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Late Victorian novels
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fascinating series of documentary writings, turned to the novel with
The Bane of a Life (1870); but, despite its first-hand account of workingclass
life, the polemical issues are toned down for a middle-class
readership. John W. Overton, in Harry Hartley (1859) and Saul of
Mitre Court (1879), makes his working-class concerns the basis of a
philosophical approach to a new society along positivist lines. Overton
was one of the earliest self-educated working-class intellectuals, and
his contribution to the growth of socialist thinking was considerable.
W.E. Tirebuck’s Miss Grace of All Souls (1895) has been described
as ‘the most important industrial novel’ to be published in England
since Hard Times forty years earlier, and it was the most successful
portrayal of independent working-class life since Mary Barton. This
‘industrial’ trend in the novel made the ‘two nations’ theme especially
vivid, with the workers’ cause strongly maintained, with no possibility
of compromise. Miss Grace is the continuation of a line in fiction
which Disraeli began in Sybil, and of which Mary Barton and Kingsley’s
Alton Locke are perhaps the most significant examples.
Two women writers of the end of the century attempted to bring
this industrial or working-class novel to a new readership, but their
work is now little read. Constance Howell shows the conversion of
an upper-class woman to socialism, in a novel of ‘class repentance’
called The Excellent Way (1888). Margaret Harkness (using a male
pen-name, John Law) took realism to new levels of directness with A
City Girl (1887) and her major novel Out of Work (1888).
Competition has had its day; it must give place to co-operation,
because co-operation is the next step in the evolution of society;
it has a scientific basis. Individualists may try to stop it, but it
cannot be stopped. The organisation of labour and the
brotherhood of men are scientific truths which must be
demonstrated. Join them in the struggle. Be Socialists.
(Out of Work)
In 1890, John Law published both In Darkest London and A Manchester
Shirtmaker. The brutality of her descriptions comes across with
immense force: