THE NINETEENTH CENTURY NOVEL

The late 18th century and the 19th century were characterized by sweeping economic, political,
technological and social changes. Industrialisation enabled industrialists to make fortunes and
witnessed the emergence of the working class whose living and working conditions deteriorated.

The period was marked by differing reactions to these social and economic changes. The celebration
of industrialisation coexisted with objections to its appalling effects on society, and the rapid urban
cultural developments that occurred throughout the country coincided with a growing desire to
return to nature.

In Britain's Century: A Political and Social History, historian William Rubinstein depicted the 19 th
century as a period of “predominance, fear and complacency”. This expression appears as an
oxymoronic way of describing something but will be quite relevant to describe not only the British
political and social landscape, but also the cultural, artistic and literary fields of the time.

The industrial revolution and the age of manufactures:

There was a demographic explosion in England, Wales and Scotland in the 19 th century. The
population grew from 10 million in 1800 to 37 million in 1901 due to an increase in the birth rate and
a decrease in the death rate of course, but also to important waves of immigration (especially from
Ireland following the Potato Famine for instance between 1845 and 1852)

In the meantime, revolutionary advances in technology were very impressive. Steam Power
developed through the 18th century and was applied to industry in the 19th century. The mining
Industry boomed as a result, along with the train and railroad industry in the 1830s and the train
became a familiar element of the British landscape, as can be seen in William Turner’s work.

Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway by Joseph Mallord William Turner (1844)
In this famous painting, he depicted the end of an agrarian era, epitomized by the plough on the
banks of the river Thames. It was painted close to the end of the Industrial Revolution, which brought
a massive shift from an agrarian economy to one dominated by machine manufacturing in the
Victorian Era. The railway was among the most potent symbols of industrialization, since this new
way of transportation heavily affected industrial and social life. Turner seemed to be a generation
ahead of other artists, as he was among the few painters at the time to consider industrial
advancement as a commendable subject of art. The painting suggests that modern technology is a
reality racing towards them.

The Fighting Temeraire (Turner) is also a very symbolic depiction of modernity and industry about to
leave the past behind. The big ship in the background was a relic from the Battle of Trafalgar during
the Napoelonic War (1805), and is painted as it is being towed up the river Thames by a steam boat
to be destroyed.

The textile industry throve as well with the advances in wool and cotton weaving thanks to the
Spinning Jenny for instance.

An Irish handweaver woman working on a Spinning Jenny

Agricultural life also changed tremendously with the beginning of the enclosure movement,
mechanization and crop rotation.

Technological innovations suddenly eradicated entire fields of specialized laborers (weavers) and this
was “One of the greatest tragedies of the Industrial Revolution”, according to Rubenstein. A huge,
cheap workforce quickly became available to the industrial machine – and there was a mass
movement from rural to urban areas. Big industrial centers mushroomed and the urban sprawl was
spectacular. This came along with the emergence of cotton factories, coal, copper and lead mines. As
industrialization increased, large-scale manufacturing industries multiplied throughout the country
and produced the biggest share of national output. More capital was available to invest in expanding
industries. Urbanization was one of the consequences of the industrial revolution. In 1800, only 3% of
the world's population lived in cities, compared to nearly 50% today (the beginning of the 21st
century). Manchester had a population of 10,000 in 1717, but by 1911 it had burgeoned to
2.3 million. The size and equipment of the towns were not appropriate for so many newcomers.
During the early 19th century the River Thames was an open sewer in London for instance, with
disastrous consequences for public health, including cholera epidemics. It was not before 1870 that
the new sewage system was complete. Children as well as adults worked and lived in cramped and
unsanitary areas, as is very well depicted by Dickens in Hard Times for example, a novel in which the
story is set in an industrial town called Coketown. The city itself is the epitome of the new way of
working and living during the industrial revolution:

“ It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of
building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston
of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of
melancholy madness.  It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small
streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and
out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to
whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the
last and the next.” ( Hard Times Book I, Chapter 5 - 1854)

This overwhelming impression of sameness and uniformity is also conveyed in Over London , by rail
for example, in which Gustave Doré depicted a row of cramped houses, and London’s appalling living
conditions. (cf series of engravings 1869-1873). The first house is replicated time and time again and
the row stretches out of sight in a circular shape, thus suggesting endless repetition.
The landscape changed, there were mills and chimneys everywhere in big industrial centers like
Birmingham, or Manchester for example.

