Social protest and the novel: Chartism, the radical press, and early Victorian fiction

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This dissertation analyzes the literary milieu and print culture of mid-nineteenth-century British radicalism and suggests that early Victorian fiction was significantly shaped by the imaginative prose and editorial journalism of popular protest movements. It traces the interplay between the underground press and canonical Victorian novelists through a series of key controversies, including debates about the empire, political economy and the New Poor Law, suffrage rights and Chartism, and the condition of women. Although social-problem novelists often adopted the guise of brave anthropologists entering an unknown subterranean world when they wrote about the working-classes, the cultural reality of social division was different, characterized on both sides as much by argument, contest, parody, and appropriation as by separation and ignorance. In particular, Elizabeth Gaskell's evocation of collective forms of self-help in Mary Barton , Harriet Martineau's satire of Cobbettite theories o

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