Reforming fictions: Refiguring the politics of class in the Victorian social-problem novel

This work is a study of the ways in which Victorian social-problem novels contributed to an imaginary reconfiguration of the class landscape in nineteenth-century England. The argument is developed through examinations of "radical characters" who mark the limits of the symbolic order of class in the novel, drawing attention to the cultural work that goes into the construction and maintenance of social hierarchies. Drawing on the work of nineteenth-century and contemporary theorists of the relationships among aesthetics, class, and subjectivity, my dissertation offers readings of social-problem novels written during the middle and late decades of the nineteenth century, including works by Disraeli, Eliot, Kingsley, Gissing, and James. Reading these novels in conjunction with prose by Carlyle and Engels among others, I explore the discursive processes through which the order of class was formed and reformed in the Victorian Age.;Chapter One, "Figuring the 'Intellectual Workman'," examines the working-class radical as he is figured in Kingsley's Alton Locke, Gissing's Workers in the Dawn, and James's The Princess Casamassima. Taking up such concerns as the nature of the intellectual workman's labor, the question of his representative status, his attitude toward revolutionary violence, and his own sense of dislocation and internal division, I argue that the intellectual workman is inherently subversive of the idea of an organic hierarchy of class. Chapter Two, "Radical Characters, Purposeful Fictions" advances the argument that the figure of the intellectual workman operates structurally to disarticulate the novel's imaginary resolutions of social and political conflicts. Reading Eliot's Felix Holt against the novels discussed in Chapter One, I argue that the radicalism of the intellectual workman is formal as well as political in nature. Chapter Three, "Forgotten amid the Great New World'," invokes the theoretical framework of Juliet MacCannell's The Regime of the Brother to discuss the fate of women within the putatively classless order of fraternity proposed by Victorian novelist-reformers such as Kingsley and Disraeli. I argue that, like the intellectual workman, the figure of the sister is a radical character, central to the articulation of an idealized class(less) order yet completely unassimilable to it.