Reading sympathy in the Victorian Condition-of-England novel

This study considers the ways in which the novels of the Condition-of-England period manifested Victorian conceptions about the tangible effects of sympathising with and through works of fiction by tracking just one of many sympathetic traditions available at the time, that of the Scottish Enlightenment. There have been two broad schools of thought regarding this group of novels—which, for my study, will include includes Disraeli’s Sybil (1844), Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855), Eliot’s Felix Holt, the Radical (1867), and, an atypical selection, Frances Trollope’s Michael Armstrong (1839). One approach, largely dismissive of the Victorian social-problem novel’s politics as ineffectual, regards their emphasis on sympathy with suffering as a substitute for more concrete forms of action. Some critics of the industrial novel argue that the novel’s investment in sympathy is a strategic method of assuaging the guilty feelings that illustrations of poverty give rise to, and ultimately reifies the structural inequalities that makes such degradation possible. Others, in viewing the political aims of these novels more sympathetically, have likewise approached the topic of sympathy and feeling with less suspicion, showing how the language of sympathy offered a mode of social organization alternative to Carlyle’s reviled ‘cash-nexus’. Building off a current trend in affect studies that has foregrounded the work of Adam Smith on sympathy in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), I aim to demonstrate how sympathy became entangled in the competing language structure of both radical social change and civil conservation. In so doing, I will argue that the Condition-of-England novels and responses to them could shed light on the sympathetic aims of the Victorian novel, and how the subversive possibilities of communal feelings were systematically converted into the critical distance and detachment of pity.