The purpose of this research is to examine the literary themes based on the world of industry and labor in Victorian English novels. The plan of the research will be to set forth the historical context in which such themes emerged in 19th-century British fiction, and then to show how they are manifest in the writings of contemporaneous novelists.
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 clothes, drives the same care, watches the same TV programmes, dreams the same dreams of success in the hierarchy of work (Burke 153-4).
The portrayal of the consequences to society of forces that reshaped society itself appears to have been a prominent avenue of expression. Because the commercial character of that society was an inescapable fact, and because the consequences were visited on the new middle class, the middle-class itself was the subject of m...