Birmingham in the early 19th century.

Manchester, 19th century

 This is the University of Birmingham today (buildings from the 19thc century)

+ début video Turning point in History jusqu’à 2.10

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Efq-aNBkvc

A new economic doctrine, social reform and the making of the English working class

The period was marked by intense economic and political debates and produced major socio-
economic theories that led to economic and social reforms. Repression from local and national
governments tried to prevent the spread of radical ideas and actions.

Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, often considered as the father and theorician of economic
liberalism and capitalism, set out the principles of his economic theory in his most famous work
Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). He explained that the market and
the capitalist society were self-regulated and that everything was taken care of by a mysterious
"invisible hand", that economic activity depended on individual self-interest and that the state was to
have a limited role, as natural regulation of economic transactions would ensue from natural healthy
competition. He thus supported a laissez-faire economic model.

Adam Smith’s philosophy, praising individualism, found its counterpart in the philosophy of
utilitarianism. Jeremy Bentham was a moralist and a reformer, who wrote An Introduction to the
Principles of Morals and Legislation in 1789, in which he defined good and evil in terms of pain and
pleasure. Morals should consist of the pursuit of happiness and law should therefore aim at
decreasing pain. “Evil is pain, or the cause of pain, good is pleasure, or the cause of pleasure.” His
utilitarian principles were then used to reform the Poverty relief system in England, and he was soon
followed by John Stuart Mill (Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy, 1844) and
Samuel Smiles for example (Self-Help, 1859). Utilitarianism is blatantly criticized by Charles Dickens in
Hard Times and in Oliver Twist for example.

The English working class was born with industrialization and urbanization, and the 19 th century was
also the time when agitation grew over the question of expanding the franchise (the right to vote)
and of public responsibility for dealing with poverty and public health. Several revolts occurred in the
context of the industrial revolution, the most famous of which was probably the one led by Ned Ludd
between 1811 and 1816. Industrial workers got organized to destroy machines that were accused of
stealing the jobs of many. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIIxM5v2mm4 (juste 1 minute 19). In
1831, the same type of revolt was organized by agricultural laborers who were led by a mythical
leader who was nicknamed Captain Swing.

A woman author called Elizabeth Gaskell was clearly interested in the clash between workers and mill
owners (especially the nouveau riche), a subject she was to depict in her best-known novel North
and South. In that novel, the struggles between the classes are filtered through the eyes of Margaret,
a member of the southern gentry. In Mary Barton the struggles are not filtered and the suffering of
the poor is much more striking.

There were other revolts and movements at the time, like the Chartist movement for example which
emerged in 1836 and was most active between 1838 and 1848. The aim of the Chartists was to gain
political rights and influence for the working classes. The Luddites, Chartism but also industrialists
such as Robert Owen, who wanted his workers to live in a comfortable environment, are all said to
have triggered the birth of British Trade Unionism. Owen built a utopian cooperative textile mill in
Scotland.

However, although some industrialists (Owen) favoured the well-being of the workers, other people
feared the rise of the working class and their claims. Their response was either repression or new
pieces of legislation. The 1819 Peterloo massacre was a very bloody episode in which the cavalry
struck down on a peaceful demonstration of 60000 peaceful demonstrators who were asking for a
more substantial parliamentary representation of the working class in Manchester.

Owen’s mill in New Lanark.

