Heroes and Heroines of the Working Classes in the 19th Century British Novel

Catalog description

Though the 19th-century British novel has often been associated with the middle class, this course focuses on novels whose leading characters are servants, farm laborers, or factory workers. In Samuel Richardson's Pamela, a 1745 precursor, the heroine serves an upper-class household whose young "master" attempts to seduce her. Thady Quirk, the narrator of Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800), is an Irish servant for generations of Anglo-Irish who oppress their tenants and mismanage their estate. The hero of George Eliot's Adam Bede (1859, but set earlier), is a hardworking rural carpenter whose beloved, a dairy maid, loves the aristocratic landlord's son. In Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848), the new working class of Manchester fight starvation, and Mary Barton's father fights for a trade-union.We examine the stories, narrators and narration--Pamela as letters; Castle Rackrent as a satire by an unreliable first-person narrator; Adam Bede as omniscient third-person "realism”; Mary Barton as told by a sympathetic middle-class woman. Among our questions: What are the protagonists' relationships to the other classes? Why do these works include inter-class romance? What are the protagonists' aspirations and outcomes? Supplemental readings include excerpts from Engels's The Condition of the Working Class in England; Keating's The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction, Robbins's The Servant's Hand; Baker's Longbourn, and Booth's Mrs. Woolf and the Servants.