SOURCE: Wallins, Roger P. “Victorian Periodicals and the Emerging Social Conscience.” Victorian Periodicals Newsletter 8, no. 2 (June 1975): 47-59.

[In the following essay, Wallins claims that social problems such as child labor, poor housing, and overcrowded, unsanitary graveyards brought to the attention of the middle class by nineteenth-century novelists had been exposed by popular periodicals much earlier.]

For much of the twentieth century, critics of Victorian ‘social-problem’ novels have tended to view such works as exposing the working and living conditions of the lower classes. The novels, these critics imply, materialized out of the authors' personal experiences, observations, and reading: Dickens' peripatetic wanderings through London's slums and his early journalistic career were viewed as preparation for his novels from Oliver Twist, which Louis Cazamian viewed as the first “social novel”,¹ to Our Mutual Friend; Disraeli, influenced by Carlyle and by the First Report of the Children's Employment Commissioners (1842), incorporated both sources into Sybil;² and Mrs. Trollope traveled to Manchester in 1839 to acquire material for her factory novel, Michael Armstrong.³

In particular, these critics maintain, several novelists used material from Parliamentary Committee and Royal Commission reports, at times verbatim; through the novels, then, the reading public was made aware of bad working and living conditions. Mrs. Tillotson, for example, reflected the prevalent idea that novels of the eighteen-forties exposed abuses in social conditions: by using evidence directly from Royal Commission Reports, she wrote, the novelists of that decade publicized that material to an audience that, as a result, became increasingly aware of the chasm between rich and poor. “And always”, she added, “the novelist reached readers unaware of government publications; aware only, perhaps, of a generally menacing cloud.”⁴ In 1966 Arnold Kettle claimed that the social-problem novels addressed themselves to “the conscience—not to mention the downright factual ignorance—of the middle class.”⁵

Literary historians thus have spent their energies showing which sources in particular the novelists have used. But those same historians seem to have ignored the implications of G. M. Young's 1936 comment on the blue-books—“Copied or summarized in the Press, the Blue Books created a new attitude to affairs”⁶—and Humphry House's assertion that the facts Dickens used were available also to his readers.⁷ Finally, in 1970, Richard Altick pointed out that the people who read Dickens, Disraeli, and Kingsley also read The Times, Fraser's, and other contemporary periodicals, and that it is “simply not true” that the “reading public at large got its first information … from the novelists.”⁸

The Parliamentary Committee and Royal Commission reports with which Dickens, Disraeli, Charlotte Tonna, and Charles Kingsley were familiar were available to general readers after the 1835 decision to sell them to the public. All of these reports, Archibald Alison wrote in Blackwood's, “teem with authentic and decisive evidence of the vast increase, during the last thirty years, of crime and frequent destitution among the working classes in all parts of the empire.”⁹ But the mere fact of the blue-books' existence, and even of their availability, does not guarantee that the public read them. For, consisting of hundreds of folio pages of evidence each, the blue-books did not commend themselves to easy perusal by Members of Parliament or by the rest of the upper and middle classes. One of the characters in Mrs. Tonna's Helen Fleetwood explained this problem: “You see, the facts are brought before Parliament, by having witnesses up to be examined on oath before the committee; these reports … are printed, and sold too: but I don't think one lady in a thousand ever looks into them, to say nothing of other classes; and if they are not read, how can the statements be known?”¹⁰ Mrs. Tonna and other social novelists, critics have claimed, sought to provide that publicity through their fiction. Indeed, as Sheila Smith has explained, “Some of the Victorian novelists used the novel as though it were a popular form of Blue book in order to make their readers explore social problems and give them evidence to draw some conclusions.”¹¹

What critics have not sufficiently recognized is that other sources existed from which middle- and upper-class Victorians—those with the power to effect changes by legislation—were able to learn about the conditions described by the blue-books. These people read the social novels, some by purchasing them outright, more by borrowing them through guinea-a-year subscription libraries. Certainly, these people also read the newspapers, which occasionally contained references to material in the blue-books, especially when Parliament was discussing those reports. But the articles were necessarily short, and details sparse. Also available to the upper and middle classes were the ‘quality’ intellectual and literary periodicals which, although less expensive than new fiction, still cost more than many such readers could afford to pay. Those who could not afford to purchase the periodicals outright were at least able to peruse the latest issues in the subscription reading-rooms.¹² The ‘quality’ periodicals were available, then, by one means or another, to the same classes that read the social novels. Information that appeared in these periodicals would thus be familiar to the novel-reading public.

