ABSTRACT
Production and producers appear frequently enough in the Victorian novel (Keating 1971b; Gallagher 1985). The ‘condition of England’ fiction of the 1840s responded sharply to the political challenge of Chartism and trade unionism. Middle-class writers found ways of representing the conditions which had provoked that challenge and, less satisfactorily, the awareness it sponsored. In the 1860s, Dickens, Eliot and others wrote about electoral reform, and about the looming presence of an enfranchised working class (Gallagher 1985, ch. 9).
