Collins as Missionary

Abstract

Novelists with a mission were hardly a rarity in the Victorian period. From the 1830s, journals of popular education had begun to employ short and serial fiction as a vehicle for messages either evangelical or utilitarian, and as the century wore on a similar medium was exploited by an increasingly wide range of crusading bodies — all the way from the temperance league to the suffragettes. Even writers of ‘bloods’ in penny weekly numbers for a working-class audience typically spiced their melodramatic tales with condemnations of aristocratic vice and praise for honest labour, the most notorious example being the republican George Reynolds who also ran a radical weekly paper. Major writers were themselves by no means immune to the attractions of didacticism, often combining the roles of novelist and journalist in rather similar fashion. From the mid-1840s, those willing to employ works of fiction to advocate their varying solutions to the pressing problem of the ‘Condition of England’ after four decades of rapid industrialization included Disraeli (in the trilogy beginning with Coningsby, 1844), Gaskell (with Mary Barton, 1848, and North and South, 1855), Charles Kingsley (in Alton Locke, 1850, and Yeast, 1851), plus of course Dickens himself (in Hard Times, 1854). In the mid-1860s, George Eliot with Felix Holt (1866) and Anthony Trollope in Phineas Finn (1869) were among the novelists to intervene in the debate around the second reform bill of 1867, which extended the franchise to many working men.

What brought good Wilkie’s genius nigh perdition?

Some demon whispered — ‘Wilkie! have a mission.’

(Algernon Swinburne, Fortnightly Review, November 1889)