"Sooty Manchester" and the Social-Reform Novel 1845-1855: An Examination of Sybil, Mary Barton, North and South, and Hard Times.
Year: 1961
Type: article
Abstract: Sooty Manchester-it too is built on the infinite Abysses: overspanned by the skyey Firmaments; and there is birth in it, and death in it;-and it is every whit as wonderful, as fearful, unimaginable, as the oldest Salem or Prophetic City."(Carlyle, Past and Present III, xvt) It was because others discovered this truth at about the same time as Carlyle, whose Past and Present came out in 1843, that there arose that succession of novels about social conditions that begins with Disraeli's Sybil and goes on into the next decade and even into the sixties.The creative imagination was stimulated by the social conscience, and in the product of that event " sooty Manchester " -whether it have as fictional approximation Milton, Mowbray, Coketown or be just itself- figures as a grim recurrent location.Carlyle with his penchant for choosing extra- ordinary incidents and extravagant language to describe them would have been a match for even the most sensational of modern journalists, but we have to remember that his gifts enabled him to startle his generation into realizing what was going on amongst them.Amongst his examples at the beginning of Past and Present is this:" At Stockport Assizes ... a Mother and a Father are arraigned, and found guilty of poisoning three of their children, to defraud a ' burial-society' of some £3.8s., due on the death of each child: they are arraigned, found guilty; and the official authorities, it is whispered, hint that perhaps the case is not solitary, that perhaps you had better not probe farther into that department of things.This is in the autumn of 1841; the crime itself is of the previous year or season.' Brutal savages, degraded Irish', mutters the idle reader of News- papers; hardly lingering on this incident.Yet it is an incident worth lingering on; the depravity, savagery and degraded Irishism being never so well admitted.In the British land, a human Mother and Father, of white skin and professing the Christian religion, had done this thing; they, with their Irishism and necessity and savagery, had been driven to it ... A human Mother and Father had said to themselves: What shall we do to escape starvation ?We are deep sunk here, in our dark cellar; and help is far . . .The Stockport Mother and Father think and hint; Our poor little starveling Tom, who cries all day for victuals, who will see only evil and not good in this world: if he were out of his misery at once; he well dead, and the rest of us perhaps kept alive ?It is thought, and hinted; at last it is done."(I, i) Beside the fact Disraeli's fiction is pallid in its impact, if little less sombre in its implications.Liza Gray, faced by her creditor Mrs. Mullins, calculates on " a death in our family soon-this poor babe can't struggle on much longer; it belongs to two burial clubs-that will be three pounds from each, and after the drink and the funeral, there will be enough to pay all our debts and put us all square" (Sybil III, iii).Carlyle's examples are striking, but they are not exceptional; or, if they are exceptional, they are so only in degree and not in kind.In a sentence which I omitted from the middle of the quotation he wrote: " Such instances are like the highest mountain apex emerged into view; under which lies a whole mountain region and land, not yet emerged."For the sharp evocation of sympathy and concern Carlyle's method of flashing the reader's attention on singular suffering and degradation is most suitable.The novelist seeks to bring forth that 85
DOI: 10.1136/oem.18.2.85
Author: A. Pollard
Institution: University of Manchester
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2055308720