“Fraud, Fun, and Feeling”: Slavery, Industrialism, and the Mother-Machine in Frances Trollope's Fiction

For Frances Trollope, the nineteenth century was defined by what she perceives to be a pervasive mechanization of emotional life, a phenomenon similar to what Tamara Ketabgian has recently described as the “industrialization of affect” in this period. At the center of this phenomenon, for Trollope, is the disquieting specter of the mother-machine, a figure in whom the processes of mechanical production and maternal reproduction collide. The figure originates, in Trollope's fiction, in the character Juno, an enslaved woman whose alienation from her children under slavery serves as a major plot point in her groundbreaking 1836 antislavery novel The Life and Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw; or Scenes on the Mississippi. That figure is then reworked in the violent relationship between children and machines Trollope would go on to depict in her 1839–40 novel, The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy, one of the first industrial novels published in Victorian England. In these early fictions, Trollope documents what she perceives to be the mechanization of the maternal body under, alternately, slavery and industrialism, and its consequences for both the work and experience of care under nineteenth-century capitalism in its varied forms.

Gaskell's Food Plots and the Biopolitics of the Industrial Novel

This essay uses Elizabeth Gaskell's industrial novelsMary Barton(1848) andNorth and South(1955) to chart an intersection between biopolitics, food studies, and questions of novelistic form. First, the essay develops the argument that with the emergence of population as a key cultural concern, the Victorian novel became a biopolitical form structured by an interplay between the marriage plot and what I call the “food plot.” Following Thomas Malthus's uneasy connections between reproduction and the food supply, the nineteenth-century British novel was animated by a biopolitical tension between sexuality and appetite that took the shape of an uneven relationship between the dominant marriage plot and the subordinate food plot. However, the essay goes on to argue that Gaskell's industrial fiction reworks this dynamic to expose its limits and elisions. Through its commitment to representing working-class hunger, Gaskell's industrial fiction reshapes the relationship between the food plot and the marriage plot, giving appetite a central place in Victorian narrative but also drawing attention to the problematic ways in which marriage plots push appetite to the margins. My main test case is Gaskell's first novel,Mary Barton, which deploys in order to scrutinize and finally destabilize the novelistic framework that subordinates appetite to sexuality.

Working-Class Women’s Literature: An Introduction to Study

Writing ‒ and indeed thinking ‒ about working-class literature presents a number of unique problems. To begin with, what do we mean by “working-class literature”? Literature about working-class people, literature by them, or literature addressed to them? If we use the first definition, should we include works that are ignorant of or hostile to the working-class people they write about like some turn of-the-century “industrial” novels? If we focus on writing by working people, do we include pieces that do not deal with their lives or even with their real concerns, like some “popular” songs? Should we include, say, literature by people of working-class origins, like D. H. Lawrence?

“THAT THERE BRUTUS”: ELITE CULTURE AND KNOWLEDGE DIFFUSION IN THE INDUSTRIAL NOVELS OF ELIZABETH GASKELL

ELIZABETH GASKELL SCHOLARS are well aware of the anger that Mary Barton evoked in some quarters of Manchester's industrial bourgeoisie. These scholars are also certainly familiar with the central document of this anger, a wide-ranging critique in which an anonymous “Correspondent” of the Manchester Guardian accuses the anonymous novelist not only of ignorance but also of distortions that amount to “a libel on the masters, merchants, and gentlemen of this city.” The correspondent, W. R. Greg, offers several lines of argument in support of this charge. I would like to take one of these as the opening evidence in my own argument. “In a truthful ‘tale of Manchester, or factory life,’” he remarks, “it appears very strange that no notice whatever is taken of what has been done by the masters for improving the condition of the workmen”; instead of “mechanics' institutions,” “libraries founded expressly for [the workers'] benefit,” and other “institutions [where] every stimulus is given to self-culture, to the expansion of the mind … to whatever will elevate the taste, refine the manners, [and] improve the moral character,” the reader sees only the harsh effects of “comparatively uneducated and ignorant” factory masters. The author of Mary Barton, Greg asserts, may be counted among “the hosts of humanity-mongers” who are determined to depict leaders of industry as “upstarts from the very dregs of society” (“Mary Barton”). (See Figures 8 and 9.)

The Radicalism of Felix Holt: George Eliot and the Pioneers of Labor

George eliot's felix holt the radical discusses a figure of enormous importance in the social history of Britain and the United States: the labor pioneer, that is, the person who consciously dedicates his or her whole life to long-term activity in the working class. Eliot, I argue, is the first important writer to recognize the significance of this figure and invest it with moral value. In doing so, she upends the tradition bequeathed by earlier “industrial novels” by recognizing, along with the labor pioneer, the permanence of class divisions and the political independence of the working class. Further, in heroizing the figure who struggles for the future of a new social class, Eliot departs from the reliance on “the authority of the past” or the stress on culture in general that have been seen as keys to her work.