read the new
phenomenon” (Gilmour 41)
- Typical middle-class approach: manipulative combination of ideological rejection and emotional

involvement:
- Inability to consider the poor qualified to defend themselves
“inarticulate souls, struggling there, with inarticulate uproar, like dumb creatures in pain, unable
to speak what is in them” (Carlyle)
- Rejection of the political aspirations of workers
- Choice of a personal-moral-sentimental-Christian perspective.
- Choice of the “feminine” discourse of literature / novel to challenge the masculine one
of Politics and Economy
A FEELING very generally exists that the condition and disposition of the Working Classes is a
rather ominous matter at present; that something ought to be said, something ought to be done,
in regard to it (…)
We are aware that, according to the newspapers, Chartism is extinct; that a Reform
Ministry has 'put down the chimera of Chartism' in the most felicitous effectual manner’. So say the
newspapers; — and yet, alas, most readers of newspapers know withal that it is indeed the
'chimera' of Chartism, not the reality, which has been put down. The distracted incoherent
embodiment of Chartism, whereby in late months it took shape and became visible, this has been
put down; or rather has fallen down and gone asunder by gravitation and law of nature: but the
living essence of Chartism has not been put down.
Chartism means the bitter discontent grown fierce and mad, the wrong condition therefore or the
wrong disposition, of the Working Classes ofEngland.
[“The Condition of England Question” – Chartism - Carlyle, 1839]
Critical Approach to welfare measures.
To read the Reports of the Poor-Law Commissioners, if one had faith enough, would be a
pleasure to the friend of humanity. One sole recipe seems to have been needful for the
woes of England: 'refusal of out-door relief.' England lay in sick discontent … till the Poor-
Law Commissioners arose, and said, Let there be workhouses, and bread of affliction and
water of affliction there! It was a simple invention; as all truly great inventions are. And see,
in any quarter, instantly as the walls of the workhouse arise, misery and necessity fly away,
out of sight, — out of being, as is fondly hoped, and dissolve into the inane; industry,
frugality, fertility, rise of wages, peace on earth and goodwill towards men do, — in the
Poor-Law Commissioners' Reports, — infallibly, rapidly or not so rapidly, to the joy of all
parties (…)
To believe practically that the poor and luckless are here only as a nuisance to
be abraded and abated, and in some permissible manner made away with, and swept out
of sight, is not an amiable faith. [Carlyle]
Critical Approach to the New Economy and Political Economy, but also the New Poor Law
The condition of the lower multitude of English labourers approximates more and more
to that of the Irish competing with them in all markets; that whatsoever labour … to
which mere strength with little skill will suffice, is to be done, will be done not at the
English price, but at an approximation to the Irish price (…) Half-a-million handloom
weavers, working fifteen hours a-day, in perpetual inability to procure thereby enough of
the coarsest food; English farm-labourers at nine shillings and at seven shillings a week;
Scotch farm-labourers who, in districts the half of whose husbandry is that of cows, taste
no milk, can procure no milk (…) [T]he giant Steamengine in a giant English Nation will
here create violent demand for labour … but, alas, the great portion of labour is not
skilled: the millions are and must be skilless, where strength alone is wanted (…) The
huge demon of Mechanism smokes and thunders, panting at his great task, in all sections
of English land; changing his shape like a very Proteus; and infallibly at every change of
shape, oversetting whole multitudes of workmen …
New Poor-Law! Laissez-faire, laissez-passer! The master of horses, when the
summer labour is done, has to feed his horses through the winter. If he said to his
horses: "Quadrupeds, I have no longer work for you; but work exists abundantly over
the world: are you ignorant (or must I read you Political Economy Lectures) that the
steam engine always in the long-run creates additional work?
Limitations of middle-class approaches to social issues:
During the nineteenth century there were two periods when a significant number of novelists
attempted to present the working classes in fiction. Both were times of social upheaval when real
or imagined class fears compelled people to look afresh at the basic social, economic and
political structure of society. In the 1840s and 50s the motivating force was the outcry over the
condition of industrial workers, together with the middle-class panic engendered by Chartist
politics; in the period 1880-1900 it was the problem of urban slum conditions and the
widespread public debate on Socialism. The fictional response in both periods was almost
entirely non-working class. For the novelist who wished to write about the working classes but
was not himself from a working-class background, the publicity arising out of these moments of
crisis enabled him to create a social framework for his fiction within which he could present a
way of life in every respect alien to his own, and closed to him at moments of greater stability (…)
The industrial novel develops only after the Blue Books and Chartism have paved the way, and
the urban novel of the 1890s has a similar dependence on reform agitation of the previous
decade. This is one reason for the narrow range of working-class experience presented in fiction,
and it also explains why the fiction of each period is dominated and restricted by the single
image of a Victorian city. In the earlier period Manchester is used to symbolize both the
greatness and shame of industrial England; and in the later period the East End of London serves
the same dual function for Imperial England. In both cases novelists were following rather than
anticipating the forces making for change. When the crisis declined the interest of novelists
declined also [Keating, 2-3]
A successful disciple: Dickens
Attack on Utilitarianism: Thomas Gradgrind and “facts”
‘Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are
wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the
minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.
This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on
which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!’ [Chapter 1]
Thomas Gradgrind, sir. A man of realities. A man of facts and calculations. A man who
proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over, and who is not
to be talked into allowing for anything over. Thomas Gradgrind, sir—peremptorily
Thomas—Thomas Gradgrind. With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table
always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell
you exactly what it comes to. It is a mere question of figures, a case of simple arithmetic.
You might hope to get some other nonsensical belief into the head of George Gradgrind,
or Augustus Gradgrind, or John Gradgrind, or Joseph Gradgrind (all supposititious, non-
existent persons), but into the head of Thomas Gradgrind—no, sir! [Chapter 2]
Hard Times: Sissy unable to understand “national prosperity”
‘I am almost ashamed,’ said Sissy, with reluctance. ‘But to-day, for instance,
Mr. M’Choakumchild was explaining to us about Natural Prosperity.’
‘National, I think it must have been,’ observed Louisa.
‘Yes, it was.—But isn’t it the same?’ she timidly asked.
‘You had better say, National, as he said so,’ returned Louisa, with her dry
reserve.
‘National Prosperity. And he said, Now, this schoolroom is a Nation. And in this
nation, there are fifty millions of money. Isn’t this a prosperous nation? Girl number
twenty, isn’t this a prosperous nation, and a’n’t you in a thriving state?’
‘What did you say?’ asked Louisa.
‘Miss Louisa, I said I didn’t know. I thought I couldn’t know whether it was a
prosperous nation or not, and whether I was in a thriving state or not, unless I knew
who had got the money, and whether any of it was mine. But that had nothing to do
with it. It was not in the figures at all,’ said Sissy, wiping her eyes.
‘That was a great mistake of yours,’ observed Louisa.
Sketches by Boz - Mr Bung’s narrative
‘It’s very true, as you say, sir,’ Mr. Bung commenced, ‘that a broker’s man’s is not a life to be envied; and in course
you know as well as I do, though you don’t say it, that people hate and scout ’em because they’re the ministers of
wretchedness, like, to poor people. But what could I do, sir? The thing was no worse because I did it, instead of
somebody else; and if putting me in possession of a house would put me in possession of three and sixpence a day,
and levying a distress on another man’s goods would relieve my distress and that of my family, it can’t be expected
but what I’d take the job and go through with it. I never liked it, God knows; I always looked out for something else,
and the moment I got other work to do, I left it. If there is anything wrong in being the agent in such matters —not
the principal, mind you— I’m sure the business, to a beginner like I was, at all events, carries its own punishment
along with it. I wished again and again that the people would only blow me up, or pitch into me—that I wouldn’t
have minded, it’s all in my way; but it’s the being shut up by yourself in one room for five days, without so much as
an old newspaper to look at, or anything to see out o’ the winder but the roofs and chimneys at the back of the
house, or anything to listen to, but the ticking, perhaps, of an old Dutch clock, the sobbing of the missis, now and
then, the low talking of friends in the next room, who speak in whispers, lest “the man” should overhear them, or
perhaps the occasional opening of the door, as a child peeps in to look at you, and then runs half-frightened away
—it’s all this, that makes you feel sneaking somehow, and ashamed of yourself; and then, if it’s wintertime, they just
give you fire enough to make you think you’d like more, and bring in your grub as if they wished it ’ud choke you—
as I dare say they do, for the matter of that, most heartily. If they’re very civil, they make you up a bed in the room
at night, and if they don’t, your master sends one in for you; but there you are, without being washed or shaved all
the time, shunned by everybody, and spoken to by no one, unless some one comes in at dinner-time, and asks you
whether you want any more, in a tone as much to say, “I hope you don’t,” or, in the evening, to inquire whether you
wouldn’t rather have a candle, after you’ve been sitting in the dark half the night. When I was left in this way, I used
to sit, think, think, thinking, till I felt as lonesome as a kitten in a wash-house copper with the lid on; but I believe
the old brokers’ men who are regularly trained to it, never think at all. I have heard some on ’em say, indeed, that
they don’t know how!
Sketches by Boz – The Parish
How much is conveyed in those two short words—‘The Parish!’ And with how many tales
of distress and misery, of broken fortune and ruined hopes, too often of unrelieved
wretchedness and successful knavery, are they associated! A poor man, with small
earnings, and a large family, just manages to live on from hand to mouth, and to procure
food from day to day; he has barely sufficient to satisfy the present cravings of nature, and
can take no heed of the future. His taxes arein arrear, quarter-day passes by, another
quarter-day arrives: he can procure no more quarter for himself, and is summoned by—
the parish. His goods are distrained, his children are crying with cold and hunger, and the
very bed on which his sick wife is lying, is dragged from beneath her. What can he do? To
whom is he to apply for relief? To private charity? To benevolent individuals?
Certainly not—there is his parish. There are the parish vestry, the parish infirmary, the
parish surgeon, the parish officers, the parish beadle. Excellent institutions, and gentle,
kind-hearted men. The woman dies—she is buried by the parish. The children have no
protector—they are taken care of by the parish. The man first neglects, and afterwards
cannot obtain, work—he is relieved by the parish; and when distress and drunkenness
have done their work upon him, he is maintained, a harmless babbling idiot, in the parish
asylum
Bleak House – Jo at court
Says the coroner, is that boy here? Says the beadle, no, sir, he is not here. Says the coroner, go and fetch
him then. In the absence of the active and intelligent, the coroner converses with Mr. Tulkinghorn.
Oh! Here's the boy, gentlemen!
Here he is, very muddy, very hoarse, very ragged. Now, boy! But stop a minute. Caution. This boy must
be put through a few preliminary paces.
Name, Jo. Nothing else that he knows on. Don't know that everybody has two names. Never heerd of sich
a think. Don't know that Jo is short for a longer name. Thinks it long enough for HIM. HE don't find no fault with it.
Spell it? No. HE can't spell it. No father, no mother, no friends. Never been to school. What's home? Knows a broom's a
broom, and knows it's wicked to tell a lie. Don't recollect who told him about the broom or about the lie, but knows
both. Can't exactly say what'll be done to him arter he's dead if he tells a lie to the gentlemen here, but believes it'll be
something wery bad to punish him, and serve him right—and so he'll tell the truth.
"This won't do, gentlemen!" says the coroner with a melancholy shake of the head.
"Don't you think you can receive his evidence, sir?" asks an attentive juryman.
"Out of the question," says the coroner. "You have heard the boy. 'Can't exactly say' won't do, you know.
We can't take THAT in a court of justice, gentlemen. It's terrible depravity. Put the boy aside.”
[Brocklehurst: “all liars will have their portion in the lake burning with fire and brimstone”]
Bleak House – Jo in the street
Jo sweeps his crossing all day

