Society, the Social and the Individual

Abstract

In Chapter 1, I suggested that social-problem novels have been defined as a group or sub-genre by their interest in large-scale social concerns, and that judging them involves an understanding of the nature of that social reference. However, as I indicated in Chapter 2, this task is not as simple or as straightforward as it seems. Indeed what might have struck the reader as an over-detailed survey of past criticism was intended to show that accounts of the social-problem novels, despite their wide theoretical and methodological differences, all possess the same limitation: they identify their sub-genre historically, but they nevertheless judge the individual novels by reference to concepts or criteria to which the Victorians would have had little or no access. The main reason for this state of affairs is, I have suggested, that the subject-matter which defines the sub-genre — those large-scale social issues which the novels address — is understood from the vantage-point of the twentieth-century critic.