Introduction Representation was contested on two fronts in nineteenth-century England. In politics, the franchise was gradually extended by the three Reform Bills, first to the majority of the middle class in 1832, then to industrial workers in 1867, and finally to agricultural workers in 1884.1 In the arts, there was a remarkable expansion of the “social frontiers” (Tillotson 75) of fiction, poetry, and painting, marked by a new popularity for realistic (and often heavily researched) depictions of poverty. In the years between the first two Reform Bills, in particular, the very people who were denied representation in government were increasingly represented in art and literature, due in large part to the efforts of middle and upper-class artists who were granted the franchise. By 1849, Charles Kingsley could pronounce in a review of “Recent Novels” that fashionable novels about the social elite had at last become “most un-fashionable” (419), a literary shift he dates to April 10th, 1848. Kingsley’s allusion to the exact date of the third Chartist petition and rally indicates the intimate relationship between the two battlefields for representation. Although individual authors did not necessarily endorse universal franchise, a diverse group of artists used literature and the visual arts to oppose poverty and lobby for social and political reform. Their efforts bore the mark of Chartist demands. This dissertation examines the diverse body of narrative art that documented and imagined poverty during this period. While it is notoriously difficult to recover the 1 Women were not granted the franchise until the Act of 1918, which gave voting rights to women over thirty. It was not until the Equal Franchise Act of 1928 that both men and women over the age of twenty one were granted equal voting rights. 1 readership of any text, particularly “which books were read by which classes” (Himmelfarb 411), the texts I examine were written by middle and upper-class authors and addressed themselves to “the conscience—not to mention the downright factual ignorance” (Kettle 171) of the middle and upper classes. By representing the poor for an enfranchised audience, artists attempted to change not only the attitudes and beliefs of individual readers, but the social and political policies of a nation. This is the body of literature I call “sentimental realism,” a genre that includes narrative fiction, poetry, and paintings. An exhaustive survey would be impossible, but relevant works include novels—Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849); Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843), The Chimes (1844), Bleak House (1852-3), and Hard Times for these Times (1854); Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil: or The Two Nations (1845); Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life (1848), Ruth (1853), and North and South (1854-5); Charles Kingsley’s Yeast (1848, 1851) and Alton Locke: Tailor and Poet (1850); Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna’s Helen Fleetwood (1841) and The Wrongs of Woman (1843-44); and Frances Trollope’s The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy (1840); poetry—Caroline Bowles Tales of the Factories (1833); Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “The Cry of the Children” (1844), “A Song for the Ragged Schools of London” (1854), and Aurora Leigh (1856); Thomas Hood’s “The Song of the Shirt” (1843) and “The Bridge of Sighs” (1844); Caroline Norton’s A Voice from the Factories (1836), “The Weaver” (1840), and The Child of the Islands (1846); Adelaide Anne Procter’s “Homeless” (1862), and Henrietta Tindal’s “The Cry of the Oppressed” (1852); and paintings—William Maw Egley’s “Omnibus Life in London” (1859); William Powell Frith’s “The Derby Day” (1856-8) and “The Railway Station” (1862); Richard Redgrave’s “The Governess” (1844) and “The Sempstress” (1844); and George Frederic Watts’ “The Song of the Shirt”/“The Seamstress” (1848). 2 Much of the critical work that has examined these texts has been limited to the fiction, novels which are called, depending on the critic, industrial novels, social problem novels, “Condition of England” novels, romans à thèse, novels of social reform, or novels of purpose.2 I want to propose a new name for two reasons. First, I want to incorporate poetry and paintings that have been excluded from studies of the novel and thus designate a “genre” that crosses generic boundaries. Second, and more importantly, I want to forward a particular argument about the social role of these texts, one that stems from their integration of the affective appeal of sentimentalism with the referential claims of realism (I will develop this argument at length in Chapters 3 and 4). Sentimentalism and realism have often been viewed as antithetical