The Condition-of-England Novel Revisited

While the Condition-of-England novel resists strict definition, it refers to a body of literary works that set out to diagnose the socio-political condition of Victorian England. These novels of the 1840s and 1850s – most notably the work of Dickens, Disraeli and Gaskell – sought to confront their middle-class readership with a world utterly at odds: rampant industrialisation, urbanisation and, related to this, class conflicts. Novels such as Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854) laid bare the desolation, crime and disease in the growing cities, while seeking to sift out the social divisions between factory owners and their workforce.

Dickens’s novel will be the departure point for this class to map out new sites of marginalisation and precarity in recent British fiction. Thus, starting from the poverty and inequality of the Victorian era, we will move across time and texts to explore the ways this generic category has found renewed expressions in the decades that followed. What has continued to be a defining feature, though, is the concern with major socio-political movements that largely play out in the private sphere of the oppressed. In our final reading, then, we will revisit the central tenets of the Condition-of-England novel in one of the most recent, if not relevant, representatives of the genre. A prime example for a 2020 Condition-of-England novel, Ali Smith’s Summer (2020) responds to the global entanglements of post-Brexit Britain amid the arrival of Covid-19. Our discussions will be informed by how the condition of England can no longer be diagnosed as a local phenomenon alone but as one defined by global developments such as the rise of populism, migration politics and Britain’s exit from the EU, all of which gesture towards the loss of symbolic power as a former imperial centre.