Morality, Economics and the Market

Abstract

Hard Times, Mary Barton, North and South, Alton Locke, Sybil and Felix Holt were not the only works of mid-nineteenth-century fiction to address problems of social discontent or of disorder in contemporary industrial society.¹ This chapter will not attempt to provide a comprehensive survey of all the works which could be included in the sub-genre. What distinguishes the novels I have listed is the immediacy of their representation of social conditions and the degree of complexity and sophistication with which those conditions are both described and discussed. Most of the novels which I have listed are unshrinking in their vivid portrayals of urban poverty. In Mrs Gaskell’s Mary Barton and North and South we are given striking portraits of working-class dwellings, ranging from the hygienic ordinariness of the sparsely furnished Barton home to the insanitary squalor of the Davenports’ cellar. The opening chapters of Kingsleÿ s Alton Locke contain some equally arresting descriptions of sordid London slums and sweat-shops, reminiscent of Friedrich Engels’s account of the dwellings alongside Manchester’s River Irk but more vivid in its evocation of the unfortunate individuals forced to eke out a living there.