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Social, cultural, and intellectual factors account for Victorian literature's interest in domestic workers. Servants as members of the largest occupational category in Victorian England impacted domestic culture, turning the home into a space where class relations and class identities were performed and negotiated. Thinkers such as Darwin and Hegel contributed to anxieties over servants as class enemies, who were nonetheless necessitous for a master's survival and subjectivity. Victorian servants as vexatious figures are subjects of canonical literature, of nonfiction, and of their own autobiographical acts, satire, and poetry. Early scholarship viewed servants as minor characters with formal functions; later, feminist, Marxist, postcolonial and deconstructionist approaches politicized the servant as a marginal figure. More recent studies read literary texts as participating in dominant cultural discourses on servants as a class, while also focusing on servants as producers of working‐class literature.
Social, cultural, and intellectual factors account for Victorian literature's interest in domestic workers. Servants as members of the largest occupational category in Victorian England impacted domestic culture, turning the home into a space where class relations and class identities were performed and negotiated. Thinkers such as Darwin and Hegel contributed to anxieties over servants as class enemies, who were nonetheless necessitous for a master's survival and subjectivity. Victorian servants as vexatious figures are subjects of canonical literature, of nonfiction, and of their own autobiographical acts, satire, and poetry. Early scholarship viewed servants as minor characters with formal functions; later, feminist, Marxist, postcolonial and deconstructionist approaches politicized the servant as a marginal figure. More recent studies read literary texts as participating in dominant cultural discourses on servants as a class, while also focusing on servants as producers of working‐class literature.
GOTHIC FICTIONS IN THE LATE VICTORIAN era presented the conditions for a shift in the conception of how character works. During this period, the creation of prominent literary personae such as Jekyll and Hyde, Sherlock Holmes, and Dorian Gray came to rely less on the personality of their fictional identities and more on their ability to stand in for and elicit reactions to complex social, political, and economic debates. By this I do not mean that these characters are "flat" in the sense E. M. Forster proposes when he states in Aspects of the Novel (1927) that such characters are, in their purest form, "constructed round a single idea or quality" (103-04). What I mean is rather that the specific manner in which these characters are composed has been directed in such a way so as to deny the evolution of emotional, intellectual, and moral traits in favor of a narrative approach that employs fictional identity as a location for the representation of important social questions. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, character, I suggest, provides a particularly important site for writers to construct difficult arguments. Along the same lines, the reevaluation of character in the late Victorian era also entailed a reassessment of the concept as a collection of features marking members of certain social and economic classes. To take a case in point, the late nineteenth-century ideal of the Victorian gentleman met its decline as a result of political and social unrest when the growing socialist movement that began in the 1870s tarnished the integrity of economic powers. Skepticism-and, in the case of the Black Monday riots that took place in Hyde Park on February 8 th , 1886, insubordination-towards the economic hierarchy forced England's class system to maintain itself through the incorporation of dissent as it reinforced its ranks to weather the social upheaval that spanned the 1880s. Images of bourgeois corruption were a common staple of late Victorian public discourse, assuming prominence not merely in the pamphlets and speeches commonly found in radical activity, but also in popular novels such as Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now (1875) and the daily writing of W. T. Stead for the Pall Mall Gazette.
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