In fact, the periodicals of the eighteen-thirties and eighteen-forties did provide their readers with the same basic information these people were to get later from the fiction, and with many more details than they could get from the newspapers. For with the passage of the Reform Bill of 1832, the periodicals were able to turn their primary attention away from political reform, which had been their major topic for several years. A writer for the Westminster Review in April 1833, for example, complained about the increasing numbers of the “uneducated, toilworn, and ignorant working class”, many of whom, especially factory workers, had to live in hovels on unsanitary streets.¹³ From 1833 through 1838, before the appearance of the factory-novels, the major intellectual and literary periodicals—Bentley's Miscellany (which had begun publication in 1837), Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, the Edinburgh Review, Fraser's Magazine, the New Monthly Magazine, the Quarterly Review, and the Westminster Review—contained over a hundred articles on social conditions, most of them on the working and living conditions of factory workers; and in the next ten years they added nearly three hundred more. Certainly, these periodicals tended to reflect the same political bias in their discussions of social conditions that they did in their other discussions. The Edinburgh Review, the journal of the Whig party, generally adopted the cause of the manufacturing interests. The Quarterly Review, founded in 1809 as the Tory opponent to the Edinburgh, often attacked these interests. So too did Blackwood's, begun in 1817 as another Tory counter to the Edinburgh. The Westminster Review, founded in 1824 as the organ of the utilitarians, favored the interests of the manufacturers (since most were Benthamites at least in spirit), and advocated improvements in working and living conditions only to the extent that such changes would improve output and efficiency. And in the first issue of Fraser's, in February 1830, editor William Maginn maintained that the labels “Whig” and “Tory” were no longer meaningful, but added: “We are not of liberal principles” (pp. 5 and 7). Despite the political philosophies behind these periodicals, however, their writers often quoted extensively from both the blue-books and private investigations. An examination of the articles in these periodicals, furthermore, clearly shows that, in the overwhelming number of cases, the non-fiction writers preceded the novelists in ‘exposing’ such material.

The two earliest examples of relatively well-known fiction which discussed working and living conditions of factory workers were Frances Trollope's Michael Armstrong and Charlotte Tonna's Helen Fleetwood, both published in 1839-40 and both describing factory conditions that were little more than what the blue-books had exposed as early as 1832, before such reports were available for sale to the general public. The two authors depicted the malformed, weakened children, whose “lean and distorted limbs—sallow and sunken cheeks—dim hollow eyes … give to each tiny, trembling, unelastic form, a look of hideous premature old age.”¹⁴ Such children worked in rooms whose heat, steam, stench, and dust gradually sapped their lives—if the machines or a “ruffian overlooker” did not cripple or kill them. Mrs. Tonna noted particularly the pace of work: “Move, move, everything moves. The wheels and the frames are always going, and the little reels twirl round as fast as ever they can; and the pulleys, and chains, and great iron works overhead, are all moving; and the cotton moves so fast that it is hard to piece it quick enough; and there is a great dust, and such a noise of whirr, whirr, whirr …” (vii, 537). Mrs. Trollope complained similarly: “The ceaseless whirring of a million hissing wheels, seizes on the tortured ear; and while threatening to destroy the delicate sense, seems bent on proving first, with a sort of mocking mercy, of how much suffering it can be the cause” (viii, 80).

