What Feels Right: Ethics, Intuition, and the Experience of Narrative

This chapter demonstrates how literary theory bears the mark of the ethical debates of the nineteenth century. Through a reading of Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848) and Charles Dickens's Hard Times (1854), as well as a discussion of a number of classic narrative theorists, it shows how narrative theory, underwritten by a principle of forward compulsion through the text, reiterates the position of the intuitionist thinkers of the Victorian period. Both novels are examples of what people have come to call the “industrial novel,” or the “social problem novel”: a set of novels that focus on the condition of the working class. There is a strongly felt, if sometimes vague, ethical message in these novels' focus on the human misery inherent in capitalism: a general sense that it is necessary to treat other humans by some other standard than the bottom line. The chapter then considers the philosophical arguments of Bernard Williams—famous for his use of small narratives as philosophical argument—and suggests how narrative form, having subsumed the tenets of intuitionism, itself became an effective argumentative practice.

Gaskell's Food Plots and the Biopolitics of the Industrial Novel

This essay uses Elizabeth Gaskell's industrial novelsMary Barton(1848) andNorth and South(1955) to chart an intersection between biopolitics, food studies, and questions of novelistic form. First, the essay develops the argument that with the emergence of population as a key cultural concern, the Victorian novel became a biopolitical form structured by an interplay between the marriage plot and what I call the “food plot.” Following Thomas Malthus's uneasy connections between reproduction and the food supply, the nineteenth-century British novel was animated by a biopolitical tension between sexuality and appetite that took the shape of an uneven relationship between the dominant marriage plot and the subordinate food plot. However, the essay goes on to argue that Gaskell's industrial fiction reworks this dynamic to expose its limits and elisions. Through its commitment to representing working-class hunger, Gaskell's industrial fiction reshapes the relationship between the food plot and the marriage plot, giving appetite a central place in Victorian narrative but also drawing attention to the problematic ways in which marriage plots push appetite to the margins. My main test case is Gaskell's first novel,Mary Barton, which deploys in order to scrutinize and finally destabilize the novelistic framework that subordinates appetite to sexuality.

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.

Behind the Curtain

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.

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

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.