long … He sums up his mental
condition when asked a question
by replying that he “don’t know
nothink.” He knows it is hard to
keep the mud off the crossing in
dirty weather, and harder still to
live by doing it. Nobody taught
him even that much; he found it
out
1.4. The Cultural-Literary World
1.4.1. The book industry
“This is a reading age” (J.S. Mill)
“We have become a novel-reading-people. Novels are in the hands of us all; from the Prime Minister
down to the last-appointed scullery-maid. We have them in our library, our drawing- rooms, our bed-
rooms, our kitchens – and in our nurseries” (A. Trollope)
A) INFLUENCE OF TECHNICAL & LEGAL CHANGES: BIGGER, QUICKER, CHEAPER
- Steam energy introduced in the printing trade in the 1830s.

- Writing and reading became more ephemeral [production / circulation / consumption …]
-Reduced gap between expensive first editions and cheap reprints (abolition of resale price
maintenance) [“Standard Novels” / Yellowbacks / Collected works / Foreign reprints]
- “Taxes on knowledge” reduced and then abolished
- Extraordinary increase of periodical titles [115 launched in 1859alone]
- From political and religious sectarianism to literature & reviewing
- WHS Smith: network of newsagent stalls & railways
- Circulating libraries (Mudie’s) & Public libraries (after 1851)
- Growing percentage of fiction [16% (1st half) - 25% (2nd half) / 380 novels in 1880]
B) INFLUENCE OF DEMOGRAPHIC AND ECONOMIC CHANGES
- Expansion of reading habits down the hierarchy.

- Traditional middle-class [merchants, bankers, large employers, lawyers]
- New middle-class professions [physicians, teachers, civil servants] [100-300 p. a year]
[white-collar workers: from 300.000 in 1851 to 650.000 in 1881 / average income rise: 70%]
- Low-middle class & working class readership [skilled workers, small shopkeepers and domestic
servants].
- Growth of literacy: 1840: 67% & 51% / 1871: 81% & 73%
- Rise of population: 40% / Rise of book production: 400% [14m in 1830 – 32m in 1900]
- Rise of English language speakers in the world: 1800: 26 million / 1900: 126 million
C) INFLUENCE OF NEW, AGGRESSIVE PUBLISHERS

- Involved in creative processes, not just businessmen
- New generation after the collapse of Constable and Ballantyne (1826)
- Richard Bentley [Melville]
- John Blackwood [George Eliot]
- Smith, Elder and co. [George Eliot]
- Macmillan
- Chapman & Hall [Dickens]
- Bradbury & Evans [Punch / Dickens / Thackeray]
- Longman [Disraeli]
- Below the “literary novel” about 90 different publishers of penny dreadfuls.

D) NEW FORMS OF PUBLICATION OR DISTRIBUTION
SERIAL PUBLICATION
- Like newpapers: 32 pages + 2 illustrations / 1 shilling
- Popular at first for technical & economic reasons
- Only successful for some authors (Dickens, Thackeray, Bulwer-Lytton or Wilkie Collins)
- 20 installments in 19 months: sensational design
MAGAZINE SERIALIZATION
- Mixed structure: novels + reviews + articles + short stories
- Overlapping of novels
- Prestige of writers-editors (Thackeray & Cornhill Magazine, 120.000 copies)
- Careful about scandalous contents – Respectability
- Monthly – 1 shilling / Dickens’s weekly Household Words & All the Year Round - 2 pennies]
- Christmas issues
BOOK FORM
- Expensive, unchanged tradition of three volumes (35 shillings - a skilled worker’s wage)
- Security for publishers (60% guaranteed because of circulating libraries)
- Small runs (500-1000 copies)
- Acceptable for novelists (250 pounds per novel)
1.4.2. Serialization: strategies, techniques & attitudes
- Emotional engagement of the reader: “Make them laugh, make them cry, make them
wait”
- Attention to reactions and changes (eg. Sam Weller in Pickwick)
- Multiplot structure, panoramic method & parallel situations
- Predictable, regular cliffhangers
- Formulas to help the reader’s memory (Dickens’s secondary characters and paradox)
- Importance of beginnings (grabbing beginnings / symbolic functions)
- Problems with endings [multiplot (unconvincing ends & loose threads)] [pressure of
happy endings (GE), Providentialist logic, moral conclusions]
- Poetic justice and unmistakable moral interpretations required. Morality as artistic
criterion (Heathcliff)
- Excessive length (Wuthering Heights -> timeshifts & surrogate narrators) (reaction of
modernist novellas)
- Careless narratorial techniques: omniscient digressive author (J. Sedley in Vanity Fair)
- Alternative formula of experiments with autobiography and consciousness
- Three part logic: sowing/reaping/garnering (HT) / Expectation/illusion/disillusion
1.4.3. Concerns
A) Importance of culture-education and its effects on political structure
- Carlyle: expansion of wide-scale printing and

inevitability of thinking and of democracy
- G. Eliot: Extension of education more important than

extension of the franchise
B) However, anxieties about middle classes
- J.S. Mill: “The world reads too much and too quickly to read well”
- M. Arnold: problem of “how to find and keep high ideals”.
[philistinism: material values]
1.4.3. Concerns
Our actual middle class has not yet, certainly,
the fine culture, or the living intelligence, which
quickened great bodies of men at these epochs
[Ancient Greece, Italian Renaissance, Elizabethan
England] (…) It is the middle class which has real
mental ardour, real curiosity; it is the middle
class which is the great reader; that immense
literature of the day which we see surging up all
round us,— literature the absolute value of
which it is almost impossible to rate too humbly,
literature hardly a word of which will reach, or
deserves to reach, the future, — it is the middle
class which calls it forth, and its evocation is at
least a sign of a widespread mental movement in
that class. Will this movement go on and
become fruitful; will it conduct the middle class
to a high and commanding pitch of culture and
intelligence? That depends on the sensibility
which the middle class has for perfection; that
depends on its power to transform itself [Arnold:
A French Eton. 1863-4]
1.4.3. Concerns
Ruskin’s idealization (invention?) of
the ‘old’ middle classes:
Scott lived in a country and time,

when, from highest to lowest, but
chiefly in that dignified and nobly
severe middle class to which he
himself belonged, a habit of serene
and stainless thought was as natural
to the people as their mountain air
What implicit message is conveyed?