These novels, however, were as much as six years behind the periodicals, which began discussing the Sadler Committee Report (1832) nearly as soon as it was available, and which also discussed the private investigations of Charles Babbage and Andrew Ure, both apologists for the manufacturers, and Dr. James Kay (later Kay-Shuttleworth), who attacked factory conditions. Writers for Blackwood's in particular condemned the harsh conditions. In April 1833, John Wilson supported a law to regulate factory work, especially child labor. He complained that four-year-old children were forced to work twelve to sixteen hours a day, and railed against this “waste of infants”. Yet Wilson had to admit that some of the evils could not be remedied, even by pending legislation:

The atmosphere must be hot, and dusty, and polluted. … Sickness and sorrow enough, and too much, will there be under a Ten Hours' Bill—but many will then escape death, who now wither away out of languid life, old-looking dwarfs though not yet in their teens. The engine will, under any bill, clutch up boy or girl, and dash out their brains against the ceiling, or crush them into pancakes by pressure against the walls, or seem to be devouring them, as, in horrid entanglement, mutilated body and deformed limbs choke the steam-fed giant, till, for a few moments he coughs—rather than clanks—over his bloody meal.

This was by far the most gruesome description of factory accidents to appear in any of the periodicals and was, in fact, more horrifying even than the novels' descriptions of the results of accidents. Citing details on the number and length of rest and refreshment periods, Wilson showed that overlookers often beat the young workers,¹⁵ a fact also included in Michael Armstrong and Helen Fleetwood in 1839. During the next few years, authors in Blackwood's reiterated how terrible the conditions were in the factories, and how necessary it was to help the children especially. By the middle of 1836, in fact, Alfred Mallalieu described the evils of the factory system as “the grand problem of the day”.¹⁶

Fraser's also frequently attacked the evils of the factory system. In March and April 1833, its authors condemned the “cupidity of manufacturers” who had replaced many of their adult laborers with six- and seven-year-olds. As a result, the parents, though willing and able to work, were often forced to depend on their children's labor, at much lower wages, for their own subsistence.¹⁷ Similar points were emphasized in the novels later. In Helen Fleetwood, for example, one neighbor told the Widow Green: “Those murdering mills … to my mind it's a cannibal sort of life to be eating, as one may say, the flesh off our children's bones, and sucking the young blood out of their veins” (vi, 530).

Even the Westminster Review, which in January 1833 had maintained that “at any and all times a considerable portion of suffering must exist in a manufacturing community dependent on the uncertainties and irregularities of demand, and pressed with a quantity of superfluous labour”,¹⁸ had to admit in October 1836 that factory children were abused. Discussing the Commissioners' Report on the Employment of Children in Factories (1833), Thomas Southwood Smith acknowledged that sick children went to work, often carried to the factories by their parents, even though doctors had said they would die if they continued.¹⁹ Three years later Mrs. Trollope portrayed precisely such a scene, with accompanying illustration, in her novel (xix, 202; reproduced on p. 51 of this issue). In December 1836, Lord Ashley, who had unsuccessfully sponsored a Ten Hours' Bill in 1833, wrote a long article for the Quarterly Review based partially on reports dating back to 1831 and 1832 and partially on The Curse of the Factory System, a newly published book by John Fielden, a radical manufacturer who had already introduced the ten-hour day into his factories.

Thus, between 1833 and 1838, the periodicals were very active in publicizing the many evils of the factory system. When in 1839 Mrs. Trollope and Mrs. Tonna emphasized that their respective stories, “however needfully disguised as to persons and place, … [are] substantially correct in [their] leading particulars” (Helen Fleetwood, xx, 627; see also Michael Armstrong, xvii, 186), their readers might already have been aware of the details. For, while such conditions as these authors described still existed, they had already been thoroughly exposed by the blue-books and discussed by the major intellectual periodicals.

After 1839, the novels condemned factory conditions in much less precise detail. But again fiction trailed developments in the periodicals because, after 1837, the periodicals changed their tone about factories. Perhaps they had exhausted the topic, or perhaps they believed that some improvements in working conditions had been made, especially in Lancashire's cotton mills. Certainly, in the Second Report of the Children's Employment Commission, published early in 1843, the Commissioners maintained that factory work “is seldom in itself oppressive, or even laborious”, and is rarely injurious; furthermore, they stated, that although some overseers did occasionally treat the children harshly, they were the exceptions. The Commissioners added that machinery need to be fenced off, but, for the most part, they acknowledged that working conditions had generally improved “in recent years”.²⁰ That statement, appearing in a report compiled in 1842, indicates that the improvements they saw were in process in the late eighteen-thirties.

