Victorian Industrial Novels and the Plight of the Working Class

The Industrial Transformation of Victorian England

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 from which to cultivate stories about the plight of humanity. Perhaps no one fully understood at the time that it was the end of the agrarian age — that farming the land was no longer the only means by which people could survive and flourish. There was a new commerce being generated from the smoke-stacked factories that began to litter the lush yet formidable countryside of England's industrializing landscape.

George Eliot's exceptionally poignant novel Felix Holt: The Radical, set thirty years before its original publication date, examines and highlights the roles of the individual within society, especially among those who worked in the factories. Its descriptions of those towns and their people read like history rather than fiction. The novelists of that era seemed to find in the darkened tones of soot-polluted skies a shadow of the dark undertow of their society — as though industry, by being set into motion, had stained a once-pure world with hidden guilt.

Other novels of this era reflect on the same concerns that Eliot expounded upon: Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil, Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton, and Charles Dickens' Hard Times. Each features central characters who reside within industrial environments, and each confronts the conduct and circumstances in which people were allowed to live — appalling upon reflection, yet accepted as a necessity of survival. The novels reveal stark contrasts throughout, showing how far society was willing to push people to maintain a way of life, to the point where even children were sent into the mills and mines.

George Eliot's Felix Holt and the Midland Landscape

Felix Holt opens with a description of the Midland region of England as Eliot understood it in the 1830s, 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, shrouding 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" (Felix Holt, pp. 76–79).

In these Midland districts, Eliot writes, "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," one might be "rattled over the pavement of a manufacturing town, the scene of riots and trades-union meetings," where prosperous men "with a considerable banking account were accustomed to say that they never meddled with politics themselves" (Felix Holt, pp. 76–79). This juxtaposition of rural beauty and industrial grime is central to Eliot's social vision in the novel, capturing the uneasy coexistence of the old agrarian England and the new industrial order.

Conclusion: Endurance, Reflection, and the Human Will

Each of these novels is wrought with admirable qualities about the human will to adjust and survive under adverse conditions. They are also reflections of a time we hope are never repeated — a time when the conditions and motives that created such suffering went largely unchallenged. Taken together, Felix Holt, Sybil, Hard Times, and Mary Barton form a remarkable body of social testimony, bearing witness to the costs of industrial progress and the resilience of those who bore them.