Joseph W. Childers's Industrial Culture And The Victorian Novel
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In ‘Industrial Culture and the Victorian Novel’ Joseph W. Childers highlights the role of information to the industrialism in Britain in the early Victorian period. Information was crucial to understand the structure of the industrial culture. Moreover, widely accepted ideas were starting to be questioned and as Childers points out people ‘were existing differently’.
Accordingly, novelists as Gaskell, Dickens, Disraeli, Kingsley, and Frances Trollope provide specific examples of progress.
Childers indicates that the novel is a good instance of the relationship between the reciprocal reliance on the industrialism and the cultures of information. In fact, between the years 1832 and 1867 is impossible to understand the novel without industrialism. Novels were the most effective account for daily details of industrialism. This shift on the perspective about the world reflected on the characters that had been socially irrelevant became…show more content… Dicken’s novels from Pickwick (1837) to Our Mutual Friend (1865) rely on the importance of formal education. Dickens in Hard Times (1854), relates the industrial life with the educational system in in the fictional Coketown. Thomas Gradgrind’s school depicts the main theme of the novel that is facts versus fancy. Information is out of interpretation, everything can be reasoned with facts. Knowledge is regular and predictable. Dickens points put eh rigid methods of industrialism, which turn culture into a factory and devour imagination.
Other novelist as George Eliot, had a more direct approach to industrialization and the importance of being ‘the best self’ through education. In Felix Holt he discusses the regeneration of industrialization though the medium of education and culture as an expression of our best selves based on Matthew Arlond’s ‘Culture and Anarchy’. This idea of being our best selves started a new way of considering class