For whatever reason, in 1839 Blackwood's contained articles by John Willes and Archibald Alison which virtually ignored the evils that still existed, and emphasized instead that factories provided a steady demand for workers.²¹ In de-emphasizing the physical damage done to workers, these articles set the tone for the treatment of factory working conditions in both the periodicals of the eighteen-forties and the novels then and later.

Echoing the new attitude of Blackwood's toward working conditions in factories. Bentley's Miscellany in 1840 began a series of articles, entitled “Moral Economy of Large Towns”, by W. C. Taylor. In his discussion of Manchester, Taylor pointed out that factory owners had carefully “boxed” their machinery to avoid accidents to the workers. The workers themselves were healthy and cheerful, and their labor was “not unwholesome”. Factory children were larger and stronger than their rural counterparts, and their employers appeared especially interested in protecting their morality. In contrast to Mrs. Trollope's Michael Armstrong, who in 1839 wished never to have to go to work in a factory again (ii, 16), the children whom Taylor saw looked upon admission into the mills as “a boon and a favour”.²²

By 1845, contemporary fiction, following the lead of the periodicals, no longer emphasized the unsafe and unhealthy conditions in factories and mills. In Sybil, we see factory workers rising early to get to work on time;²³ we learn that minor accidents still occurred (II, ix, 91); we hear of a factory that lowered wages by a strict system of fines (II, ix, 88); but we never enter the factory, we never see the conditions in which people worked, we get none of the details that Michael Armstrong and Helen Fleetwood had provided in 1839 and that the periodicals had included as early as 1833. Disraeli was familiar with factory working conditions from reading in the blue-books; his novel reflected the shift in fictional concerns from specific factory conditions to discussions of more general social problems.²⁴ In Mary Barton (1848), power-loom weavers suffered from low wages, short hours, and job insecurity,²⁵ but Mrs. Gaskell did not attack working conditions. In Shirley (1849), “about the past” but “for the present”,²⁶ Charlotte Brontë depicted a mill-owner who learned that he had to take an active interest in his workers, rather than one who sadistically beat his operatives and forced them to work faster and harder. The blue-books of the eighteen-forties, discussed and extensively quoted by the periodicals, had many reports of masters who did not relinquish authority within their factories to brutal overseers: where the employees were directly responsible to the owners, they were treated more humanely.²⁷

After Michael Armstrong and Helen Fleetwood, then, the social novels presented few pictures of abuses in factory working conditions; after 1837, the periodicals also had few major complaints. Instead, periodical writers in particular concentrated more heavily on the living conditions of the urban poor, a topic which they had been discussing in some detail for several years. That these conditions were horrible cannot be debated. Available statistics indicate that the newly emerging cities were ill-prepared for the tremendous increase of population that the factories brought in.²⁸ Even Peter Gaskell, whose Artisans and Machinery (1836) was primarily a defense of manufacturers, reported that the homes of most factory workers in Manchester were filthy, unfurnished, and devoid of decency or comfort. Blankets and sheets, for example, were unknown.²⁹

Beginning in 1833, the periodicals described actual streets and buildings in the working-class districts of large towns, and in this preceded the novels by several years. Although not the only periodical to discuss such conditions, the Westminster Review in particular provided early specific information, including statistics. In a discussion of the Factory Bill then before Parliament (a bill it opposed) and a review of Dr. Kay's The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Class in Manchester, Westminster authors in 1833 and 1834 explained that the houses built for the great influx of factory workers into Manchester were small, dirty, crowded, and unventilated. The streets “became the receptacles of the most disgusting offal.” Of 687 streets in Manchester, 112 were ill-ventilated; 352 had heaps of refuse, stagnant pools, and ordure; of 6,951 houses inspected, 1,135 were damp, 452 were ill-ventilated, 2,221 were “destitute of privies”. Such conditions clearly led to typhus epidemics.³⁰ In July 1834, the Westminster Review again attacked conditions leading to disease, especially the poor sewer systems in the alleys and courts of the working population: disease “stalks through many of the streets.”³¹ And in a July 1836 Westminster article, William Bridges Adams argued that, although “the crowded lanes, courts, and alleys of a large town, whose every house is one unseemly den of squalid hunger, strife, envy, hatred, malice and all uncharitableness”, were being cleaned up, many such areas in London's slums still existed.³²

