Evaluating the Social-Problem Novel

Abstract

The mid-nineteenth-century novels which we now call ‘social-problem’ or ‘industrial’ novels — principally Hard Times, Mary Barton, North and South, Alton Locke, Sybil and Felix Holt — were not described and identified as a group by their nineteenth-century readers or critics. In fact the label has a relatively recent origin for it dates only from the 1950s.¹ The forty years since that time, though, have seen a sustained interest in the novels as a group, and various readings of them have been produced. However, common to nearly all of these readings is the conclusion that the works are in some way flawed — that they are marked by incoherence and contradiction and that they possess fundamental weaknesses of plot and characterisation. The modern student of Victorian literature is thus confronted by a paradox: on the one hand there is a considerable body of critical work devoted to the social-problem novels; but on the other, most of the judgements about them appear to be negative. Such a situation in turn provokes two further questions: why should works with such widely acknowledged shortcomings have continued to attract so much attention? And why do we need yet another book devoted to them?