ABSTRACT
THE POINT OF DEPARTURE FOR THE ANALYSIS THAT FOLLOWS IS THE PERCEPTION of an unevenness in British social development in the 1850s, a discrepancy between the “public” world still very much of patrician dominance and the “private” world of middle-class economic power. The sentiment expressed by Dickens in support of civil service reform is informed by a characteristic Dickensian frustration with the pace of change in the domain of political society, a frustration that similarly informs much of his writing in the 1850s. The social world that Dickens knew and wrote about, that of the metropolitan middle classes, was still politically underrepresented, as well as socially subservient to patrician influence and interest. Another important thing that the above quote illustrates is the sense of social authority of literature informing its context: Dickens backed the Administrative Reform Association as a writer of great public stature, someone whose social capital was made through literature alone, which in turn speaks of a new level of social influence won by literature as a social practice.