The 1832-34 New Poor Law was also an answer to the question of public responsibility in the
handling of poverty. Among other things, they created the system of the workhouse. Bentham
claimed that people would always choose to do what was pleasant and therefore the poor would
always claim public assistance rather than work. He thus aspired to reform legislation in accordance
to these hedonist principles. Despite stern criticism of the dehumanizing consequences of applying
the rationalist principles of utilitarianism, as denounced by Charles Dickens in the rational
management of the fictional industrial Coketown in Hard Times, utilitarian thought influenced many
reforms. Bentham’s secretary and disciple, Edwin Chadwick, thus designed England’s 1832 Poor Law
Amendment Act of 1834 to discourage the poor from seeking relief by making it only available in
unpleasant workhouses with painful working and housing conditions where there was little food.
Dickens’ most famous character, Oliver Twist, was born and lived in meager conditions in a
workhouse during his childhood for example. Child labour was also denounced at the time, and the
working conditions as well, for both adults and children. Cf trailer Oliver Twist Polanski:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUFblil8o2k.

Other writers also addressed social issues. Benjamin Disraeli, in Sybil and the two nations, gave a
striking picture of Britain as a society sharply divided between the rich and the poor: “Two nations;
between whom there is no intercourse or sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits,
thoughts and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones or inhabitants of different planets –
the rich and the poor.”

Thomas Hardy also recorded the bleaker side of country life and the corrosive pressure of urban ways
on rural life in Far From the Madding Crowd (1874), and in Tess of the D’Ubervilles (1891), he defines
Tess as a member of the independent rural artisan class, a group whose way of life as a whole , he
asserts, is at risk of extinction and whose quality of life is in decline due to capitalist economic forces
and the industrialization of agricultural labour. He writes: “The village had formerly contained, side by
side with the agricultural labourers, an interesting and better-informed class, ranking distinctly above
the former -the class to which Tess’s father and mother had belonged -and including the carpenter,
the smith, the shoemaker, the huckster, together with nondescript workers other than farm-
labourers; a set of people who owed a certain stability of aim and conduct to the fact of their being
life-holders like Tess’s father, or copyholders, or, occasionally, small free-holders. But as the long
holdings fell in they were seldom again let to similar tenants, and were mostly pulled down”.(435)

In Tess, the criticism of the industrial Victorian England is also to be perceived through the call for a
return to Nature, which is very symbolically represented by the scene in Stonehenge. In Polanski’s
1979 movie, the scene in Stonehenge is majestic: having killed Alec, Tess tells what she did to Angel
and they hide themselves for a couple of days in a hotel and then are discovered by a chambermaid.
They then decide to walk to Stonehenge by night, and Angel promises to save Tess. She falls asleep on
one of the stones, and Angel watches her sleep. The police arrive and he asks them to let her wake up
by herself. She is then sent to jail in Salisbury. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmLu_Invf_0

Understanding the contradictions of the Victorian era

If the 19th century started under the reign of George IV, and then William IV, it is mostly well
known for the 64 year-long reign of Queen Victoria. It was a period of industrial, political,
scientific, and military change within the United Kingdom, and was marked by a great
expansion of the British Empire. In 1876, Parliament voted to grant her the additional title of
Empress of India. She inherited the throne aged 18. Though a constitutional monarch,
privately, Victoria attempted to influence government policy and ministerial appointments;
publicly, she became a national icon who was identified with strict standards of personal
morality.
By German painter Winterhalter 1859
By Sir George Hayter (1838)

1887
Victoria reigned over Britain and over a huge empire. The 19 th century was known as the
imperial century because it expanded greatly from 1814 to 1914. This policy was also dubbed
Pax Britanica since it was a period of relative peace and economic dominance in many ways
assured by the military (naval) dominance of GB. The scrabble for land culminated in the
spread of British power and resources across the globe. By the mid-19 th century, two broad
views of Empire emerged. There were the voluntarists and the federationists. Gladstone was
a Voluntarist and thought the colonies should be voluntary members of the Empire - very
much foreshadowing the principles of the Commonwealth -, whereas Disraeli was a
federationist and supported forced membership with centralized British government in
charge. He won this political struggle. By 1920, the British empire was dominating the whole
world and the British society had gone through a century of economic and social changes.
Many contradictions were born of all these transformations and advances, that were to be
conveyed in art and literature as well.

