"Naked Truth is the Best Eloquence": Martineau, Dickens, and the Moral Science of Realism

At one point in the middle of Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton, the narrator steps back from her melodramatic tale to analyze the larger misunderstanding between Manchester workers and masters that has led to a grueling strike. But after several pages of broad sociological observations the narrator interposes: "So much for generalities. Let us now return to individuals," and continues with the story of Mary's romantic dilemma.¹ Here, in brief, is the program of the industrial novel of the 1840s and 1850s: the insistence on linking individual behavior to larger social systems, the lament that industrial culture is marred by selfish and ignorant class conflict, and the ultimate belief that this industrial culture can be reformed by incorporating more sensitivity to the individual point of view—a task to which narrative fiction is uniquely suited. Economic theory may have transformed society with its sweeping vision, but it fails as social policy because of its inability accurately to register the rich details of individual lives. The workers' lives chronicled by industrial fiction—Mary Barton and her father John, Michael Armstrong, Alton Locke, Sybil Gerard, and Felix Holt—are posited by these novels as essentially more real, fictional though they are, than the economic laws admired by the middle classes.²

Harriet Martineau's Illustrations of Political Economy, a series of didactic novellas that were immensely popular upon their publication in 1832–1834, have an uneasy relation to this subgenre. They are often considered the first industrial novels, with their staging of conflict between industrialist and worker, and between traditional social bonds and liberal contracts. But instead of foregrounding suffering individuals, they champion the impersonal economic laws that determine their behavior. Martineau's explicit aim, as expressed in the "Preface" to the series, is to convince her readers of the economic principles of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Thomas Malthus, "which, if generally understood, would gradually remove all the obstructions, and remedy the distresses and equalize the lot of the population."³ This allegiance to statistics, factories, and utilitarianism places her tales outside the broadly romantic tradition of literary revolt against industrialism within which the later industrial novels (and much of literary criticism itself) are often located. What's more, the novellas' embrace of predetermined truths results in a clipped and closed narrative shape that makes them paradoxically less convincing to later readers than if they'd been more morally complex. Their claim to be "illustrations," in which stories of human choice and suffering serve only to make vivid an abstract law, contravenes the relation in most realist texts between abstract law and lived experience, in which the former is found inadequate to explain the latter. In her own "Preface," for example, Gaskell takes the rhetorical tack of "know[ing] nothing of Political Economy" in order to claim that Mary Barton represents truth (that is, experience) rather than dogma; she adds that "if my accounts agree or clash with any system, the agreement or disagreement is accidental."⁴ Her claim to know "nothing" is clearly false, if we are to believe her analysis of class conflict in the Manchester strike. But it allows her to veil her controversial attack on industrial abuses by seeming instead to attack the political-economic idea of truth as abstract system and to naturalize her political purpose as a desire to represent social truth.

Reading the Illustrations, on the other hand, is difficult because they break with the usual assumptions of realist fiction: how are we to read a novel that has a law, and not a human being, as its hero? What I'd like to do in this essay is to tease apart the ways in which the Illustrations' embrace of economic law both sets them formally apart from the later industrial novels and creates the conditions for those novels' understanding of the political power of realist fiction. For though the Illustrations seem to be antirealist in their defense of law over unpredictable experience, they also contain a defense of humble everyday detail, subject matter often associated with realism. Even more effectively, in asserting...