Literature overview and analysis

Oh, To Be England Now That the Industrial Revolution Is Here

The emergence and expansion of industry within Victorian England was a primary concern among the writers and other members of the intelligentsia of that colorful era. During the 19th century, people were moving away from the farm and into the factories, which provided writers a new vista to cultivate stories about the plight of Man. Perhaps no one fully understood at the time it was the end of the agrarian age, where farming the land was no longer the only source and means people could survive and flourish in this world. There was a new commerce being generated from the smoke-stacked factories that began to litter the lush, green yet formidable countryside of England. George Eliot's exceptionally poignant novel Felix Holt: The Radical, set thirty years prior from its original publication date, examines and highlights the roles of the individual within society, especially the types of people who works in the factories. The descriptiveness of those towns and its people, like history rather than fiction. I suspect that the novelists of that era found the darkened tones of the soot that polluted the skies was a shadow of the dark undertow of their society by putting the industry beast into motion: that society was no longer pure, but stained by a hidden guilt. There were other novels during this era that reflect on some of the same concerns and findings at George Eliot expounded upon -- such works as Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil, Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton, and Charles Dickson's Hard Times. Each has central characters that reside within the industrial environs, and it's the conduct and circumstances in which we allow people to live: appalling upon reflection, but then a necessity of survival: we see contrasts throughout the novels, and how far we are willing to push people to maintain a way of life -- even the children are sent into the mills and mines.

Felix Holt opens with a description of the Midland region of England Eliot described of that time in the 1830's when "the morning silvered the meadows with their long lines of bushy willows marking the watercourses, or burnished the golden corn-ricks clustered near the long roofs of some midland homestead. Everywhere the bushy hedgerows wasted the land with their straggling beauty, shrouded the grassy borders of the pastures. Such hedgerows were often as tall as the labourers' cottages dotted along the lanes, or clustered into a small hamlet, their little dingy windows telling of nothing but the darkness within. In these Midland districts the traveler passed rapidly from one phase of English life to another: after looking down a village dingy with coal-dust, noisy with the shaking looms. Rattled over the pavement of a manufacturing town, the scene of riots and trades-unions meetings where the neighbourhood of the town was only felt in the advantages of a near market where men with a considerable banking account were accustomed to say that "they never meddled with politics themselves" (Felix Holt, p.76-79).

In Benjamin Disraeli's 1845 novel Sybil, or Two Nations examines and amplifies the social conditions through England since the Reform Act -- which is the centerpiece timeframe of Felix Holt. Through his short passages are descriptive paragraphs that paints an acute picture of the countryside, or the life, most had not seen or experienced first hand in England: "The plain is covered with the swarming multitude: bands of stalwart men, broad-chested and muscular, wet with toil, and black as the children of the tropics: troops of youth -- alas! Of both sexes -- though neither their raiment nor their language indicates the difference: all are clad in the male attire.some are -- the mothers of England! But can we wonder at the hideous coarseness of their language when we remember the savage rudeness of their lives?.Infants of four and five years of age, many of them girlsentrusted with the fulfillment of most responsible duties.Their labour indeed is not severeit is passed in darkness and solitude" (Disraeli, 177-178). This is Disraeli holding up a mirror to the country, eloquently, and perhaps scaring the ignorant. Another story that emerged in the same year, first appearing as weekly magazine installments, was Charles Dickens' Hard Times. It literally looks at the mechanization of industrial life through the life of Stephen Blackpool and his fellow workers. They reside in Coketown, an "unusual town of red and black like the painted faces of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys.a black canal in it, and a river that ran purplevast piles of buildings full of windows where there was a rattling and a tremblingwhere the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously.inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the pavements, to do the same work, and to who every day was the same" (Dickens, 17). And yet, the "lights of the great factorieswerelike Fairy palaces" (Dickens, 49). Finding beauty in the horror.