For Assignment 3: Essay 3, you are required to write an essay based on your reading of one (1) of the nineteenth-cent

Weight: 20% of your final course grade

Suggested Due Date: After finishing Unit 4

Length: Approximately 1000 words

Instructions:

For “Assignment 3: Essay 3,” you are required to write an essay based on your reading of one (1) of the nineteenth-century novels listed below. If you have any questions about this assignment or your choice of topic, please do not hesitate to contact your tutor.

This assignment is relatively simple. Drawing on one (1) of the three novels listed below, describe the author’s impression of working-class organization and working-class leaders.

1. Charles Dickens, Hard Times , introduction by Philip Collins. New York: Knopf; Toronto: Random House, 1992. AU call no.:  PR/4561/.A1/1992 c. 1–4. (Available online through Project Gutenberg.)
2. Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil; Or, The Two Nations , introduction by R. A. Butler, edited by Thom Braun. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1980. AU call no.:  PR/4084/.S8/1980 c. 1–6. (Available online through Project Gutenberg.)
3. Elizabeth C. Gaskell, Mary Barton , introduction by Edgar Wright. London: Oxford University Press, 1987. AU call no.:  PR/4710/.A4/M393 c. 1–5. (Available online through Project Gutenberg.)

To help you write this essay, keep in mind the following questions as you read the novel:

• Is the author’s treatment of workers the same or different than the treatment of other characters in the book?
• How sympathetic or attractive are the working-class characters as opposed to the owners and managers?
• Are there explicit or implicit assumptions about social change?
• What is the author’s attitude to violence, riots, and the behaviour of crowds?
• How does the author view factories, urbanization, and other concomitants of the Industrial Revolution?
• Is this an optimistic book?

In answering these questions, you should get some sense of the author’s impression of the working class during the Industrial Revolution.

All three of these novels were very popular books, and the authors are well-known. They were written over a ten-year period, from 1845 (Sybil) to 1854 (Hard Times). Charles Dickens needs little introduction; he remains one of the best loved of English authors. He was 44 years old and a well-known writer when Hard Times appeared in 1854, serialized in Dickens’s weekly magazine, Household Words. The novel is perhaps the most fanciful of the three books; characters easily become caricatures.

Disraeli is better remembered as a politician than as an author: he was twice prime minister of Britain. Nonetheless, he was also a very popular writer, a career which began in the mid-1820s with the publication of his first novel, when he was twenty-two years old. Sybil is from a later period—published in 1845—and was the second book in a loosely structured trilogy on contemporary socio-political themes. By this time, Disraeli had been a Member of Parliament for eight years. The novel contains his analysis of working-class poverty and unrest, and it served to publicize his own political views.

Mary Barton was Mrs. Gaskell’s first novel, published in 1848 when the author was thirty-eight. Set in Manchester, the book is based on the labour troubles of 1842–1843. Mrs. Gaskell lived with her husband (a Unitarian minister) in that city, and she knew it and its workers well. If this is the least polished of the three novels, it is also the most authentic. Dickens was much impressed by this novel, and Mrs. Gaskell subsequently became a regular contributor to Household Words.