The Perils of Representation in Shirley: Portrayals of Women and Workers in Charlotte Brontë’s Industrial Novel

Develops a reading of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) that shifts the discussion of this industrial novel from waged to unwaged industry, from the masculinized factory floor to the feminized workplace of the home. Explores its warmly detailed portrayal of domestic labor in a Victorian working-class community—from preparing food and sewing curtains to caring for children, the sick, and the dying. Further considers the novel’s many amateurs: scientists, firefighters, sleuths, sick-nurses, and herbalists. Supplements Elaine Freedgood’s reading of the Bartons’ cotton curtains to highlight the female labor of sewing them and, beyond their decorative function, their assertion of a working-class right to privacy.

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Accidents of a Novel Trade: Industrial Catastrophe, Fire Insurance, and Mary Barton

Nineteenth-Century Literature ◽

10.1525/ncl.2010.65.3.315 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 65 (3) ◽

pp. 315-347

Author(s):

Paul Fyfe

Keyword(s):

Risk Management ◽

Henry James ◽

Insurance Industry ◽

Victorian Novel ◽

Political Landscape ◽

Industrial Novel ◽

Fire Insurance ◽

Workplace Accidents ◽

Insurance Business

Paul Fyfe, "Accidents of a Novel Trade: Industrial Catastrophe, Fire Insurance, and Mary Barton"(pp. 315––347) This essay argues for the industrial novel as a form of risk management, in dialog with the insurance business and its particular problems with fire. elizabeth Gaskell's abiding concerns for workplace accidents and compensation in Mary Barton (1848), focused by a spectacular mill fire, contests the definition and "writing"of risk on commercial terrain. At the same time, various fire insurers, scrambling to manage a risk that seemed beyond control, invented hybrid strategies of description that impinged on the domain of novelists. I demonstrate how changing concepts of accident and risk characterize the unstable political landscape of England's industrial north, measure the increasingly material pressures on property and life, and inform diverse practices of writing, particularly those that novelists shared with the insurance industry. ultimately, the "queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary"for which Henry James denigrates the Victorian novel may derive from such historical circumstances in which writers like Gaskell absorb accidents as a practice of the genre.

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An Old Dog Enters the Fray; or, Reading Hard Times as an Industrial Novel

Dickens Studies Annual ◽

10.7756/dsa.044.011.221-241 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 44 (1) ◽

pp. 221-241

Author(s):

Priti Joshi

Keyword(s):

Industrial Novel ◽

Hard Times

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Democratic Networks and the Industrial Novel

Victorian Studies ◽

10.2979/victorianstudies.55.2.243 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 55 (2) ◽

pp. 243 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Lewis

Keyword(s):

Industrial Novel

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Ecological Form

10.5422/fordham/9780823282128.001.0001 ◽

2018 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Keyword(s):

George Eliot ◽

Joseph Conrad ◽

Global Scale ◽

Industrial Society ◽

Victorian England ◽

Victorian Era ◽

Industrial Novel ◽

Literary Forms ◽

Joseph Dalton Hooker ◽

Ecological Form

Victorian England was both the world’s first industrial society and its most powerful global empire. Ecological Form coordinates those facts to show how one version of the Anthropocene first emerged into visibility in the nineteenth century. Many of that era’s most sophisticated observers recognized that the systemic interconnections and global scale of both empire and ecology posed challenges best examined through aesthetic form. Using “ecological formalism” to open new dimensions to our understanding of the Age of Coal, contributors reconsider Victorian literary structures in light of environmental catastrophe; coordinate “natural” questions with social ones; and underscore the category of form—as built structure, internal organizing logic, and generic code—as a means for generating environmental and therefore political knowledge. Together these essays show how Victorian thinkers deployed an array of literary forms, from the elegy and the industrial novel to the utopian romance and the scientific treatise, to think interconnection at world scale. They also renovate our understanding of major writers like Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, John Ruskin, and Joseph Conrad, even while demonstrating the centrality of less celebrated figures, including Dinabandhu Mitra, Samuel Butler, and Joseph Dalton Hooker, to contemporary debates about the humanities and climate change. As the essays survey the circuits of dispossession linking Britain to the Atlantic World, Bengal, New Zealand, and elsewhere—and connecting the Victorian era to our own—they advance the most pressing argument of Ecological Form, which is that past thought can be a resource for reimagining the present.

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