1.4.3. Concerns
C) The Social Necessity of Literary Education
- Ideal role played by literature: a classless society of developed individuals

[to “transform” or “refine” professionals into humanists]
- Political funtion: to make them moderate, “conservative”.
- Elevated role of criticism and its values: complex analytical skills conveyed
- Access to education: Universal Act of Education in 1870.
BUT
- Teaching of English literature at schools: memorizing passages of poetry and

learning the allusions.
- Derivative taste: Bible / Shakespeare / Bunyan / Robinson Crusoe + Dickens / Carlyle /
Ruskin / Palgrave’s Golden Treasury
- English Literature at University not found convincing or necessary: “Why
transform into a difficult exercise what is natural virtue?” (Walter Pater)
- Basic contradiction: writing-thinking as a humane profession that worked against
professionalism itself, a non-capitalist agency lodged in the middle of the market
society it sought to modify. [i.e. the modern world does not need (too many)
humanists]
1.4.3. Concerns
D) The ‘doubtful’ elevation of the novel
- Traditional scepticism: “[Novel-reading] occassions in time the entire destruction of the powers of the
mind” (Coleridge) / “[reading novels] can hardly strenghen the intelligence” (Trollope)
- Inverse correlation between quality and quantity: growth means decline
“if we look abroad, in France, where the reading public is less numerous than in England, a more
elevated and refining tone is more fashionable in literature; and in America, where it is infinitely larger,
the tone of literature is infinitely more superficial” [Bulwer-Lytton, 1833]
- George Gissing’s pessimism: the commercial dimension destroys artistic ambition [New Grub Street]
- Fear that people uncritically imitate the behaviour of characters (criminal biographies / Oliver Twist).
Women particularly adept to ‘poisonous’ reading [Quixote figures: confusion between fiction and reality]
- Rise creates “subliterature”: Association of good novels to ‘respectable’, professional middle clases,
creates room below for “cheap” literature read by working classes. 1880s: explicit opposition to ‘inferior’
subgenres and the press.
- Aesthetic legitimacy not yet achieved [light reading still].

2. Novelistic Genres and Social
Reality.
2.1. Silver Fork

2.2.1. Some Structural Patterns
2.2.2. Some Canonical Texts
2.2.3. The Case of Hard Times
2.3. Historical
2.4. Regional-Provincial
2.1. Silver Fork
[Edward Copeland]
A) Period: mostly a late “Regency” publishing phenomenon, coinciding with the political
period of the Reform [1825-1841]
B) Low critical reputation, then and now:
- “Embarrasing” but historically “necessary” to understand great works like Thackeray’s

Vanity Fair
- [Relevant cultural figure of “the Dandy” inspired by Beau Brummell]
- Too topical to be grasped nowadays (like satire sometimes)
- A political embarrasment to the next generation, both Whigs and Tories
- [instrument for promotion of Whigh leaders turned Tories (Bulwer & Disraeli)]
- Not well adapted to rules of realism: too many twists and turns of plot not motivated
by psychological forces
- Perceived as continuous with earlier women’s literature (Edgeworth, Austen, Burney)
- A circulating library phenomenon: three-deckers (around 900 pages) to be read quickly
- Extremely formulaic:
“Take a pair of Pistols and a pack of cards. A cookery-book and a set of new quadrilles; mix
them up with half an intrigue and a whole marriage, and divide them into three equal
portions” (Disraeli)
2.1. Silver Fork
C) Trivial Contents:
- Attachment to consumerism and advertising (insider information on fashionable

products and places). Paradox: middle classes were told what objects to desire, but
knowing the price of things, or caring too much about those objects was considered
bad taste
- Function of “urbanity manual”. Ridiculed by William Hazzlitt
“So a young linen-draper or attorney’s-clerk from the country, who had gained a thirty-
thousand pound prize in the lottery and wished to set up for a fine gentleman, might learn
from these Novels what hotel to put up at, what watering place to go to, what hatter,
hosier, tailor, shoemaker, friseur to employ, what part of the town he should be seen in,
what theatre he might frequent; but how to behave, speak, look, feel, and think in his new
and more aspiring character he would not find the most distant hint in the gross
caricatures or flimsy sketches of the most mechanical and shallow of all schools …” [“The
Dandy School” - The Examiner, November 18, 1827]
- Attachment to gossipy journalism (celebrity news, scandals, social rivalries) and

commercial alliance with newspapers. [Characters read “things” in newspapers /
newspapers announce novels as news …]
2.1. Silver Fork
D) More “serious”, political meanings:
- Attachment to political controversy and symbolic power [struggle for power at a time of
convulsion and fear of revolution: “renegotiation of traditional systems of power, including
the shifts in social relationships and status that come along with such momentous change”
(Copeland, 2)]
- Instrument to express tensions between social classes.
- “… in the mid 1820s and early 1830s a particular scrutiny of the aristocracy and the
middle clases had been common in the press, mostly formulaic, with frowns directed
towards the extravagance of the aristocracy and mocking laughter towards pretensions
to fashion in the middle clases” (Copeland, 11)
- Deeper significance of “fashion”: not just references to millinery, but, as in novels of

manners, values and moral interpretations associated to all forms of social behaviour
[satirical model of the Brangthons in Burney’s Evelina]
2.1. Silver Fork
E) The real “message”: Taking positions – moving up
- The relevance and aspirations of a social “middle”. Novels sold as portraits of

aristocratic life, but both authors and readers were slightly below this level. Young,
glamorous, genteel novelists claiming intimacy, but in fact with limited access to the
most exclusive tiers, to the privileged “three hundred” (Copeland, 14)
- Personal plot of social promotion mixed with political involvement [relevant for
bildungsroman] and equivalent function for authors.
- Importance of a particular London topography: [Franco Moretti - Atlas of the European

Novel, 84: Pelham gets lost when he moves east of Regent Street]
Marylebone Regent
Street Covent Garden
Oxford Street SILVER FORK Holborn NEWGATE
The City
Mayfair
2.1. Silver Fork
F) Great Names and Works of the Genre (!)
- Edward Bulwer (Lytton) - Pelham; or the Adventures of a Gentleman (1828)

[Life as a dandy in Paris and London, but cynical-frivolous attitudes about the importance
of it / some glimpses of middle class life in Cheltenham / plot made interesting by
introducing a “heroic” defence of a friend, Sir Reginald Glanville, having to move to the
dangerous territory of the East End]
[Rosina Bulwer - Chevely; or The Man of Honour (1839) – [written to destroy the
reputation of her husband]
- Benjamin Disraeli - Vivian Grey (1826)

[A Young, ambitious, manipulative dandy’s attempt to enter political life. He fails and
leaves for Germany. Failure also in affair with a girl
Ellen Moers (The Dandy, p. 94) compares Pelham and Vivian:
“Pelham is a dandy who conceals a serious moral purpose behind his affectations; Vivian is
a dandy whose lust for power defies concealment, and whose dandyism is a pose to gild
inmoral means used for an inmoral end … Pelham’s wit is fresh, spontaneous, impudent;
Vivan’s is always calculated and often sinister”
2.2.1. Some Structural Patterns
Factory Life: Two Views [A: Frances Trollope; B: Benjamin Disraeli]
A. But in the room they entered, the dirty, ragged, miserable crew, were all in
active performance of their various tasks; the over-lookers, strap in hand,on
the alert; the whirling spindles urging the little slaves who waited on them, to
movements as unceasing as their own; and the whole monstrous chamber,
redolent of all the various impurities that “by the perfection of our
manufacturing system,” are converted into “gales of Araby” for the rich, after
passing in the shape of certain poison, through the lungs of the poor. So Sir
Matthew proudly looked about him, and approved.
B.Nor should the weaving-room be forgotten, where a thousand or fifteen

hundred girls may be observed in their coral necklaces, working like Penelope in
the daytime; some pretty, some pert, some graceful and jocund, some
absorbed in their occupation; a little serious some, few sad. And the cotton you
have observed in its rude state, that you have seen the silent spinner change
into thread, and the bustling weaver convert into cloth, you may now watch as
in a moment it is tinted with beautiful colours, or printed with fanciful patterns.
In other words
A B
- Dirty crew / owner / overlookers - Girls
- Poor / rich - No distinction
- Onlookers (flogging) - Machines doing things / girls thinking
- Noise & smell - Nothing
- Cost of transformation - Wonder of transformation
- Irony about contrast between - Beautifying:

commercial glamour and industrial - Mental life of girls (not effort)
- Epic simile
squalor
- Regularity and beauty of uniforms
More idealization from Disraeli: Happy Machines: A new pathetic fallacy?
A machine is a slave that neither brings nor bears degradation; it is a being

endowed with the greatest degree of energy, and acting under the greatest
degree of excitement, yet free at the same time from all passion and emotion.
It is, therefore, not only a slave, but a supernatural slave. And why should one
say that the machine does not live? It breathes, for its breath forms the
atmosphere of some towns. It moves with more regularity than man. And has it
not a voice? Does not the spindle sing like a merry girl at her work, and the
steam-engine roar in jolly chorus, like a strong artisan handling his lusty tools,
and gaining a fair day's wages for a fair day's toil? [Coningsby]
[And ’tis my faith that every flower / Enjoys the air it breathes. (WW)]
[Samuel Butler’s Erewhon]
- Overlapping labels: Industrial - Factory – Social Problem – Condition of England
- Early partisan documents: Mrs Trollope – Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy
(1839)
- Canonical novels of the genre:

- B. Disraeli – Coningsby (1844) / Sybil (1845)
- Elizabeth Gaskell - Mary Barton (1848) / North and South (1855)
- Charles Kingsley: Alton Locke (1850) / [Yeast ((1848) 1851)]
- Canonical novelists with significant contributions to the genre

