ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the Victorians understood that a prime goal of the mid-nineteenth-century novel was to engender more inclusive social sympathy as Britain entered the democratic era in the decades between the Reform Act of 1832 and that of 1867. It reads the narrative templates that Frances Trollope developed in the wake of the First Reform Act as casting a new light on the evolution of Victorian fiction. Oliver Twist (1837–39), Jane Eyre (1847), and Adam Bede (1859) rework Trollope’s antislavery, anti-child-labor, and anti-Bastardy Clause novels. Adapting topically specific material from social-problem fiction enabled Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot to create stories that invited nineteenth-century readers to imagine a broader and more democratic sense of social inclusion even as they were constantly reminded of, and perhaps reassured by, the exclusions that made such inclusiveness possible.
