The Victorian ‘Condition of England’ Novel

Abstract

The last chapter illustrated some of the broad differences in literary impulse, range of knowledge, political philosophy and literary technique in the work of Mrs Gaskell, Disraeli, Dickens and Charles Kingsley. There are important differences and they help to explain why the actual novels each wrote are so different. But one thing they all had in common and that was the ambition to extend the range of the nineteenth-century novel. They sought to extend it in various ways: by including the lives of the industrial poor, by portraying working-class politics, by drawing attention to a wide range of social abuses and, perhaps most important of all, by extending the range of human sensibility to embrace the thoughts and emotions of the simplest and leasteducated members of society. In some respects, they were heirs to the tradition created by Wordsworth in the Lyrical Ballads for they were inspired by the faith Wordsworth expressed in ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’: ‘That we have all of us one human heart.’KeywordsHard TimeFactory OwnerMental GrowthExact ObservationHousehold WordThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.