Historian William Rubinstein depicted the 19 th century as a period of “predominance, fear and
complacency” and that this was an oxymoronic expression for a very contradictory century. Let’s see
how this could be explained.
Predominance refers to the economic, technological, industrial, imperial and militarily superiority of
the UK. Complacency defines a period of revolutionary social and industrial change with relatively
little political change for the vast majority. There were Reform acts, but which did not lead to much
change since with the 1884 Reform act, more than 40% of the male population was still
disenfranchised (didn’t have the right to vote) and women, of course, did not have the right to vote.
The upper classes feared revolt (after the French and the American revolutions), upheaval, social
collapse, disorder, change, disease, crime, which were all considered as derived from the lower
classes. There was also a crisis in faith, due to the difficult conditions in which a lot of people had to
live, but also to scientific advances, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) questioning the
possibility of a providential higher power.
Victorian thought hence praised a desire for order. Everything had to be in its right place: men and
women, races, the classes. There was also a desire for simplistic, universal explanations to complex
issues, and a desire to maintain supposed traditions and some sort of conservatism.
All these issues were dealt with in the cultural fields.

- There was for instance a renewal of religious music in the wake of the crisis in faith. John Goss
wrote "If we believe that Jesus Died for instance and Samuel Sebastian Weisley is known for “The
Wilderness” and his psalms. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud3vxzd2qjw. Edward Elgar is also
known for his 1887 Ave Maria: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoAVhjPnHeY, although he is
better known for Pump and Circumstances.
The Victorian era also witnessed the break between a scholarly intellectual kind of music and a
popular music to sing and dance. It was also the time when playing the pianoforte at home, or in the
garden became very popular, as illustrated in Jane Asten’s Sense and Sensibility: “The effect of his
discourse on the lady too, could not escape her observation, for though she was too hounorable to
listen, and had even changed her seat, on purpose that she might NOT hear, to one close by the
piano forte on which Marianne was playing, she could not keep herself from seeing that Elinor
changed colour, attended with agitation, and was too intent on what he said to pursue her
employment.-- Still farther in confirmation of her hopes, in the interval of Marianne's turning from
one lesson to another, some words of the Colonel's inevitably reached her ear, in which he seemed
to be apologising for the badness of his house.” (Volume III Chapter 3).
One of the famous English composers of such piano works is William Sterndale Bennett who wrote
Impromptus for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDoE53me5iQ

Victorian thought on the criminal classes. The criminal classes were seen as highly vulnerable of
slipping into the criminal class and there was this fear that the ‘good’, hard-working members of the
lower classes would be attracted to the easy life of idleness. The criminal class was seen as being a
threat to public order, moral values, the financial health of the country and to public health and
sanitation. Jack the Ripper for instance, the notorious serial killer who terrorized Whitechapel in
1888, features in works of fiction like gothic novels published at the time. For instance, in Darkest
London by Margaret Harkness, who used the pseudonym John Law, published in 1889. A couple of
years later, Arthur Conan Doyle started his Sherlock Holmes series and wrote The Hound of the
Baskervilles. Concerning the criminal class, there was also a need to find explanations, and it was the
beginning of sciences such as Physiognomy and Phrenology which were considered as convenient
theories. Alexandre Lacassagne for example, a French criminologist claimed that one’s ‘natural’
characteristics could be determined from physical traits and thus categorized and he was followed by
George Combe, a major figure pushing phrenology in England.
In the opening chapters of Great Expectations, Dickens takes his readers back to the 1810s prisoners
were kept in the ‘hulks’ – prison ships moored in the Thames and the Medway rivers. These criminals
were treated as utterly alien and separate. The escaped convict who unforgettably rises from
amongst the graves in the opening chapter, the battered, ravenous man with his leg iron, is like a
spirit come to claim Pip. The narrator becomes aware that there is no getting away from crime, but
this is a reflection of his own guilty conscience. In Oliver Twist, Dickens also fights against the
negative stereotypes of criminals and prostitutes such as Nancy who eventually shows the good in
herself to protect Oliver from the hands of the deadly wrath of Bill Sikes.

