Theme of Industry in Victorian English Novels

The Industrial Revolution led to a permanent reshaping of the British economic landscape, with machines supplanting manual labor to one degree or another from the introduction of interchangeable parts onward. Urbanization was another aspect of this reshaping, as agricultural England shifted into the England of bourgeois industry and commerce. James Burke's description of the profound social consequences of the Industrial Revolution on the modern period provides insight into the shape of the universe that novelists encountered when developing narrative action that took into account the realities of the then-current environment.

The production line has in the last hundred years radically altered the rate at which innovation affects our lives. One of the results of that change has been to narrow the gap, at least in the developed world, between rich and poor, as the profusion of goods available on the market has helped to create a certain democracy of possessions . . . . [O]nly the rich can afford possessions that are truly unique. The rest of the community lives in the same kind of house, wears the same pattern of cloth

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t be isolated from the contrast in Dickens's own life between the factory and Gore House, the lifelong concern with social deprivation and the enjoyment of luxurious living. That is the sense in which, as Edgar Johnson says, the novel 'pierces fathoms down in self-is relentless in self-judgment,' and devoid of the self-pity of the earlier first-person book" (Mankowitz 216). Dvorak cites The Old Curiosity Shop as another example of Dickens's attempt to interpret the avarice of bourgeois Victorian culture in a way that shows the moral triumph of embracing compassion over the corrupt bourgeois ethic, with the death of Little Nell the touchstone of that idea. The entire plot of Bleak House turns on the Jarndyce inheritance litigation in the Court of Chancery. Korg suggests that the money-centered movement of the story is emblematic of a critique of the whole of Victorian society as it emerged in consequence of the tremendous impact of the Industrial Revolution. Bleak House "is a criticism of the law..... but it is also an image of the impersonal 'System' to which governments entrust their affairs . . . a metaphor for the hopelessness of sorting out right from wrong in a world that lacks a living moral sense . . . . [The System]
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Approximate Word count = 7680
Approximate Pages = 31 (250 words per page)

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