ABSTRACT
From Dickens to Hardy, England became the most powerful empire and the most economically advanced country in the world; and, following the political trend, in these and other novelists of the period, poverty in England became a more pressing issue than at any time previously, in any country. English novelists, including George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell, contribute to a formidable revaluation of the English poor in the Victorian era and to a climate of opinion containing much optimistic faith in education, enlightenment, science, and progress. The poor are depicted in new ways: for example, a workhouse child fallen among thieves in Dickens’ Oliver Twist; a union leader in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton; a day laborer who becomes mayor in Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge. These works reflect a growing realization that extreme poverty could be ended.
