John Lanchester’s Capital: A Dickensian Examination of the Condition of England

John Lanchester’s Capital (2012) is an example of what is often called the “condition of England novel,” since it seeks to diagnose the state of the nation at a time of crisis, specifically the financial crisis of 2008. Charles Dickens is the central figure in the condition of England tradition as it was defined in the middle of the twentieth century, and Capital gains a great deal of its power from Lanchester’s creative dialogue with Dickens. Like Dickens, Lanchester is a radical social critic and a fictional chronicler of London, but the very different situation of the novelist in the early twenty-first century means that Lanchester is not able to reproduce Dickens’s confidence in the socially transformative power of fiction.