The intersection of class and religion in Victorian novels of the 1850s

Abstract

In my dissertation, I focus on a set of English novels written in the 1850s in order to analyze how the fiction of the 1850s, the mid-Victorian period, engaged with social issues in ways that resembled as well as differed from the social problem novels of the previous decade. Consequently, I contend that in the 1850s, as social, economic, and political problems became less pressing and immediate, and the suffering of the population through hunger, disease and filth diminished in scale, religion reasserted itself as a mediating device in discourses surrounding social problems in the novels of this period. In each chapter, I focus on how specific religious affiliations, present as discursive frameworks in the novels, are a significant yet neglected aspect of the representation of class issues. Each novel is an example of a different religious denomination offering a frame or particular concepts to debate intricate class issues. Each novel has a particular form (gothic, industrial novel, historical novel, and working-class autobiography) which is substantially connected to the specific class issue in the novel. Arguing against the received “loss of faith” narrative in scholarship which, until recently, characterized the culture and literature of the Victorian period as one marked by religious doubt and gradual loss of faith, I demonstrate in reading these novels that tracing the intersections of class and religion yields a greater understanding of how social issues are represented in the novels of the 1850s.