Five American authors on wealth, poverty, and inequality

University of Bucharest Review, 2016

The increasing numbers of urban poor and the unprecedented growth of Victorian London significantly altered the ways in which social and moral differentiations came to be written into the structure of the city in the late nineteenth century. In George Gissing and Arthur Morrison's city, this paper argues, the 'otherness' and 'isolation' of the poor were explicitly identified and narrated through mapping poverty with a naturalistic representation of smaller spatial units within the borders of impoverished districts. Considering Charles Booth's distinctive analysis of London as a physical structure in Labour and Life of the People (1889-1903), this article provides a comparative approach to the representation of urban poverty and slums in Gissing's The Nether World (1889) and Morrison's A Child of the Jago (1896) with an emphasis on physical boundaries, spatial segregation and naturalism. In these works, the outcast poor dwell in strongly classified spaces because of their difference; they are considered deviant and a threat to the structure of power in the metropolis, where an increasing consciousness of boundaries and of spatial order exists. Gissing's city is generally described as dull and monotonous, while Morrison's streets are full of grotesque and lively characters corrupted by socioeconomic conditions and trapped in East London.

NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction

Published in the GSTF Journal of Education (JEd), Singapore Volume- I, Issue- I ISSN: 2345-7163 (The Official Journal of Global Science and Technology Forum, Singapore), 2013

Charles Dickens (1802-1870), the quintessential Victorian author has depicted various recurrent social evils of the 19th century England. In Great Expectations particularly, he has shown how the poor orphan young boy Pip, deeply unhappy with his wretched domestic life, aspires for a better life and position in the society by any means. Though in a different way, Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhay (1896-1950), one of the luminaries of Bengali literature and an eminent early 20th century writer, has also exhibited the struggle of the orphan young adolescent Apu picturing the domestic and social realities of the Bengali rural and urban society of the 1920s and 1930s in his well-known back to back novels The Ballad of the Road (Pather Panchali) and its sequel The Unvanquished (Aparajito). Both these novelists have simultaneously portrayed the outward impoverished life of common class people, and the layered sensitibity and human emotions in them, especially in the thoroughly growing ordinary child characters like Pip, Apu and others. They have also made poverty a character itself, a condition that represents the stark realities of life of the then English and Bengali societies respectively. But at the same time, they seem to be far different from each other in dealing with poverty and their attitudes to life and reality. Therefore, this comparative study aims to critically analyse these novels and explore how differently these authors have conveyed their ideology of ‘realism’. Keywords: reality, struggle, poverty, suffering, aspiration, prospect, disillusion, mystical.

Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, 2006

Late 19th century novels provide graphic descriptions of working and living conditions and their impact on population health, in particular the detrimental effects of hunger, poor housing, environmental conditions, hazardous work and poor pay, smoking and alcohol and crime, but also the transformative possibilities of social and political action. The popularity of these novels helped raise the collective conscience of citizens and illuminated the direction for 20th century welfare reforms. Yet many of these problems remain and the pathways to and from poverty are still recognisable today. Although novels are now less central in conveying social information, rereading these novels enables us to understand how social and economic circumstances were understood at the time and what led to social and political change.

The Henry James Review, 2009

In The Princess Casamassima, Henry James's highly untypical novel of international uprising, terrorist action, and family melodrama, the plot of revolution reverberates throughout the text, to the extent that revolution and personal identity are conflated to an exceptional degree. Moreover, the organization of the revolutionary movement parallels a structure of identity played out throughout the novel, one torn between a "surface" and a depth of "passion and devotion" (PC 6: 49). When Hyacinth presents to the Princess Casamassima his understanding of the world of revolutionary movements, he is almost explaining personal mechanisms of repression and control: It's beyond anything I can say. Nothing of it appears above the surface; but there's an immense underworld peopled with a thousand forms of revolutionary passion and devotion. The manner in which it's organised is what astonished me, I knew that, or thought I knew it, in a general way, but the reality was a revelation. And on top of it all society lives!. .. In silence, in darkness, but under the feet of each one of us, the revolution lives and works. It's a wonderful, immeasurable trap, on the lid of which society performs its antics.

Journal of Victorian Culture, 2004

Journal of English Language and Literature (JELLC), 2022

Great Expectations is considered one of the most outstanding works of Charles Dickens. The novel takes place in Victorian era Britain and it is, therefore functions as a medium to mirror the social dynamics of this respected era including class-divided social hierarchy, social mobility, and the concept of morality which manifest themselves more explicitly with the effects of the industrial revolution. Through its main character and protagonist Pip, the reader witnesses the course towards the ‘myth’ of upward mobility. In this regard, the present paper aims to foreground the dynamics of Victorian society that are reflected in the novel.

SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1600-1900 , 2014

PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 1992

This essay focuses on a central strand of a complex process: the intersection of class and gender ideologies in an icon of Victorian fiction, the “Angel in the House,” who comprises and is constituted by her ideological other, the servant. A wife, the presiding hearth angel of Victorian social myth, actually performed an important and extensive economic function. Prevailing ideology held that the house was a haven, a private domain opposed to the public sphere of commerce; but, in fact, the mistress managed her husband's earnings to acquire social and political status and thus served as a significant adjunct to his commercial endeavors. Several discursive practices coalesced in the 1830s and 1840s to give middle-class women unprecedented power, so that running the bourgeois household became an exercise in class management, a process both inscribed and exposed in the Victorian novel.

Victorian Studies, 2022