| Much nineteenth-century moralizing about the working classes derived from the interpretation that the French Revolution was caused by the smoldering discontent of the masses. This tendency was reinforced by the development of an urban "mob" in many cities and the increasing polarization of classes. Anxieties surrounding rapid and uncontrolled social change were often manifested in fantasies of a vast unknown substratum threatening to rise up in violent revolution. This work examines that narrative's origins in the revolutionary era and its subsequent use and transformation throughout the nineteenth century by writers responding to the complex problems created by social change in an expanding industrial society. The transition from an agrarian to an industrial economy and recognition of the consequent change in social relations was a lengthy and ongoing process, the effects of which have left their traces in literary and polemical works from the later eighteenth into the early twentieth centuries. Interdisciplinary and sociological in approach, this work considers a broad range of texts and authors, from minor and extra-literary figures to major writers, including Burke, Hazlitt, Carlyle, Martineau, Disraeli, Dickens, Gaskell, Matthew Arnold, James and Gissing. |