categories. I argue, on the contrary, that the genre’s unique ethical role stemmed from its integration of the two. Sentimentalism asked readers to form emotional and empathic relationships with individual poor characters, imagining and identifying with them in their suffering. Claims to realism, meanwhile, instructed readers that characters served a metaphorical function in their social milieu: each individual stood for hundreds and thousands of their contemporaries. This confluence of generic identities allowed sentimental realism to mobilize readers’ feelings for fictional characters for “actual” poor individuals in their social world. The genre’s sentimentalism did not undermine its realism (or vice versa); rather, they work in tandem to heighten its emotional appeal and social relevance. 2 The most significant studies of these novels include: Patrick Brantlinger, The Spirit of Reform: British Literature and Politics, 1832-1867; Louis Cazamian, The Social Novel in England, 1830-1850: Dickens, Disraeli, Mrs. Gaskell, Kingsley, trans. Martin Fido; Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832-1867; Arnold Kettle, “The Early Victorian Social-Problem Novel”; Sheila Smith, The Other Nation: The Poor in English Novels of the 1840s and 1850s; Kathleen Tillotson, Novels of the 1840s; Raymond Williams, “The Industrial Novels” in Culture and Society. The emphasis on industrial fiction that characterizes much of the criticism is a result of Marxist bias towards certain economic transitions. These critics favor novels that take place in the new industrial cities at the expense of rural and even London poverty. Dickens is often excluded for this reason, but he is central to my account. 3 Sentimental realism incorporates a diverse group of texts, ranging from thinly disguised social treatises to richly woven narratives to passionate cris de coeur. The authors I discuss are similarly diverse, with a wide range of political beliefs, religious affiliations, and artistic abilities. The range in faiths, for example, is considerable: Charles Kingsley was a Church of England pastor, Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna a fervent Evangelical, Adelaide Anne Procter a converted Catholic, Elizabeth Gaskell the wife of a Unitarian minister. As for politics, authors not only held different political positions and party affiliations but were sometimes in direct conflict. The Christian Socialist Charles Kingsley, for instance, makes jabs at Benjamin Disraeli, one of the founders of the “Young England” movement that attempted to unite the interests of the upper-class with the poor. Disraeli himself was originally a Radical, later a progressive Tory, and ultimately the leader of the Conservative party who introduced the Second Reform Bill as Prime Minister. Dickens, meanwhile, was a devout believer who rejected most forms of organized Christianity and a political activist who alternately gratified and infuriated liberal and conservative alike. Despite this diversity, however, the genre is unified not only by its topic of poverty but also its self-conscious use of literature for explicitly social objectives. While Victorian literary history often traces a trajectory in which art is increasingly divorced from its moral, political, and didactic effects, many artists at mid-century embraced l’art utile over l’art pour l’art. In 1859, the writer, critic, and professor of English literature David Masson wrote in British Novelists and their Styles that the mid-nineteenth century was seeing “a great development” of “Novels or Poems of Purpose,” due in large part to the vast political changes in Britain and Europe (264). The author and critic William Henry Smith also observed the rise of didacticism. Significantly, he identifies two trends in modern fiction since Scott: 4 1) The past was discarded for the present, persons from the lower classes were brought prominently forward, and portraiture was aimed at more than narrative. 2) The interest both of narrative and portraiture was subordinated to some useful purpose, or some system of opinions which the author was desirous of forwarding or expounding. (“Debit and Credit” 59) Although Smith’s review traces developments in the subject matter and function of literature as two distinct phenomenon, I will argue that the use of fiction for “some useful purpose” was intimately related to—and dependent upon—the rise of modern-day realism, especially its representation of contemporary life and poor and working-class characters. The use of literature for social commentary was not universally acclaimed; Thackeray, for one, satirized novels “with a purpose” in his “Plan for a Prize Novel,” and Trollope parodied Dickens, “Mr. Popular Sentiment,” in The Warden. Some critics complained about “political pamphlets, ethical treatises, and