- Charles Dickens - Hard Times (1854)
- Charlotte Brontë – Shirley (1849)
- George Eliot – Felix Holt, The Radical (1866)
2.2.1. From Typical Features to Structural Patterns
A) Mixed functions (and some confusion!):
- The rise of a combined function for the novel (sociological-political document):
[Antecedents: Radical novels (Godwin) & historical novels (Scott)]
“when writers addressed social issues in fiction they were also claiming amore directly political
role for the novel than feminized activities were generally granted” (Poovey, 510)
New functions
-To arouse sympathy for the conditions of the emerging working class [accusations of
exaggeration]
- Wider debate or discourse about the current state of thenation
[social analysis + reform messages]
[Confusing and manipulative combination, already perceived in Carlyle: Poverty + Chartism (+
Utilitarianism)]
B) The problem of making them interesting as novels
… industrial life was a genuinely new subject for the novel, and its incorporation into the
conventions of early Victorian fiction posed inevitable problems of form and treatment, to
say nothing of the ideological problems inherent in the subject itself. Work, and especially
the routine work of factory or mill, is something that novelists have always had difficulty in
making interesting, and the same is true of social problems when these are not dramatic or
romantic in nature. In the industrial novel the documentary impulse towards the patient
observation of the everyday is always potentially at odds with the inherent tendency of the
form towards exciting plotsand romantic entanglements. ‘It is admitted that a novel can
hardly be made interesting or successful without love inevitably’ [A.] Trollope observed
half-regretfully (…) Kingsley wrote …: ‘there is love and murder enough to satisfy “sweet-
toothed” readers’ (Gilmour 40)
C) Two problems concerning realism:
- “Thematization” of every social issue makes other aspects of the life of people
irrelevant [poverty / race / gender / ideology, etc.]
- The stylistic challenge: the reproduction of working-class speech through dialect [a
novelty]
D) Recurrent “ideological” criticisms [after R. Williams]
- Failure, despite their sympathy, to imagine or see the lives of Working-Class characters
- Failure to recognize the industrial labor force as a rising class developing solidarity and political
autonomy
- Failure to find fictional solutions that would contain and acknowledge their social observation and
criticism [public issues abandoned in favor of personal plot resolutions, sometimes out of the
industrial order itself]
E) A different perspective [Bodenheimer]: to look at what texts tell us about the writers [not what writers
say about factories]: Useful as portraits of the social fantasies of middle-classes, not as portraits of
industrial reality
Victorian social-problem novels … allow us to access to the minds of observant, sensitive, and articulate members of the
middle class as they confronted troubling and unanswerable questions (…) The novels may be less about factory
conditions or the status of trade unions than about the patterns of contradiction and paradox which characterize the
formal fantasies of people living through a period of unprecedented social change (…) The content of those patterns
points to a middle-class crisis of self-definition: these novels display conflict about the nature and diversity of a newly-
empowered and newly fragmented middle class as they attempt to reimagine the roles that it should play in the
maintenance of social order [Bodenheimer, 5]
[“Fantasies”: “Politics of story” useful to interpret ideology: Ideals of convergence]
The industrial novel, in the last analysis, is a middle-class enterprise. It reveals the fears and fantasies, as well as the
generous sympathies, of writers confronted by what were then strange new areas of experience [Gilmour41-2]
G) Romances of Heroines. Women caught in male conflicts. Mixture of the sentimental and the
political-ethical
The difficulties of the passage from daughterhood to womanhood shape the stories of most Victorian heroines. When
their fathers and lovers are factory owners, magistrates or political reformers, the conflicts and choices of the
daughters also provide the structure of the novels’ commentaries on industry and politics [15]
Stories that place a young middle-class heroine at odds with the ruling social assumptions of her neighborhood,
making her moral development and romantic settlement dependent on her engagement with conflicts of class. Both
as consequences and critics’ of their fathers’ worlds, daughters do the fictional work of reform: they attempt to
remedy the injustices of their fathers or to provide missing elements in their lovers’ assumptions of social power [15]
H) Two patterns of resolution thank to female mediation :
- Vertical (social classes): The social activity of the heroine is associated with an investigation of
paternalist power structures and with the corresponding question of a woman’s role in that model of
social order. The heroine functions as intermediary of the plight of the working class.
- Horizontal (classes / ideologies / economic models): A different tension, that between the traditional
landed gentry and the rising business entrepreneur. More conventionally passive role of the heroine:
choosing between two men who place the standards of gentility against the energies of enterprise
[tensions collected about the prospect of social mobility and ascent]
I) Why Women?
-The Essential Condition: a woman’s flexibility derives from her peculiar

position: both in and out of social responsibilities.
[like Cathy in Wuthering Heights]
- She can represent alternatives to classical Political Economy

[sphere of morality untainted by the competitive ethos of the
marketplace]
- She has a structurally double relation to working-class characters: she

acts on behalf of workers from a ruling-class position, but her confined life
is formally analogous to the lives of the working poor.
- Obviously the rebellions of a few isolated heroines are less threatening

than collective activities of workers.
A) Some general similarities and differences:
a) Different approaches to writing & commenting between Disraeli-Kingsley and Gaskell [gender and
genre mixed]: Documentary, Essayistic, Didactic (male) versus “naively” experiential (female)
b) Serious political differences between Disraeli`s “Young England” ideology and Kingsley’s “Christian
Socialism” [Merry England ridiculed by Kingsley]
[“Left”] ---- Chartism --- Kingsley --- Whigs --- Disraeli --- Tories --- [“Right”]
c) Similar narrative strategies: love stories to articulateconflicts [but women (Gaskell) focus on women’s
developments, while men only use them (love stories and women)]
d) Similar ideological solutions: moral regeneration of individuals:

[consequence of deaths-sacrifices]
[limited utopia of self-promotion and/or exile (poor people)]
[reconciliation between opponents through religion]
e) Rejection of Chartism as an acceptable political alternative:

[Restrictive understanding of democracy: Kingsley’s “corporate bodies”]
[Issue of the true essence of the Chartist movement: the riotous versus the moral force]
[Biased emphasis on the inadequacy of violence]
[Only Kingsley tried to vindicate Chartism, as a Christian movement]
The overtly “political” approach of Disraeli and Kingsley
The general reader whose attention has not been specially drawn to the subject which these volumes
aim to illustrate, the Condition of the People, might suspect that the Writer had been tempted to some
exaggeration in the scenes which he has drawn and the impressions which he has wished to convey. He
thinks it therefore due to himself to state that he believes there is not a trait in this work for which he
has not the authority of his own observation, or the authentic evidence which has been received by
Royal Commissions and Parliamentary Committees. [Sybil, or the Two Nations (1845) Benjamin Disraeli
– “Advertisement“]
The main purpose of its writer was to vindicate the just claims of the Tory party to be the popular
political confederation of the country; a purpose which he had, more or less, pursued from a very early
period of life. [Coningsby (1844) Benjamin Disraeli – “Preface”]
On politics I have little to say. My belief remains unchanged that true Christianity, and true monarchy
also, are not only compatible with, but require as their necessary complement, true freedom for every
man of every class; and that the Charter, now defunct, was just as wise and as righteous a "Reform Bill"
as any which England had yet had, or was likely to have. But I frankly say that my experience of the last
five years gives me little hope of any great development of the true democratic principle in Britain,
because it gives me little sign that the many are fit for it. [Alton Locke, Taylor and Poet (1850) Charles
Kingsley. From “Preface to the Working Men of Great Britain” (1854)]
Those who read my story only for amusement, I advise to skip this chapter. Those, on the other hand,
who really wish to ascertain what working men actually do suffer … [Alton Locke, Taylor and Poet (1850)
Charles Kingsley. From Chapter X: “How Folks turn Chartists”]
The “emotional” approach of Elizabeth Gaskell
Mary Barton (1848) Elizabeth Gaskell - PREFACE.
Three years ago I became anxious (from circumstances that need not be more fully alluded to) to employ
myself in writing a work of fiction. Living in Manchester, but with a deep relish and fond admiration for the country, my
first thought was to find a frame-work for my story in some rural scene (…) I had always felt a deep sympathy with the
care-worn men, who looked as if doomed to struggle through their lives in strange alternations between work and want;
tossed to and fro by circumstances (…) A little manifestation of this sympathy, and a little attention to the expression of
feelings on the part of some of the work-people with whom I was acquainted, had laid open to me the hearts of one or
two of the more thoughtful among them; I saw that they were sore and irritable against the rich (…) Whether the bitter
complaints made by them, of the neglect which they experienced from the prosperous-- especially from the masters
whose fortunes they had helped to build up--were well-founded or no, it is not for me to judge. It is enough to say, that
this belief of the injustice and unkindness which they endure from their fellow-creatures, taints what might be
resignation to God's will, and turns it to revenge in too many of the poor uneducated factory-workers of Manchester.
The more I reflected on this unhappy state of things between those so bound to each other by common
interests, as the employers and the employed must ever be, the more anxious I became to give some utterance to the
agony which, from time to time, convulses this dumb people; the agony of suffering without the sympathy of the happy,
or of erroneously believing that such is the case (…) [W]hatever public effort can do in the way of legislation, or private
effort in the way of merciful deeds … should be done, and that speedily, to disabuse the work-people of so miserable a
misapprehension. At present they seem to me to be left in a state, wherein lamentations and tears are thrown aside as
useless, but in which the lips are compressed for curses, and the hands clenched and ready to smite.
I know nothing of Political Economy, or the theories of trade. I have tried to write truthfully; and if my
accounts agree or clash with any system, the agreement or disagreement is unintentional. To myself the idea which I
have formed of the state of feeling among too many of the factory-people in Manchester, and which I endeavoured to
represent in this tale (completed above a year ago), has received some confirmation from the events which have so
recently occurred among a similar class on the Continent.
B) Disraeli’s “Young England” Trilogy: Coningsby / Sybil / Tancred
- Ideology of “Young England”: vague project to modernize the Tories and boost his own
political career. “One Nation” message, against “sectional anomalies” (i.e., conflicts).
Coningsby (1844): Two combined plots:

