ABSTRACT
Gaskell’s novel and other social problem fictions, Rachel Stern argues, may owe an unacknowledged debt at the level of form to Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy, including, but not limited to, A Manchester Strike. Stern’s essay offers another perspective of Martineau in an extended close reading of the aesthetic tensions and sociological principles at work in several of the Illustrations. For Stern, Martineau’s explicitly didactic narratives “persistently problematize the nature of individual character,” represented as both amenable to rational persuasion and susceptible to social overdetermination, and in so doing function as hitherto underappreciated precursors in the genealogical history of realist fiction.
