An underground history of early Victorian fiction : Chartism, radical print culture, and the social problem novel / Gregory Vargo, New York University.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Vargo, Gregory, author.

Series:

Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture ; 110.

Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture ; 110

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English fiction--19th century--History and criticism.

English fiction.

Social problems in literature.

Working class in literature.

Chartism in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xiv, 278 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Introduction: can a social problem speak?

Social inheritance in the new poor law debate: William Cobbett, Harriet Martineau, and the Royal Commission of Inquiry

Books of (social) murder: melodrama and the slow violence of the market in anti-new poor law satire, fiction, and journalism

A life in fragments: Thomas Cooper's Chartist Bildungsroman

Questions from workers who read: education and self-formation in Chartist print culture and Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton

Revenge in the age of insurance: villainy in theatrical melodrama and Ernest Jones's fiction

"Outworks of the citadel of corruption": the Chartist press reports the empire

Two nations revisited: the refugee question in the people's paper, household words and Charles Dickens's A tale of two cities.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 17 Nov 2017).

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

1-108-18728-5

1-108-18189-9

1-108-19569-5