An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction: Chartism, Radical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture)
Cambridge University Press, 12/7/2017
EAN 9781107197855, ISBN10: 1107197856
Hardcover, 298 pages, 23.5 x 15.7 x 1.8 cm
Language: English
How does the literature and culture of early Victorian Britain look different if viewed from below? Exploring the interplay between canonical social problem novels and the journalism and fiction appearing in the periodical press associated with working-class protest movements, Gregory Vargo challenges long-held assumptions about the cultural separation between the 'two nations' of rich and poor in the Victorian era. The flourishing radical press was home to daring literary experiments that embraced themes including empire and economic inequality, helping to shape mainstream literature. Reconstructing social and institutional networks that connected middle-class writers to the world of working-class politics, this book reveals for the first time acknowledged and unacknowledged debts to the radical canon in the work of such authors as Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle, Harriet Martineau and Elizabeth Gaskell. What emerges is a new vision of Victorian social life, in which fierce debates and surprising exchanges spanned the class divide.
Introduction
can a social problem speak?
1. Social inheritance in the New Poor Law debate
William Cobbett, Harriet Martineau, and the Royal Commission of Inquiry
2. Books of (social) murder
melodrama and the slow violence of the market in anti-New Poor Law satire, fiction, and journalism
3. A life in fragments
Thomas Cooper's Chartist Bildungsroman
4. Questions from workers who read
education and self-formation in Chartist print culture and Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton
5. Revenge in the age of insurance
villainy in theatrical melodrama and Ernest Jones's fiction
6. 'Outworks of the citadel of corruption'
the Chartist Press reports the empire
7. Two nations revisited
the refugee question in the People's Paper, Household Words and Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities.