Title
Feeling For The Poor: Bourgeois Compassion, Social Action, And The Victorian Novel (Victorian Literature And Culture Series),Used
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What if the political work of Victorian socialproblem novels was precisely to make the reader feel as if reading themin and of itselfmattered? 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 socialproblem 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, socialproblem novels offered their middleclass readers the opportunity to experience themselves in the position of both benefactor and beneficiary. Betensky argues that these narratives were not only about middleclass fear of or sympathy for the working classes. They gave voice, just as importantly, to a middleclass desire for and even envy of the experience of the dominated classes. In their representations of poor and workingclass characters, socialproblem novels offered middleclass subjects an expanded range of emotional experience that included a claim to sympathy on their own behalf.
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