Thus, it would have been no great surprise to many readers of Bentley's Miscellany to read, in 1837, of young Oliver Twist, apprenticed to a coffin-maker, visiting the worst part of an unidentified town and seeing decaying tenements, stagnant and filthy streets, and rats which “lay putrefying in [the] rottenness”.³³ Readers would also have been aware of what he saw in London later in the novel: “A dirtier or more wretched place he had never seen. The street was very narrow and muddy, and the air was impregnated with filthy odours” (viii, 55). Even Jacob's Island, “the filthiest, the strangest, the most extraordinary of the many localities that are hidden in London”, a “maze of close, narrow, and muddy streets”, in which people actually lived (1,381), would not have surprised some readers of Oliver Twist, for the conditions Dickens described there had been thoroughly discussed in a June 1833 New Monthly Magazine article, “The Dregs of London”. The author of that article pointed out the nature of “those quarters where what are called respectable people never set foot, but by merest accident”: unmarried couples lived together; thieves sold their wares and prostitutes plied their trade; the gin-shop at the corner was generally filled, down the street was a “flash-house” where crimes were concocted; and in the cellars were “the academies of theft, where burglary is taught on scientific principles.”³⁴ For some of the novel-reading public, then, Fagin probably existed four years before he appeared in Dickens' novel.

After Oliver Twist, Michael Armstrong, and Helen Fleetwood mentioned filth in the streets and portrayed sick workers, but both novels were more concerned with working conditions and their effects on the people. Nonetheless, Mrs. Trollope did occasionally describe the living conditions of workers and the effect of such conditions. The rapid advance of a fever through Deep Valley Mill, for example, was the result of the living conditions of apprentices there, “the congregated effluvia of fifty uncleansed sleepers in one chamber” (xx, 212) and the poor food they received, in addition to the oppressive atmosphere of the factory itself. Mrs. Trollope also provided an extended description of the living conditions of factory workers who subsisted in Hoxley-lane, “the most deplorable hole in the parish, … a long, closely-packed double row of miserable dwellings, crowded to excess by the population drawn together by the neighbouring factories.” Filth accumulated; “crawling infants” made the dust their natural element (iv, 35).

While Michael Armstrong and Helen Fleetwood said little specifically about disease in the workers' homes, writers for the periodicals attacked both the conditions that often allowed disease to run rampant, and the complacency that allowed many people in Britain to ignore such conditions. In Blackwoods in 1839, J. F. Murray, for example, recognized the general apathy over public health other than at plague time:

The danger never is at a distance. … There exists, in great cities, an under-current of pertilence at all times and in all seasons—typhus, for example, is ever at work among us—it is true, at work obscurely, because its ravages are among the obscure—among those who live precariously from day to day, in low, unventilated, and densely populated neighbourhoods, where bad drainage, bad air, bad water, and bad smells, perpetuate the epidemics they originate.³⁵

Robert Ferguson complained in the June 1840 Quarterly Review that workers' homes were devoid of ventilation, and were often no more than “dark, damp, dirty” cellars. “It is the impurity of the dwelling, and the contamination which ensues where vice is allowed to herd with want”, he added, “that fills our town with misery and disease.”³⁶

Similarly, in the manufacturing section of Mowbray, five years later in Sybil, the factory workers lived in “dank and dismal cellars” (II, ix, 88). The novel's picture of the living conditions of home artisans was also the same as the periodicals' descriptions of factory workers' homes (not surprisingly, since Disraeli used some of the same sources):

Wodgate had the appearance of a vast squalid suburb. As you advanced, leaving behind you long lines of little dingy tenements, with infants lying about the road … at every fourth or fifth house, alleys seldom above a yard wide, and streaming with filth, opened out of the street. These were crowded with dwellings of various size, while from the principal court often branched out a number of smaller alleys, or rather narrow passages, than which nothing can be conceived more close and squalid and obscure. [There were] gutters of abomination, and piles of foulness, and stagnant pools of filth.

