Feeling for the poor : bourgeois compassion, social action, and the Victorian novel

Resource Information

The work Feeling for the poor : bourgeois compassion, social action, and the Victorian novel represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in Boston University Libraries. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Feeling for the poor : bourgeois compassion, social action, and the Victorian novel

Title remainder

bourgeois compassion, social action, and the Victorian novel

Statement of responsibility

Carolyn Betensky

Creator

• Betensky, Carolyn, 1962-

Subject

• Armut
• Compassion in literature
• Compassion in literature
• Criticism, interpretation, etc
• Englisch
• Englisch
• English fiction
• English fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism
• Mitgefühl
• Mitleid
• Motiv
• Poor in literature
• Poor in literature
• Roman
• Social action in literature
• Social action in literature
• Social classes in literature
• Social classes in literature
• Soziale Klasse
• Soziale Klasse
• Sozialer Roman
• 1800 - 1899

Genre

• Criticism, interpretation, etc

Language

eng

Summary

"What if the political work of Victorian social-problem novels was precisely to make the reader feel as if reading them {u2014} in and of itself {u2014} mattered? Surveying novels by Charles Dickens, Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and Henry James, Carolyn Betensky tracks the promotion of bourgeois feeling as a response to the suffering of the poor and working classes. Victorian social-problem novels, she argues, volunteered the experience of their own reading as a viable response to conflicts that seemed daunting or irreconcilable. Encoded at multiple levels within the novels themselves, reading became something to do about the pain of others. Beyond representations of conscious or unconscious wishes to control, conquer, or discipline the industrial poor, social-problem novels offered their middle-class readers the opportunity to experience themselves in the position of both benefactor and beneficiary. Betensky argues that these narratives were not only about middle-class fear of or sympathy for the working classes. They gave voice, just as importantly, to a middle-class desire for and even envy of the experience of the dominated classes. In their representations of poor and working-class characters, social-problem novels offered middle-class subjects an expanded range of emotional experience that included a claim to sympathy on their own behalf"--From the Jacket

Member of

• Victorian literature and culture series

Cataloging source

DLC

Government publication

government publication of a state province territory dependency etc

Index

index present

LC call number

PR878.P66

LC item number

B47 2010

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography

Series statement

Victorian literature and culture series.