On The Uncertainty Of The Morality Of The Working-Class Characters In The Victorian Novels

As a major transformation of the British society, the Victorian Age underwent a rapid development of Capitalism, a large redistribution of social classes and a grand change of ideology. Several major writers of that time started to pay attention to the working-class at the bottom of the society and modeled many representative and created vivid characters. Since ideology is science of ideas which are reflections and reactions to the realities of social, economic and political transformations, the examination of the morality of working-class characters will attribute a lot to the academic studies of both literature and society. The thesis tries to analyze the uncertainty of morality of the working-class characters in relation to their class status in the Victorian novels with Marxist class analysis and historicism.This thesis is composed of five parts. The first part is the introduction which states the central argument, the methodology of research and the significance of the thesis, along with a literature review of the Victorian novels. Chapter One offers an overview of the working class conditions in the Victorian Age and summarizes the historical background and the causes of the uncertainty of their morality. Chapter Two tries to describe the two groups of working-class characters in the Victorian novels, those living in the urban area and those living in the rural area, by examining their class status. Chapter Three mainly explains the uncertainty of morality of the working-class characters. The last part concludes that the social and economic status of the working-class deprived not only their unified and distinctive morality system but also their discourse power to claim it. The working-class is born with this uncertain moral value, which might be partly responsible for the compromises and failures in the early revolutions since the primary main purpose was economics, not political rights.