(III, iv, 167)

This is clearly the same kind of “impurity of the dwelling” that Robert Ferguson had referred to in his 1840 Quarterly article. But Ferguson had made a frightening point with his information, that Disraeli did not make: such filthy living conditions led to a rapid spread of disease, and Ferguson warned his audience that, “once generated in a severe form among the hovels of the paupers, fever spreads to the best-housed and best-fed.” It usually moved from the centers of cities, the unhealthiest areas, to outlying districts. “On this score alone”, he had written ominously, “if man will not be linked to man by sympathy of feeling, most assuredly he shall be by the bonds of suffering and disease” (p. 123). Thomas Carlyle reiterated this point in 1843: a sick Irish widow, refused aid by the people around her, infected them with typhus-fever. “She proves her sisterhood”, Carlyle maintained; “they were actually her brothers, though denying it!”³⁷

Of the social novelists, Charles Dickens in particular was aware that disease cut across social boundaries, as Ferguson and Carlyle had maintained. In Dombey and Son (1846-48), Dickens pointed out that the air in the heart of the districts where the lower classes lived was polluted, “foul with every impurity that is poisonous to health and life”; no child could grow normally in such an atmosphere. Furthermore, he maintained, the physical health of man was a primary determinant of his moral health:

Those who study the physical sciences, and bring them to bear upon the health of Man, tell us that if the noxious particles that rise from vitiated air were palpable to the sight, we should see them lowering in a dense black cloud above such haunts, and rolling on to corrupt the better portions of town. But if the moral pestilence that rises with them, and in the eternal laws of outraged Nature, is inseparable from them, could be made discernible too, how terrible the revelation!

(xlvii, 647)

In addition to the filth which permeated their homes, many members of the lower classes suffered from the atmosphere where they lived. The air was often tainted by the presence of overcrowded graveyards. The major periodicals had many articles which, in whole or in part, informed the public about such dangerous conditions, but they appeared after a brief reference in Oliver Twist. When young Oliver accompanied Mr. Sowerberry to a funeral, he noticed that the dead woman was buried in an already bulging corner of the graveyard used for paupers: “The grave was so full, that the uppermost coffin was within a few feet of the surface” (v, 38). However, Dickens made no comment here on the potential pestilence.

Such a point was first made, instead, by Dr. Taylor in the 1840 Bentley's Miscellany series, “The Moral Economy of Large Towns”. In London, where Broad-Street and High-Street join, Taylor wrote, was the church of St.Giles-in-the-Fields. The graves were densely populated. Opening them for new bodies caused great fevers from the gases released, and the gases from the vaults under the church itself infected people in the church.³⁸ Several months later, Henry King told his Blackwood's readers of a “churchless metropolitan dead-pit, … an admirable specimen of the art of packing, on a large scale”. Bodies were constantly being added to this hell-hole in the heart of London, already “crowded and crammed to within a few inches of the surface with the ghastly contributions of years.”³⁹

Early in 1842, the Westminster Review discussed Gatherings from Grave Yards (1839), by G. A. Walker, a surgeon whose experience made him aware of this menace to society's health. The reviewer, John Hawkins Elliott, stated that everyone was being slowly poisoned “with the deadly poisonous emanations of burial-grounds and charnel-houses”, whose gases saturated the air. These gases eventually entered “streets, alleys, houses, and finally into the lungs of the people”, where they caused “disease, decrepitude, and death”. Even a short exposure to a diluted form of these gases could cause typhus fever. The churchyard at St. Botolph's, Aldgate, had some paupers' graves, perhaps like the one in Oliver Twist, commonly kept open until seventeen or eighteen bodies were available. The stench arising in hot weather caused nearby inhabitants to close their windows, “thus shutting in, and again and again breathing air, poisoned by their own lungs, that they may escape a stronger and more malignant poison lurking outside their windows, emitting from the rottenness of a crammed-full ground in the very heart of the city.”⁴⁰

After Edwin Chadwick's Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Classes (1842) was published, Francis Head reviewed it in the Quarterly and cited statistics: 50,000 corpses were annually interred in London; one burial-ground in particular contained, under one acre of surface, 60,000 corpses.⁴¹ In August, a writer for the Westminster Review pointed out that, in poor sections of town, graves were often dug thirty feet down, left uncovered until full of bodies, and then reopened in rotation at the end of a year.⁴²

Although people in the early social novels had died of overwork and undernourishment, those novels had, except for the brief reference in Oliver Twist, generally ignored the conditions of the graveyards in which the characters were buried. None appeared in the well-known social novels, in fact, until Mrs. Gaskell showed a factory worker's grave in Mary Barton, and even then she provided much less detail than the periodicals did: “Below was the grave in which the pauper bodies were piled until within a foot or two of the surface; when the soil was shovelled over, and stamped down …” (vi, 67).