- Sentimental context: Harry Coningsby, caught up in a feud between his aristocratic
grandfather (Monmouth) and a manufacturer (Millbrook). He is friends with Millbrook’s son and
loves Millbrook’s daughter. [old people’s feud also sentimental]
- Political context: he develops a disaffection with old Toryism thanks to long conversations (or
rather didactic monologues) in which he passively receivesperspectives from Whigs, Jews, and
Catholics. Women are made irrelevant in this political dimension.
Sybil (1845): Two combined facets:

- Sentimental context: Relationship between Sybil Gerard and Egremont, a proud aristocrat
- Political context: Divisions in Chartism between the moderate, articulate, moral force faction
(Sybil and Walter Gerrard) and the rioting one (StephenMorley)
- Political messages: Inadequacy of Chartism as political project / Inadequacy of corrupted
Whiggism / Inadequacy of aristocratic stagnation and prejudice against middle classes
- Solutions to conflict: Mixture of the personal and the political: Walter and Stephen killed
during a riot / Sybil rescued by Egremont / Sybil is married to Egremont / socialpositions of
Sybil and Egremont revised]
Disraeli’s logic of adjustment, and other typical Victorian values.
From early morn to the late twilight, our Coningsby for several days devoted
himself to the comprehension of Manchester. It was to him a new world,
pregnant with new ideas, and suggestive of new trains of thought and feeling.In
this unprecedented partnership between capital and science, working on a spot
which Nature had indicated as the fitting theatre of their exploits, he beheld a
great source of the wealth of nations which had been reserved for these times,
and he perceived that this wealth was rapidly developing classes whose power
was imperfectly recognised in the constitutional scheme, and whose duties in
the social system seemed altogether omitted. Young as he was, the bent of his
mind, and the inquisitive spirit of the times, had sufficiently prepared him, not
indeed to grapple with these questions, but to be sensible of their existence,
and to ponder. [Coningsby]
Chartism, Democracy, and Aristocracy in Sybil
The delegates made their accustomed statement; they wished to pledge no one; all that the
people desired was a respectful discussion of their claims; the national petition, signed by nearly a
million and a half of the flower of the working classes, was shortly to be presented to the House of
Commons, praying the House to take into consideration the five points in which the working classes
deemed their best interests involved; to wit, universal suffrage, vote by ballot, annual parliaments,
salaried members, and the abolition of the property qualification.
"And supposing these five points conceded," said Lord Valentine, "what do you mean to
do?“
"The people then being at length really represented," replied one of the delegates, "they
would decide upon the measures which the interests of the great majority require."
"I am not so clear about that," said Lord Valentine; "that is the very point at issue. I do not
think the great majority are the best judges of their own interests. At all events, gentlemen, the
respective advantages of aristocracy and democracy are a moot point. Well then, finding the question
practically settled in this country, you will excuse me for not wishing to agitate it. I give you complete
credit for the sincerity of your convictions; extend the same confidence to me. You are democrats; I am
an aristocrat. My family has been ennobled for nearly three centuries; they bore a knightly name before
their elevation. They have mainly and materially assisted in making England what it is. (…) You talk of our
taxation and our wars; and of your inventions and your industry. Our wars converted an island into an
empire, and at any rate developed that industry and stimulated those inventions of which you boast. You
tell me that you are the delegates of the unrepresented working classes of Mowbray. Why, what would
Mowbray have been if it had not been for your aristocracy and their wars?
C) Charles Kingsley’s Christian Socialism

[worldview full of contradictions: i.e. progressive & racist]
Alton Locke (1850)

- Attention to Chartism and the strategic conflicts
within it. Refusal to condemn the movement as a
whole. Attempt to recycle it into a Christian
movement
- Rejection of the radical, violent faction (Fergus
O’Flynn - Feargus O’Connor – Northern Star), and
vindication of the moral-force Chartists (Sandy
Mackaye - Thomas Carlyle)
- Importance of self-education and intellectual rise to
adopt a more balanced perspective [but faithfulness to
his own origins]
- Many other ingredients: love stories / prison /
visionary reflections / deaths / attack on Catholics &
Newmanites
Kingsley’s Christian Socialism
The workmen whose quarrels you mention are not Christians, or socialists either. They are of all creeds
and none. We are teaching them to become Christians by teaching them gradually that true socialism,
true liberty, brotherhood, and true equality (not the carnal dead level equality of the Communist, but
the spiritual equality of the church idea, which gives every man an equal chance of developing and using
God's gifts, and rewards every man according to his work, without respect of persons) is only to be
found in loyalty and obedience to Christ. They do quarrel, but if you knew how they used to quarrel
before association, the improvement since would astonish you.
"You regarded the Charter as an absolute end. You made a selfish and a self-willed idol of
it. And thereforeGod's blessing did not rest on it or you."
"We want it as a means as well as an end--as a means for the highest and widest social
reform, as well as a right dependent on eternal justice.“
"It is all true enough--bitterly true. But yet, why do we need the help of theclergy?"
"Because you need the help of the whole nation; because there are other classes to be
considered beside yourselves; because the nation is neither the few nor the many, but the all; because it
is only by the co-operation of all the members of a body, that any one member can fulfil its calling in
health and freedom; because, as long as you stand aloof from the clergy, or from any other class, through
pride, self-interest, or wilful ignorance, you are keeping up those very class distinctions of which you and
I too complain, as 'hateful equally to God and to his enemies;' and, finally, because the clergy are the
class which God has appointed to unite all others
D) Gaskell’s feminine-novelistic “case
histories”
- Purpose: “women feminizing both

masters and workers … teaching
them to identify with each other, as
women (and novelists) already do.
Fiction … tak[es] the middle-class
reader into the homes and minds of
the poor” (Poovey)
- “(Non)political” message: politicians

and masters should know better
about the suffering of workers,
workers should know more about
the rules of the market
Mary Barton (1848)
- Another combined plot: MB caught in conflicts and dilemma: unionist father John turns more
radical; Mary has to choose between Jem Wilson (working-class) and arrogant Harry Carson;
Carson is killed by John. Jem is trialed and Mary contributes to clear him.
- Controversial issues seen as events in the domestic life of the poor people or left aside (poor law,
factory inspectors, accidents). Even the 1839 Charter petition occurs offstage, although it explains
the dramatic turn inJohn Barton’s view of life and domestic stability.
- “Political” solution: old, distressed John Carson introduces improvements after he understands the
feelings of his workers.
North and South (1855):
- More favourable to mill owners.

