Does the nineteenth century social problem novel document reality in order to educate readers?
… in which both Mary Gaskell and Charles Dickens were writing, protests and demonstrations on the part of the workers were growing, and certainly their fate was attracting more attention. Although the expression ‘condition of England’ is a general one, it refers to some quite specific events: the economic slump of the beginning of the 1840s which had left many out of work and hungry, and the growing influence of Trades Union and Chartism, a social movement proposing various political changes, which was seen as dangerously radical in outlook. There was a growing hostility between industrial manufacturers and their hands, exacerbated by poor standards of working and living in the towns, and mutual mistrust. This was the ‘reality’ of the 1840s. Gaskell and Dickens were by no means the only authors to document the period. Much of the writing about the social problems of the time came not from fictional sources …
