History through Literary Imagination: Portrayals of Worker Representation and Collective Action in Condition-of-England Novels, c.1830–1855

The first half of the nineteenth century witnessed exceptional social turbulence in Britain, not least rapid industrialization and squalid urbanization. Against this background emerged a genre of English literature – the ‘condition-of-England’ novel – whose authors drew the attention of the privileged classes to the living and working conditions of the urban poor, and suggested ways to improve them. These authors were sympathetic to the plight of the working classes but were at the same time invariably hostile towards the activity of trade unions, the very organizations that workers formed to help themselves. This article examines two questions. First, why were these authors so hostile to the collective action of the working classes, and why did that hostility begin to dissolve by the early 1850s? And second, what does analysis of these novels reveal about the evolving nature of the alternative solutions they proposed to resolve working-class poverty? By tracing an arc of development in authors’ attitudes over the period c.1830–1855 – from a focus on working-class education to reform of legislation on working time and conciliation between the classes – it tracks the gradual emergence of an innovative ‘sociological imagination’ in the later novels.