Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism > The Novel of Manners - Social And Political Order

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SOCIAL AND POLITICAL ORDER

Richard Faber

SOURCE: "Ordered Estates," in Proper Stations: Class in Victorian Fiction, Faber & Faber, 1971, pp. 16-22.

[In the essay that follows, Faber discusses how the works of such novelists as George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Anthony Trollope reflected the changes in nineteenth-century English society brought about by industrialization and urbanization.]

Looking back from the middle years of the century novelists could recall a pastoral England, where the country still bulked larger than the towns and where every village was an island. In each distinct community the squire and/or the parson represented the gentry. Below them were the well-to-do farmers and the rural professional men—doctors, lawyers and, more humbly, schoolmasters. Below them, again, the rural artisans and tradesmen (carpenters, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, saddlers, weavers, shopkeepers) and, finally, the labourers who often...

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1. Introduction
2. Representative Works
3. Social And Political Order
4. Domestic Order
5. Depictions Of Gender
6. The American Novel Of Manners
7. Further Reading
8. Copyright