- Combined plot again: Margaret Hale, an outsider from the rural south in Milton-Northern, Darkshire
caught in conflict: Friendship with free-thinking worker Nicholas Higgins & Love with stiff-necked
master John Thornton
- Solution: after returning to the south and receiving an inheritance, she marries bankrupt Thornton,
who now becomes a softer employer
Oblique, “non-political”, treatment of political issues
Chartists … could not believe that government knew of their misery; they rather chose to think it
possible that men could voluntarily assume the office of legislators for a nation, ignorant of its real
state; as who should make domestic rules for the pretty behaviour of children, without caring to know
that those children had been kept for days without food. Besides, the starving multitudes had heard,
that the very existence of their distress had been denied in Parliament (…)
So a petition was framed, and signed by thousands in the bright spring days of 1839,
imploring Parliament to hear witnesses who could testify to the unparalleled destitution of the
manufacturing districts (…)
One of them was John Barton.
John Barton became a Chartist, a Communist, all that is commonly called wild and visionary.
Ay! but being visionary is something. It shows a soul, a being not altogether sensual; a creature who
looks forward for others, if not forhimself.
***
"You can never work facts as you would fixed quantities, and say, given two facts, and the product is so
and so. God has given men feelings and passions which cannot be worked into the problem, because
they are for ever changing and uncertain (…) Now to my thinking, them that is strong in any of God's
gifts is meant to help the weak,--be hanged to the facts! I ask your pardon, sir; I can't rightly explain
the meaning that is in me. I'm like a tap as won't run, but keeps letting it out drop by drop, so that
you've no notion of the force of what's within."
Job looked and felt very sorrowful at the want of power in his words, while the feeling
within him was so strong and clear.
"What you say is very true, no doubt," replied Mr. Carson …
More combined arguments
… here's Carsons, and Duncombes, and Mengies, and many another, as comed into Manchester with
clothes to their back, and that were all, and now they're worththeir tens of thousands, a' getten out of
our labour; why the very land as fetched but sixty pound twenty year agone is now worth six hundred,
and that, too, is owing to our labour: but look at yo, and see me, and poor Davenport yonder; whatten
better are we? They'n screwed us down to th' lowest peg, in order to make their great big fortunes, and
build their great big houses, and we, why we're just clemming, many and many of us. Can you say there's
nought wrong in this?"
***
To return to Mary. Her plan had been, as we well know, to marry Mr. Carson, and the occurrence an hour
ago was only a preliminary step. True; but it had unveiled her heart to her; it had convinced her she loved
Jem above all persons or things.But Jem was a poor mechanic, with a mother and aunt to keep; a mother,
too, who had shown her pretty clearly she did not desire her for a daughter-in-law: whileMr. Carson was
rich, and prosperous, and gay, and (she believed) would place her in all circumstances of ease and luxury,
where want could never come. What were these hollow vanities to her, now she had discovered the
passionate secret of hersoul? She felt as if she almost hated Mr. Carson, who had decoyed her with his
baubles. She now saw how vain, how nothing to her, would be all gaieties and pomps, all joys and
pleasures, unless she might share them with Jem; yes, with him she harshly rejected so short a time ago.
A) Some paradoxes about this novel
- The social novel with more critical attention
- The least representative of Dickens’s work
- The most problematic / least representative of all industrial novels.
[Plot too symbolic / poor, melodramatic characterization of working-class characters / comic
characterization of middle-class villains …]
B) Dickens’s controversial political stance:
- Traditional perspective:
- Low-class ‘aesthetics’ & rhetoric. Easy-flowing, humorous, sentimental.
- Sympathy with the poor, with children / Upper class villains.
- Attacks on institutions and privileges
- Revised perspective: [Orwell – Williams – Lodge - Eagleton]
- Extraordinary evasiveness: emotional, not analytical / moral-melodramatic indignation,
particularly about cruelty to children, but unclear accusations
“Dickens seems to have succeeded in attacking everybody and antagonizing nobody … he is always
pointing to a change of spirit rather than a change of structure” (Orwell)
- Underlying conservatism, due to the contradictions of his lower middle class social background
(“small urban bourgeoisie”) & the limitations of his education /
- “Justified” by commercial & artistic reasons
Orwell‘s verdict on Dickens
Dickens had grown up near enough to poverty to be terrified of it, and in spite of
his generosity of mind, he is not free from the special prejudices of the shabby-
genteel. It is usual to claim him as a 'popular' writer, a champion of the
'oppressed masses'. So he is, so long as he thinks of them as oppressed; but
there are two things that condition his attitude. In the first place, he is a south-
of- England man, and a Cockney at that, and therefore out of touch with the
bulk of the real oppressed masses, the industrial and agricultural labourers (…)
The other point is that Dickens's early experiences have given him a horror of
proletarian roughness.
C) The context of the writing of Hard Times:
- November 1853: Fall of circulation of

Household Words & agreement to publish
weekly a short novel for £ 1.000
- End of November: Public readings for the
benefit of the Birmingham and Midland
Institute [& excursion to Wolverhampton].
Short speech calling for greater mutual
understanding and co-operation between
employers and employed, & improved
educational opportunities for the workers.
- Preston lock-out: article in Household Words
(10/12/1853) against strikes,
professional political agitators and “mob-
orators”.
[Remember, a lock-out is NOT a normal strike]
- 28/1/1854: weekend visit to Preston
- Article in Household Words (“On Strike” –
11/2/1854): he declares himself a friend of
masters and workers. Not harsh with Trade
Union leaders
D) Dickens’s “artistic” decisions:
1 - Choice of a more abstract / “ambitious (?) / neutral (?) theme: The “terrible mistake”
of the “science” of Political Economy and Utilitarianism, reflected in the education of
children: “Industrial” methods of Gradgrind, the school owner.
“[Dickens] identified the factory problem not with economics but with the Utilitarian
denial of human imagination” (James 548)
-Basic opposition: Coketown (principle of uniformity and material concerns) and

Sleary’s travelling circus (principle of community and eccentricity. A “pastoral” solution
commented by Bodenheimer) [Fancy versus Fact]
[The inside of a factory is never shown in the novel / Dickens had praised modern
industrial processes / the circus could never be a social model]
-Two contexts of oppression: school (Sissy as victim and representative of moral

sympathy) and family (Tom and Louisa Gradgrind as victims of coldness)
2 – The Industrial conflict, trade unions and the factory owner:
- Mortimer Grimshaw, a union leader, used for the fictional agitator Slackbridge
“Middle-class novelists who portray working-class movements … often resort to the

figure of the outside agitator to explain working-class discontent. The outside agitator is
always portrayed as a class traitor and parasite who employs his considerable literacy to
mislead the working class or the poor” (Brantlinger, 103)
- George Cowell, a more moderate, leader, is left out.
- Stephen Blackpool, a worker, melodramatically made a victim of unionism because

he refuses to join them (reasons “forgotten” in the transition from draft to final
text).
- Mr Bounderby almost irrelevant professionally speaking (there is no real conflict)
- Mr Bounderby only criticised for his arrogance & hypocrisy (legend of himself as a
self-made man)
At least, Coketown is an excellent model of ugliness and uniformity
[Coketown] was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but
as matters stood, it wasa town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of
machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and
never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill- smelling dye, and vast piles of
building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-
engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It
contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited
by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same
pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year
the counterpart of the last and the next.
You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful. If the members of a religious persuasion
built a chapel there—as the members of eighteen religious persuasions had done—they made it a pious warehouse
of red brick, with sometimes (but this is only in highly ornamental examples) a bell in a birdcage on the top of it. The
solitary exception was the New Church; a stuccoed edifice with a square steeple over the door, terminating in four
short pinnacles like florid wooden legs. All the public inscriptions in the town were painted alike, in severe characters
of black and white. The jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, the town-hall might
have been either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the contrary in the graces of their
construction. Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the
immaterial. The M'Choakumchild school was all fact, and the school of design was all fact, and the relations between
master and man were all fact, and everything was fact between the lying-in hospital and the cemetery, and what you
couldn't state in figures, or show to be purchaseable in thecheapest market and saleable in the dearest, was not, and
never should be, world without end, Amen." …
Does the unforgiving end against the rich villains suffice to make Dickens balanced?
Mr. Bounderby closed the door, and stood before the fire; projecting himself after his
old explosive manner into his portrait - and into futurity.
Into how much of futurity? (...) Did he see any faint reflection of his own image
making a vain-glorious will, whereby five-and-twenty Humbugs, past five-and-fifty years
of age, each taking upon himself the name, Josiah Bounderby of Coketown, should for
ever dine in Bounderby Hall, for ever lodge in Bounderby buildings, for ever attend a
Bounderby chapel, for ever go to sleep under a Bounderby chaplain, for ever be
supported out of a Bounderby estate, and for ever nauseate all healthy stomachs, with
a vast amount of Bounderby balderdash and bluster? Had he any prescience of the day,
five years to come, when Josiah Bounderby of Coketown was to die of a fit in the
Coketown street, and this same precious will was to begin its long career of quibble,
plunder, false pretences, vile example, little service and much law? Probably not. Yet
the portrait was to see it all out.
Here was Mr. Gradgrind on the same day, and in the same hour, sitting
thoughtful in his own room. How much of futurity did he see? Did he see himself, a
white-haired decrepit man, bending his hitherto inflexible theories to appointed
circumstances; making his facts and figures subservient to Faith, Hope, and Charity;
and no longer trying to grind that Heavenly trio in his dusty little mills? Did he catch
sight of himself, therefore much despised by his late political associates? (...) Probably
he had that much foreknowledge, knowing his men.
2.3. Historical Novel
[John Bowen]
A) Why did historical novels flourish at this time of change?
- The influence (and success) of Walter Scott: a deeper vision than Gothic writing (to understand the
present, particularly the national dimension, by tracing its origins):
“European peoples came to consciousness of and vigorously asserted their historical continuity and
identity … widening commerce, population shifts, and factory organization created a new pattern of day-
to-day life and consequent nostalgia for the old” (Fleishman 17)
- Or perhaps an act of “social” escapism?
“It was in the 30s in England that nostalgia became a prevailing impulse, when the morally and physically
degraded workers, thronged in cities which could not accommodate them, and, in the industrial north,
acquiring a mass identity, aroused the consternation of the other classes” (Rance 13)
- Writers wished to emulate Scott’s ambitious endeavor, at least once or twice: Dickens, G. Eliot,
Gaskell, Thackeray, Hardy, Trollope, Gissing, W. Collins, Conan Doyle.
- Lesser names were more consistently devoted to it [Bulwer-Lytton / G. P. R. James / W.H. Ainsworth]
- Professionalization of History as a scientific activity (distancing effect), but some Historians also
borrowed literary models and were read by common people [Thomas Carlyle and Thomas Babington
Macaulay]
B) Commercial success and popular orientation, thank to confusion-combination with
market-oriented genres. In fact, it was difficult to stick to the “classic” epic genre, and
other forms frequently infiltrated historical novel
- Waverley novels: nearly 80,000 sets bought between 1829 and 1849
- A reprint of C.Kingsley’s Westward Ho! sold a remarkable half a million copies
- Genres combined: - Romance and Gothic,

- Melodrama and farce,
- Satire
- Tragedy.
- Christian apologetics [Wiseman and Newman]
- Parody and pastiche [Thackeray]
- Autobiography [Pater’s Marius the Epicurean (1885)]
- Topographical and tourist literature [Ainsworth]
- Juvenile fiction [Frederick Marryatt]
C) However, bad reputation nowadays, mainly from a formal-artistic point of view: very bad writing:
- Style full of cliché, hyperbole, and pseudo-grandeur

