Victorian Visions: Literary Imaginings of Social (In)Justice in the Later Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Following the Industrial Revolution, Victorian culture was transformed into a highly mechanized society that cultural critics such as Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin openly deplored. Victorian artists, writers, and inventors began to imagine different possibilities and alternative worlds that might counter the modernity of the mid-nineteenth century; they envisioned plans for new communities that could revitalize the industrialized culture and reinvigorate a stultified people. This chapter details a course that considers a series of later nineteenth-century dys/utopian, science fiction, and lost world texts that offer visions for new future possibilities. In these texts, the class can address specific social justice issues of the late-Victorian period, such as the Woman Question and the suffragette movement, labor inequalities and the widening gap between rich and poor, the emergence of modern raciology and the rise of eugenics, and looming ecological disaster. The visionary texts of the course demonstrate how literature can help both to confront prominent social justice concerns and generate alternative future worlds.