Reform Acts: Chartism, Social Agency, and the Victorian Novel, 1832–1867 - Tapa dura

"At once boldly revisionist and meticulously argued, Reform Acts re-orients our approach to class politics and ideological criticism. Asking how the Victorians themselves understood the concept of agency, Vanden Bossche traces dynamic interchanges among class antagonists across multiple genres to delineate the shape of social change in the nineteenth century."

"Chris R. Vanden Bossche explores the subject of reform as the dominant ideal in English progressive politics... his work does offer some illuminating insights into this particular trait of Victorian self-representation."

"Students of 19th-century history, literature, and political science will find fresh insights here."

"Thoughtful... persuasive... The key contribution of the book is the way Vanden Bossche highlights curious and subtle rhetorical tricks whereby writers of the Whig and Tory side seek to align the interests of the working class with their own."

"A welcome and timely boost to scholarship in the relationship between literature and politics in mid-nineteenth-century Britain."

Reform Acts offers a new approach to prominent questions raised in recent studies of the novel. By examining social agency from a historical rather than theoretical perspective, Chris R. Vanden Bossche investigates how particular assumptions involving agency came into being. Through readings of both canonical and noncanonical Victorian literature, he demonstrates that the Victorian tension between reform and revolution framed conceptions of agency in ways that persist in our own time.

Vanden Bossche argues that Victorian novels sought to imagine new forms of social agency evolving from Chartism, the dominant working-class movement of the time. Novelists envisioned alternative forms of social agency by employing contemporary discourses from Chartism's focus on suffrage as well as the means through which it sought to obtain it, such as moral versus physical force, land reform, and the cooperative movement.

Each of the three parts of Reform Acts begins with a chapter that analyzes contemporary conversations and debates about social agency in the press and in political debate. Succeeding chapters examine how novels envision ways of effecting social change, for example, class alliance in Barnaby Rudge; landed estates as well as finely graded hierarchy and politicians in Coningsby and Sybil; and reforming trade unionism in Mary Barton and North and South. By including novels written from a range of political perspectives, Vanden Bossche discovers patterns in Victorian thinking that are easily recognized in today’s assumptions about social hierarchy.