- An inherent technical difficulty: creation of a plausible narrative voice to transmit stories to a
modern audience.
- Consequence: falling either into stifling scholasticism or romanticization [among other dangers …]
- Difficulties with language: creating a flexible yet authentic historical idiom
Passage from George Eliot’s Romola: mix of Italian expressions and stagy English
“Good-day, Messer Domenico,” said Nello to the foremost of the two visitors who entered the shop,
while he nodded silently to the other. “You come as opportunely as cheese on macaroni. Ah! You are
in haste – wish to be shaved without delay – ecco! And this is a morning when everyone has grave
matter on his mind. Florence orphaned – the very pivot of Italy snatched away – heaven itself at a
loss what to do next. Oimè! Well, well; the sun is nevertheless travelling on towards dinner-time
again; and, as I was saying, you come like cheese ready grated.”
D) A solution to the stylistic problem: to try “contemporary” novels leaning slightly to the past, with
some reputational success:
- Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859): French Revolution

- Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped (1886): Third Jacobite Rising
- However, continental rivals have fared much better in literary history: Tolstoy’s War and Peace
(1869) / Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma (1832): Napoleonic era
E) Scott as model:
- “Waverley” novels [Waverley (1814) / Guy Mannering (1815) / The Antiquary
(1816) / Rob Roy (1818) …]
- General formula: a national epic in which the fates of often strangely passive
heroes become entangled in the civil wars and conflicts of eighteenth-century
Scotland.
- Conjunction of “the historical fiction of the modern imperial nation-state in
relation to the sentimental formation of the private individual” (Duncan 1992:
5).
- Political function: to “explain” the birth of UK and its ideological positions
(Whiggism and Toryism)
- Ivanhoe (1819) as model for the medieval version (Anglo-Saxon / Norman /
Jewish).
F) Inevitable tension between “historicism” & yearning for permanence:

- Awareness of the past: “… a preoccupation with ancestry and descent, with
tracing the genealogy of the present in the past, and with discovering or creating
links to a formative history” (Gilmour 1993: 28).
- Search for the transcendent and that which could resist the power of time.
G) Georg Lukács’ paradox: [The Historical Novel - 1955]
- First critic to claim the importance of the genre for the modern history of the novel, and to
theorize on it, building on Walter Scott’s contribution:
- A powerful and strikingly coherent history of the depiction of class struggle and national
self-formation in fiction through the clash of representative individuals and social forces: an essentially
secular form, in which the masses play a significant role.
- Main function: to reveal the essential and causal links between the historical setting of
the novel and the events and characters depicted in it: “derivation of the individuality of characters
from the historical particularity of their age,”
[So writing about ancient times does not necessarily make a novel “historical” in this sense]
- However, Lukacs tends to limit ignore all British contributions after Scott (only some Thackeray)
- Theoretical reasons:
- They lack his Hegelian assumptions (not dialectical or causal enough)
- They are too centered on permanence, the transcendent in history.
- They do not follow the epic model, but satire, Gothic, or romance.
- There is not enough historical distance in many novels (one generation):
- George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872): events leading up the 1832 Reform Bill
- Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849): Luddite agitation of 1811–12
- Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860) takes place between 1807 and 1826.
-
H) Some Victorian historical novelists:
“repetitiveness, ignorance and incompetence”
(Sanders, 14):
1) Edward Bulwer (later Bulwer- Lytton)

- Regency period: The Last Days of Pompeii
(1834) / Rienzi (1835)
- Victorian period:
- The Last of the Barons (1843) [15th
century - King Edward IV versus Earl of Warwick,
last phases of the War of the Roses )
- Harold, The Last of the Saxon Kings
(1848, 11th c.– defeat of progressive king by
Normans – Condition-of-England topic)
- Many defects in technique (intrusive and
pedantic “philosophical” narration,
explanatory footnotes, etc.) and narrative
verisimilitude (moral anachronisms, historical
self-consciousness of characters, etc.)
- Tory interpretation of history: inevitability of
some change, but focus on avoidance of
conflict and suspicion of liberating efforts
2) William Harrison Ainsworth.
- Successful in the 1830s and 1840s, very prolific.
- Rookwood (1834) 18th century – Dick Turpin
- Windsor Castle (1843): Henry VIII, Catherine of
Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Wyatt and Surrey
- More fluent and less ambitious: Gothic and
Tourist guide elements.
- “Picturesque history” (Mitchell 2000: 15),
supported collaborations with his illustrators,
most usually George Cruikshank (1792–1878)
- Focus on the sublime and moments of
surpassing power, grandeur, or horror / a
particular effect or sensation–rather than the
causal links.
- Failure to integrate, or to provide the bare
minimum of coherent characterization and
plotting.
3) G. P. R. James: imitator of Scott, able to write

more than sixty three-deckers.
4) Charlotte Yonge’s The Lances of Lynwood (1855).

Based on Froissart’s “Chronicles” on the Black
Prince’s campaigns in France and Spain
I) One intelligent historical writer: Thackeray
- A more sceptical position: critical with “greatness”, the picturesque and the heroic in historical writing. Ironic with
grandiloquence and pretension
“… the dignity of history sadly diminishes as we grow better acquainted with the material which composes it. In our
orthodox history-books the characters move on as a gaudy playhouse procession, a glittering pageant of kings and
warriors and stately ladies ... Only he who sits very near to the stage can discover of what stuff the spectacle is made.
The kings are poor creatures, taken from the dregs of the company; the noble knights are dirty dwarfs in tin-foil; the fair
ladies are painted hags with cracked feathers and soiled trains … “
- The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon (1844): autobiography of an eighteenth-century Irish scapegrace who nevertheless
insists throughout his deeply unreliable and darkly ironic narration on his heroism, nobility and valor.
- Vanity Fair (1848): Napoleonic Wars.
- Henry Esmond (1852):
- From the time of the Glorious Revolution to that of the Young Pretender
- Attempt to replicate an authentic 18th-c. memoir, complete with period typeface and spelling.
- Sophisticated anti-heroism.
“I have seen in his very old age and decrepitude the old French King Lewis the Fourteenth … persisting in acting through
life the part of Hero; and, divested of poetry, this was but a little wrinkled old man, pock-marked, and with a great
periwig and red heels to make him look tall – a hero for a book if you like ... but what more than a man for Madame
Maintenon, or the barber who shaved him, or Monsieur Fagon, his surgeon?”
- The Virginians (1859): The Esmond family during the American revolutionary wars, but has found far fewer admirers.
J) The Theme of Chivalry & Chivalric Codes of Honour
- Hundreds of historical essays on the topic after Walter Scott’s (1818).
- References to elevated moral positions, and also passions & ideals, as antidotes to liberalism &
Utilitarianism:
- Carlyle’s Past and Present (1843) & On Heroes (1840)
- Disraeli’s nostalgic “Young England”
- “Knighthood” becomes a set of moral values, inspired by soldierly behaviour, that does not
necessarily “belong” to the (often corrupted) aristocracy, and can be adopted by every individual.
- Vindication of a “Saxon” native dignity not crushed by the Normans that middle classes learned to
adopt as essentially “English”. [Kingsley: Hereward, the Wake. The Last of the English (1866)]
- Links with the Imperial spirit in the second half of the century [Conan Doyle – The White Company
(1891) & Sir Nigel (1906)]
- Robin Gilmour – The Idea of The Gentleman in The Victorian Novel (1981)
- David Castronovo – The English Gentleman: Images and Ideals in Literature and Society (1987)
- Karen Volland Waters - The Perfect Gentleman, Masculine Control in Victorian Men’s Fiction (1997)
[* Historical novels on Early Christianity and Catholicism in Unit 7]

2.4. Provincial or Regional Novel
[Ian Duncan]
A) Region and Nation
- Paradox of the regional setting: distinctive (differentiated from the metropolis or from other regions
within the nation) and at the same time familiar (Raymond Williams (1973): the “knowable community”),
even though we do not belong to it.
- The region or province represents a concentrated version of the “nation” as “imagined community.”
(Benedict Anderson, 1983). In a critical relation to the larger horizon of the nation, the province or region
may represent:
- an authentic site or source of national identity– a distillation of the nation;
- it may take the place of a larger national identity that has failed;
- it may register a wholesale disintegration of the categories of home: origin, community,
belonging.
B) Varieties of geographical size:

- Broad territories, typically a county or a former kingdom (Trollope’s Barsetshire; George
Eliot’s Loamshire, Walter Scott’s Scotland, Hardy’s Wessex)
- Smaller places where all characters know each other (Trollope’s Barchester or Framley,
Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, Margaret Oliphant’s Carlingford, Hardy’s Casterbridge).
- Not necessarily rural: some of them include urban settings / Not necessarily “peripheral” (Dickens’s
London)
C) Difference between “regional” and “provincial”: more methodological than real:
- Region: a place in itself.