Perhaps the most famous graveyard in Victorian fiction appeared four years later, in Bleak House, and was based on Dickens' own explorations into London's seamier districts. The “hemmed-in churchyard, pestiferous and obscene, whence malignant diseases are communicated to the bodies of our dear brothers and sisters who have not departed”, was a “beastly scrap of ground, [a] savage abomination”, houses on every side reeking of the grave. The mysterious Nemo was buried “a foot or two” down, “an avenging ghost at many a sick-bedside” (xi, 151). Dickens, then, alone of the social novelists, and despite his lack of such commentary in Oliver Twist, appeared as concerned with the effects of the dead upon the living as were the writers in the periodicals. Critics have pointed to Dickens' imaginative use of the graveyard in Bleak House,⁴³ but the important point for us to note is that, by the time he included his description and commentary in this novel, the details had already been thoroughly exposed in the ‘quality’ periodicals more than a decade earlier.

The living and working conditions of urban laborers, then, were not originally exposed in the social novels of the late eighteen-thirties and eighteen-forties. Nor was it necessary for middle- and upper-class readers to struggle through the voluminous blue-books in order to find information about the conditions in which the lower classes lived and worked. Before and during Parliament's debates about legislation to alleviate the working conditions of the industrial working class, that information was available to such readers in the ‘quality’ periodicals, in some cases more than ten years before it appeared in the fiction. Critics agree that the novels had a great effect on their readers and that the imaginative uses the novelists made of their materials actually shook the Victorian social conscience awake. But in the eighteen-thirties that conscience had been slowly emerging from its sleep when the intellectual and literary periodicals recognized the social evils in urban life and, through their discussions of the blue-books, of private investigations, and of parliamentary proceedings, communicated their concern—and very detailed information—to their readers.⁴⁴

Notes

1. Le Roman Social en Angleterre, Nouvelle Edition (Paris: Henri Didier, 1934), I, 207.

2. Robert Blake, Disraeli (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1967), p. 192; Sheila M. Smith, “Willenhall and Wodgate: Disraeli's Use of Blue Book Evidence”, RES [Review of English Studies: A Quarterly Journal of English Literature and the English Language], n.s., XIII (1962), 368-84.

3. W. H. Chaloner, “Mrs. Trollope and The Early Factory System”, Victorian Studies, IV (1960), 160.

4. Novels of the Eighteen-Forties (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 81.

5. “The Early Victorian Social-Problem Novel”, From Dickens to Hardy (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1966), p. 171.

6. Victorian England: Portrait of an Age (London: Oxford University Press, 1936; rpt. 1963), p. 33.

7. The Dickens World, 2nd ed. (1942; rpt. London: Oxford University Press, 1942; rpt. 1960), p. 42.

8. “Victorian Readers and the Sense of the Present”, Midway, X (1970), 103.

9. “Sismondi”, Blackwood's, LVII (May, 1845), 531.

10. Charlotte Elizabeth Browne Tonna, Helen Fleetwood, in The Works of Charlotte Elizabeth [sic], I (New York: M. W. Dodd, 1848), ch. xviii, p. 611. After the first reference to each novel, subsequent references will be included in the text.

11. “Blue Books and Victorian Novelists”, RES, n.s., XXI (1970), 29.

12. The information in this paragraph is from Alvar Ellegård, “The Readership of the Periodical Press in Mid-Victorian Britain”, Victorian Periodicals Newsletter, 13 (September 1971), 13-14, and 17-19, and from Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), pp. 260-61, 275-77, and 319.

13. “Condition of the Working Classes, and the Factory Bill”, Westminster Review, XVIII (April 1833), 384-87.

14. Frances Trollope, The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy (London: Henry Colburn, 1840), ch. viii, p. 80. See also Helen Fleetwood, iv, 519; v, 526; x, 552.

