It is true to suggest that the depiction of the working class changes from the sympathetic to the threatening during the Victorian period?
The differences between plebeians and bourgeois during the Victorian period progressed from condole the working class to threatened by them. Regardless of the sentimental portrayal to a sympathetic representation of the working class, that Charles Dickens has presented in his novels, the Victorians shared an anxiety of revolution in the middle and upper class affecting the plebeians and causing total chaos in the society. However one author, Elizabeth Gaskell, touches both issues in North and South, portraying empathy for the workers but also enabling a threat against the factory owner. There is a wide …show more content…
The main reason behind was poverty caused by industrialisation and the changes occurred because of it. As I have mentioned before, one change that will threat the Victorian society will be the Chartism. This types of movements were formed in the working class communities, trying to fight for higher pay and working conditions and also for the rising of food prices, which will lead to revolutions against factory masters and government. This type of threat will shake the grounds of ‘Englishness’ where apparently “The English working man has no desire for conflict...they possess no innate tendency towards revolution...while the action of revolutionaries on the continent was not lost on the subject masses of Great Britain, the majority of working men were loyalist at heart and lovers of domestic peace.”( Wearmouth, circa. 1930), as Gaskell presents it in North and South, when the factory workers revolt against their master. The representation of the Victorian society as the cruel struggle in North and South, presented by Gaskell, suggests that things might turn otherwise than …show more content…
century, this feeling would be transformed into threat and fear. Taking into account all the theories presented along the Victorian era, one cannot not think of the impact that the working class had on literature. How would one still sympathise with Dickens’s children characters, Gaskell’s factory workers or characters in the other novels of that time, such as the ones from the Bronte sisters, if there would not be such a bad treatment against the working class? Would Rossetti’s poems still be the same without the presence of fallen women, forced to prostitute because of their financial condition? Asking oneself all these questions, will directly point one towards Woolf’s argument presented at the beginning of this essay, stating that if one “takes away all that the working class has given to the English literature and that literature would scarcely suffer” (Woolf,
The differences between plebeians and bourgeois during the Victorian period progressed from condole the working class to threatened by them. Regardless of the sentimental portrayal to a sympathetic representation of the working class, that Charles Dickens has presented in his novels, the Victorians shared an anxiety of revolution in the middle and upper class affecting the plebeians and causing total chaos in the society. However one author, Elizabeth Gaskell, touches both issues in North and South, portraying empathy for the workers but also enabling a threat against the factory owner. There is a wide …show more content…
The main reason behind was poverty caused by industrialisation and the changes occurred because of it. As I have mentioned before, one change that will threat the Victorian society will be the Chartism. This types of movements were formed in the working class communities, trying to fight for higher pay and working conditions and also for the rising of food prices, which will lead to revolutions against factory masters and government. This type of threat will shake the grounds of ‘Englishness’ where apparently “The English working man has no desire for conflict...they possess no innate tendency towards revolution...while the action of revolutionaries on the continent was not lost on the subject masses of Great Britain, the majority of working men were loyalist at heart and lovers of domestic peace.”( Wearmouth, circa. 1930), as Gaskell presents it in North and South, when the factory workers revolt against their master. The representation of the Victorian society as the cruel struggle in North and South, presented by Gaskell, suggests that things might turn otherwise than …show more content…
century, this feeling would be transformed into threat and fear. Taking into account all the theories presented along the Victorian era, one cannot not think of the impact that the working class had on literature. How would one still sympathise with Dickens’s children characters, Gaskell’s factory workers or characters in the other novels of that time, such as the ones from the Bronte sisters, if there would not be such a bad treatment against the working class? Would Rossetti’s poems still be the same without the presence of fallen women, forced to prostitute because of their financial condition? Asking oneself all these questions, will directly point one towards Woolf’s argument presented at the beginning of this essay, stating that if one “takes away all that the working class has given to the English literature and that literature would scarcely suffer” (Woolf,