- Specific combination of geographical, natural-historical, antiquarian, ethnographic, and/or
sociological features that differentiate it from any other region.
- Neutral or even positive local differences.
- Outside the Home Counties, with a stronger historical basis.
- Province: any place different from London (or, secondarily, not Edinburgh or Manchester).
- (Arche)Typical identity: a more or less abstract orientation and distance.
- Negative connotation, built on a binary opposition.
- Usually found (vaguely, implicitly) within a hundred and fifty miles of London, in the aptly
named “home counties” or non-industrial “midlands.”
[Exceptions and treatment: the more tenuous associations of Gaskell’s and Eliot’s fiction with Cheshire
and Warwickshire are sustained by biography and tourism, rather than by the fiction itself].
D) Paradox of “negativity” of theme and literary importance:

- Despised by contemporary criticism.
- Central in the production of mid-Victorian fiction, from Cranford to Middlemarch
- Interesting response to historical change: how the generic and typical setting of a traditional
England, responds to the pressures of modernity (politics, debt, fashion, crime) that have overwhelmed
metropolitan life, but resisting or absorbing them – if only ambiguously, if only for a time.
E) Georgic versus Pastoral approaches:
- Georgic represents a local scene of (usually) agricultural production, in which human labor is the
force that binds together the natural order (the land and seasons) and the social order (the family,
the state). Integration within a complex economy.
- Pastoral represents a leisured fantasy of country life on the part of property-owners, as a condition
of privileged retirement from political and economic struggle. Sentimental opposition between
idealized country and the city.
- Provincial novels from 1850 to 1875 tend adopt the Georgic mode: attention to the interrelations
between local work and customs, natural settings, and the larger temporal and political frames of
history and the nation.
- Change and modernization:
- “Georgic” representations examine the process and effects of historical change.
Transformations and resistances that make local history.
- “Pastoral” representations make it a site that escapes change. A place where history is
suspended.
F) What changes?
- Massive social disruptions brought about by the agricultural and industrial revolutions (from stationary
cottagers to migratory labourers);
- The 1832 Reform Bill, the repeal of the Corn Laws, and other legislative enactments.
- The advent of the railways & speed. Nostalgia about old England
[extracts from Dickens and Eliot]
G) PERIODIZATION:
1)1800-1830:
- Regionalist discourse is established in national and historical novels by Irish and Scottish authors
- Invented by Maria Edgeworth in Castle Rackrent (1800).
- Developed by Walter Scott in the Waverley novels: repoliticization of (ancient) regional difference as
(modern) class difference.
- John Galt - Annals of the Parish (1821): reactions in Dalmailing, a small fictional town, to the French
and Industrial Revolutions, including the arrival of Utilitarianism.
- Antidote to loss of political autonomy and degradation from nation to region (1707 and 1801).
- Ireland: colonial differences between Protestant Lords and the rest of the population (themes of
repression and rebellion).
- 1840s: critical resurgence of regional fiction, focused on the industrial North and Midlands (failure of
the genre to represent the nation)
2) 1850-1875:
- Economic prosperity and imperial confidence -> a new invention, the fiction of provincial life.
- A traditional England that selectively absorbs the forces of modernization. Far from being set outside
“the world,” the province is the world: the authentic site of an imperial England able to select and
absorb the forces of change, renewing rather than surrendering its traditional properties.
- Mary Russell Mitford - Our Village (1823) [nothing is changed in a town modelled on Jane Austen]
- Elizabeth Gaskell - Cranford (1853) [Mitford’s provincialism partly revised, ironic about feminine
perspectives / based on Knutsford, Cheshire, immediate antithesis of Drumble (Manchester)]
- Elizabeth Gaskell - Wives and Daughters (1866).
- Charlotte Brontë - Shirley (1849). [also partly industrial / defence of regional integrity: “cockneys” are
represented as ignorant and uncivil, while Yorkshiremen maintain their own standards of gallantry,
sagacity, and courage]
- George Eliot - Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1872).
“Eliot brings the provincial novel to its fullest development and beyond, to its mid-1870s point of
dissolution. Eliot goes on to enrich the ideology of provincialism with a burden of philosophical and
literary allusion: in her hands the provincial novel enlarges the project of Scott’s historical fiction,
drawing on the Wordsworthian discourse of a moral resource of “common life” found amid natural
forms and traditional associations” (Duncan 331)
Trollope’s Barsetshire: Pastoralism – illusion of isolation and continuity in towns “freed” from
manufacturing or commercial predominance / lightly ironical stylization, but also building of an
imaginary and nostalgic rather than a real territory / sense that we are reading about an endangered
culture
“There is a county in the west of England not so full of life, indeed, nor so widely spoken of as some of its
manufacturing leviathan brethren in the north, but which is, nevertheless, very dear to those who know
it well. Its green pastures, its waving wheat, its deep and shady and – let us add – dirty lanes, its paths
and stiles, its tawny-coloured, well-built rural churches, its avenues of beeches, and frequent Tudor
mansions, its constant county hunt, its social graces, and the general air of clanship which pervades it,
has made it to its own inhabitants a favoured land of Goshen. It is purely agricultural; agricultural in its
produce, agricultural in its poor, and agricultural in its pleasures. There are towns in it, of course; dépôts
from whence are bought seeds and groceries, ribbons and fire-shovels; in which markets are held and
county balls are carried on; which return members to Parliament, generally –in spite of Reform Bills,
past, present, and coming – in accordance with the dictates of some neighbouring land magnate: from
whence emanate the country postmen, and where is located the supply of post-horses necessary for
county visitings. But these towns add nothing to the importance of the county; they consist, with the
exception of the assize town, of dull, all but death-like single streets. Each possesses two pumps, three
hotels, ten shops, fifteen beer-houses, a beadle, and a market-place. (Doctor Thorne, 1858, ch.1)
3) 1875-1900:
- Gloom of a worldwide economic depression, collapse of British agricultural prices and loss of two-
thirds of the land devoted to wheat production.
- Loss of stabilizing equation of provincial with national life
- Adoption of a variety of regionalisms, all of which articulate a centrifugal relation to the historical
form of the nation.
- Regionalism as “solution” to problems of identity (crisis of national & imperial identities), with its
local specificity providing sentimental refuge from historical change or else a critical view of it.
- Thomas Hardy:
- Earlier novels: explorations of the provincial mode, evoked in their pastoral titles:
- Under the Greenwood Tree: A Rural Painting of the Dutch School (1872)
- Far From the Madding Crowd (1874)
- Later novels: development of the formula of romantic regionalism into timeless tragedy: his
protagonists become sacrificial victims of change [Tess, Alec and Angel in Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891)

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Unit 6

2. Novelistic Genres and Social Reality:

The 1832 Reform Act / The First Reform Act

- Evidence of corruption in the political system.

- Rhetorical-philosophical strategy: new political structures for new times

- Redistribution of the franchise in territorial terms

- Extension of the franchise through a more homogeneous and “generous”criterion:

C) Main electoral consequence: From about 400-500.000 voters to about 650-800.000

D) Main social consequence of the Reform:

- A new ‘respectable’ middle class is born.

- Strong sense of entitlement of this new

[Most of the literary products of the time

- Importance for middle clases of “gentility”, gradually inserted, ackowledged and

“Social superiority as demonstrated by polite and respectable manners, behaviour,

- With 150-200 pounds you could enjoy a “respectable” lifestyle.

G) Limits of the Reform: innovations basically to dispel tension & revolution

1832: First Reform Act: middle-class males

Whigs-Businessmen for economic advancement

The case of Cardiff

Long feud between the Conservative Lord Bute and the

“Dense urban population, inadequate housing and sanitation, irregular employment”

[Can you perceive any manipulation?]

D) However, success was perceived as “unintentional, unplanned, and unanticipated”:

F) Muddled social thinking: ‘cruel’ progressives versus ‘humane’conservatives

- Modern “solutions” based on public regulation perceived as unfair and inhuman

[Nostalgic images of the kindly squire and the wise parson]

“a whole new order or disorder” [Davis, 13].

A) Change has become inevitable, and uncertain

[Coining of “Zeitgeist” (“Spirit of theAge”) 1835? 1848?]

D) Speed, mobility & uprooting as necessary qualities of modern life

- Destruction of traditional communities and personal identities. Raymond

E) [Marx] Capitalist economy based on a paradoxical sense of stability based on

- I have now out-lived youth … illusions … romance

1) Logic (or affectation) of “adjustment”, but ideological bias

This afternoon … I was wondering how a man who wished to do right

[Even history is interpreted under the new light]

-Victorian divulgators of Political

James Mill – Elements of Political

[Similarities with Evangelicals, including paradoxes (eg reading)]

- Typical middle-class approach: manipulative combination of ideological rejection and emotional

- Inability to consider the poor qualified to defend themselves

- Rejection of the political aspirations of workers

- Choice of a personal-moral-sentimental-Christian perspective.

Critical Approach to welfare measures.

Limitations of middle-class approaches to social issues:

Hard Times: Sissy unable to understand “national prosperity”

Sketches by Boz – The Parish

Bleak House – Jo at court

Bleak House – Jo in the street

Jo sweeps his crossing all day

1.4.1. The book industry

“This is a reading age” (J.S. Mill)

A) INFLUENCE OF TECHNICAL & LEGAL CHANGES: BIGGER, QUICKER, CHEAPER

- Steam energy introduced in the printing trade in the 1830s.

- Expansion of reading habits down the hierarchy.

C) INFLUENCE OF NEW, AGGRESSIVE PUBLISHERS

- Below the “literary novel” about 90 different publishers of penny dreadfuls.

- Carlyle: expansion of wide-scale printing and

- G. Eliot: Extension of education more important than

B) However, anxieties about middle classes

Scott lived in a country and time,

What implicit message is conveyed?

C) The Social Necessity of Literary Education