15. “The Factory System”, Blackwood's, XXXIII (April 1833), 424, 426, 441.

16. “The Cotton Manufacture, and the Factory System”, Blackwood's, XL (July 1836), 100.

17. [William Maginn?], “National Economy. No. IV: Poor-laws for Ireland”, Fraser's, VII (March, 1833), 282-291; [William Maginn?], “National Economy. No. V: The Factory System—The Ten Hours Bill”, Fraser's, VII (April, 1833), 377-392.

18. [John Bowring?], “Evidence Before the Select Committee on the Silk Trade”, Westminster Review, XVIII (January 1833), 6. (The information about authorship was kindly supplied by Professor Walter E. Houghton.)

19. [Thomas Southwood Smith], “The Factories”, Westminster Review, XXVI (October 1836), 200. (The information about authorship was kindly supplied by Professor Walter E. Houghton.)

20. Selections included in E. Royston Pike, Human Documents of the Industrial Revolution (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1966), pp. 180-82.

21. “A Week at Manchester”, Blackwood's, XLV (April 1839), 490; “The Chartists and Universal Suffrage”, Blackwood's, XLVI (September 1839), 297.

22. “Moral Economy of Large Towns. Manchester”, Bentley's Miscellany, VII (June 1840), 599 and 602.

23. Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil, or The Two Nations (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), Book II, ch. ix, p. 89, and ch. xiii, p. 115.

24. Cf. Sheila M. Smith, “Willenhall and Wodgate: Disraeli's Use of Blue Book Evidence”, RES, n.s., XIII (1962), 368-384; and “Blue Books and Victorian Novelists”, RES, n.s., XXI (1970), 31-34; and Patrick Brantlinger, “Bluebooks, the Social Organism, and the Victorian Novel”, Criticism, XIV (1972), 333-4, where “a rough pattern of mutual development in subject matter” between the blue-books and fiction is outlined.

25. Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 1958), ch. iii, p. 19.

26. Novels of the Eighteen-Forties, p. 98.

27. Pike, p. 182.

28. Pauline Gregg, A Social and Economic History of Britain, 1760-1950 (London: George G. Harrap, 1950), pp. 192-93.

29. London: John W. Parker, 1836, pp. 78-79.

30. “Condition of the Working Classes, and the Factory Bill”, 386-88.

31. [Arthur Symonds?], “Improvements of the Metropolis”, Westminster Review, XXI (July 1834), 201-202. (Information about authorship in this and in the following note was kindly supplied by Professor Walter E. Houghton.)

32. [William Bridges Adams], “Domestic Arrangements of the Working Classes”, Westminster Review, XXV (July 1836), 451.

33. Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), ch. v, p. 35. References to Dickens' other novels are to the New Oxford Illustrated editions.

34. “Monthly Commentary. The Dregs of London”, New Monthly Magazine, XXXVIII (June 1833), 213-15.

35. “The Lungs of London”, Blackwood's, XLVI (August 1839), 212.

36. “Public Health and Mortality”, Quarterly Review, LXVI (June 1840), 121.

37. Past and Present (Houghton Mifflin: Boston, 1965), pp. 150-151.

38. “The Moral Economy of Large Towns. Juvenile Delinquency”, Bentley's Miscellany, VII (May 1840), 470-71.

39. “Post-Mortem Musings”, Blackwood's, XLVIII (December 1840), 829-30.

40. [John Hawkins Elliott], “The Dead versus the Living. Gatherings from Graveyards”, Westminster Review, XXXVII (January 1842), 201-210. (Information about authorship was kindly supplied by Professor Walter E. Houghton.)

41. “Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Classes”, Quarterly Review, LXXI (March 1843), 421-22.

42. “London Churchyards”, Westminster Review, XL (August 1843), 152.

43. Trevor Blount, “The Graveyard Satire of Bleak House in the Context of 1850”, RES, n.s., XIV (1963), 370-78; K. J. Fielding and A. W. Brice, “Bleak House and the Graveyard”, in Dickens the Craftsman, ed. Robert B. Partlow, Jr. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970), pp. 115-39.

44. I should like to acknowledge the receipt of a grant from the University of Idaho which helped to provide time for research and for the writing of this article.