The Impact Of The Industrial Revolution In The Victorian Factory Novel

The Industrial Revolution was one of the most significant historical, scientific and social events ever to take place in England and which profoundly altered the whole British society. Its impact can also be traced within the field of literature, where a great number of major Victorian novelists chose to represent the social truths of the civic society, thus creating the new literary genre of the social novel. One sub-genre of the social novel however, the industrial or Condition-of-England novel, was particularly concerned with the portrayal of the social consequences of the Industrial Revolution in England. The meaningful factory novels of writers such as Charlotte Tonna, Elizabeth Stone, Benjamin Disraeli, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens or Elizabeth Gaskell popularized the industrial novel and approached pressing issues like the confrontation between the Victorian society and industrialization, the relationship between masters and workers, the working conditions or the societal turbulence which inevitably occurred.