ABSTRACT
Nineteenth-century Britain has been described as the ‘first industrial nation’ (Mathias 1983). It is the social, political and technological changes brought about over the course of the century by the accelerating processes of industrialisation, including those which effected a revolution in print culture, which are usually invoked to explain the distinctive character of this period of British history. Distinctive, too, was the sheer pace of change: within a single lifetime industry, farming, transport, the domestic home, as well as retailing were transformed. This chapter documents how these rapid and sometimes dramatic developments in nineteenth-century social, economic and intellectual life provided writers with new themes and challenges, as they attempted to come to terms with what later historians would characterise as the beginnings of modernity. We can get a general sense of how different 1890s Britain was from that of, say, the 1830s by briefly comparing the fictional worlds of two well-known novels of the period.
