Engl 444: Industry and Empire in Nineteenth-century Britain

Industry and Empire were the two processes that "book-ended" the 19^th century, engendering simultaneously profound optimism and intense anxiety. Central to debates about both industry and empire were questions of gender – about women and their "proper" place, as well as men and masculinity. We will use these three questions – about industry, gender, and empire – as the lenses through which we approach the century’s literature. We will begin by examining various responses to industrialism, particularly the crisis of poverty, the rise of class antagonism, and the criminalization of the poor. By the 1850s, as women’s aspiration for greater voice and rights grew, the debate about industrial costs and class differences was replaced by anxieties about gender and attempts to define the role and nature of women and men, domesticity, and women’s place in the nation. By the 1880s, gender concerns in turn were supplanted by, first, celebration and then consternation about Empire, its effects on England and the English, its costs and dangers. We will examine how these three concerns were resolved and how they reappeared in different guises and disguises as the century progressed. Throughout, we will examine how the character of "English" identity was produced and reproduced, asserted and altered in its engagement with these questions.

The guiding assumption of this course is that 19th-century literature cannot be read in isolation from the social debates of the day. For a variety of reasons having to do with the ways in which Victorian intellectual life was organized, 19th-century "literature" and writers were continually in conversation with essayists, journalists, philosophers, sociologists, economists, politicians, etc. In order to reconstruct some of these conversations, we will read literary texts alongside non-literary ones and consider the former as intervening and participating in the social and political debates of the day.

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