Bibliography

Driver, Felix. “Moral Geographies: Social Science and the Urban Environment in Mid-Nineteenth Century England.” Transaction of the Institute of British Geographers 13 (1988): 275-287.

This essay investigates the ideas associated with urbanity during the beginning of the social sciences as a distinct branch of knowledge. Driver reveals how social science was a moralistic one at its creation. Therefore, in the nineteenth century there was no distinction drawn between moralism and environmentalism. They were both seen as a part of an integrated whole. Social science was predominantly concerned with the habits and the mores of a specific people within a specific space.

Killham, John. “The Idea of Community in the English Novel.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 31 (1977): 379-396.

This essay reviews The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence by Raymond Williams. Drawing on late nineteenth and twentieth century sociological thought, Killham draws a distinction between the Gemeinschaft and the Gesellschaft. Killham, then, goes on to focus on how a multitude of English novelists portrayed the rural community as a normal type in the face of the advancement of urbanization, modernity, and capitalism. Killham critiques Williams’ appraisal of Dickens as a novelist who just focused on the ills of the Gesellschaft and without having any proposed cures. Killham asserts that in Dombey and Son, the narrator actually approves of industry as a tool for overcoming the eighteenth century “stagnation” that Dombey represents in his desire to create a dynasty.

Maxwell, Jr., Richard C. "G. M. Reynolds, Dickens, and the Mysteries of London." Nineteenth-Century Fiction 32 (1977): 188-213.

Maxwell shows how Dickens’s work, in its portrayal of London draws on certain themes expressed in urban gothic literature. Specifically, there is the use of secrets and London as a labyrinth of secrets that is found in the novels of George W. M. Reynolds. This concept of London as a setting of secrets, further, appears in Dickens’s Bleak House.

Sutherland, Guilland. "Cruikshank and London." Victorian Artists and the City: A Collection of Critical Essays. By F.S. Schwarzbach. Ed. Ira Bruce Nadel. New York, NY: Pergamon, 1980. 106-25.

This chapter examines the influence that George Cruikshank’s artistic representations of London life had on the Victorian novelists of Charles Dickens and Harrison Ainsworth. Sutherland, specifically, focuses on three aspects of London that Cruikshank incessantly returned to: the “low-life scenes,” life in the streets, and “midnight scenes.”

Thompson, F. M. L. "Social Control in Victorian Britain." The Economic History Review 34 (1981): 189-208.

Thompson discusses how the working-class, those on the receiving end of methods of social control, exerted agency in defying attempts to mold them into middle-class norms. He reveals how they created their own values and mores by appropriating, and altering, what they found useful, such as literacy, among the elements that were used to socialize them into middle-class norms.