Victorian way of thinking on the working class: Utilitarianism was the order of the day. The poor and
the working class were despised and the new upper-middle classes mostly wanted them to be kept
under their heel. Victorian thought on poverty was a very moralistic approach, which was to be later
used by Margaret Thatcher and her neoliberal reforms: “The Victorians had a way of talking that
summed up what we were now rediscovering – they distinguished between ‘the deserving’ and ‘the
undeserving poor’. Both groups should be given help : but it must be help of very different kinds if
public spending is not just going to reinforce the dependency culture.” (The Downing Street Years, M.
Thatcher)

This ideology was to be the bedrock of the 1834 Poor law. Sir George Nicholls (a major actor in setting
up the poor law) said about the 1834 new system of the workhouses: “I wish to see the Poor House
looked to with dread by the labouring classes, and the reproach for being an inmate of it extend
down from father to son. . . For without this, where is the needful stimulus to industry?”

We will study together an excerpt from Hard Times (Gradgrind) that exemplifies well utilitarianism
and industrialization.

Victorian way of thinking on women: Although the call for reform and the promotion of women’s
right started as early as the late 18 th century and was expressed in Mary Wollstonecraft 's
autobiographical novel (Mary) in which she condemned the conditions that had led women to
weakness and dependence through the lack of education, and although she published a very
polemical essay in 1792 entitled “A Vindication of the Rights of Women", women were still very
dominated by their male counterparts in Victorian Britain.

The theory of Patriarchalism was first expounded by Sir Robert Filmer in his book Patriarcha,
The Natural Power of Kings Defended against the Unnatural Liberty of People (1635), in
which there is an analogy between the authority of the king over his country and that of a
father over his family. Despite John Locke’s harsh criticism of Patriarcha in his Two Treatises
of Government (1690), in which he considered “Just powers [as emanating] from the consent
of the governed”, Filmer’s system remained highly influential all through the 18th century and
well into the nineteenth century. Historian Patricia Hollis, in her work Women in Public: The
Women’s movement 1850-1900 (2013), depicts the situation as “Separate Spheres” (ch. 1.3).
Indeed, men belonged to the sphere of the mind and of action, were, naturally disposed to
political thought, strength, action and ambition. Their natural place was in the world of
other men.
Men were capable of remaining untarnished by evil in the world if they had a proper woman
at home to cleanse their spirits. On the contrary, women belonged to the sphere of the heart
and were naturally disposed to love, affection, moral superiority, sensitivity, order. They were
considered as physically and mentally inferior to men. Men were their protectors, and
women trying to live outside these natural qualities could only fall into imbalance and
hysteria. Their place was thus in the home where they could practice ‘Moral Motherhood’
and protect their families from the evils outside. The only way for a woman to be a worthy
person was to be a good wife. Jane Austen often stages family situations in which a mother
or aunt or a family friend is worried that one of the daughters is not yet married. Marriage
and money are two themes that are extremely often intertwined in her novels, which are
sometimes narrative of resistance and display ironical and subtle criticism of the 19 th century
British upper-class.
The late 19th century witnessed the slow but steady breakdown of these ideals. Women
began using their natural attributes to gain public power and showed their moral superiority
tackling issues such as slavery, death penalty, and temperance.

Emily Davies, Catherine Mumford and Beatrice Webb, among others, called for women to
have greater financial independence and a right to higher education. This was the birth of
the Modern Women’s Movement that was to fight for women to have the right to vote.
Women’s cause was intertwined with the workers’ organization into union, and then later in the very
early 20th century to the birth of the Labour party (1906).

All in all, from the late 18th century, and well into the 19 th century and the Victorian era, the British
society was a paradoxical one, which underwent deep economic and social changes thanks to or
because of the agricultural and industrial revolutions, but remained faithful to its traditions and
cherished a sort of conservatism. This resulted in revolts and the upper-classes’ fear of revolts,
organization and repression, growing inequalities, all of which against an imperial and powerful
backdrop, and under the reign of a dreaded but admired queen.