Unwilling Idlers: Labor, Unemployment, and the Politics of Genre in Victorian Fiction

This dissertation proposes that English nineteenth-century novels of the working class comprise a literary genre defined by the occurrence in them of unemployment as topos, problem, and narrative strategy. This structural similarity is consistent across texts written by authors with different class locations and ideological priorities. Whether radical or conservative, middle-class or working-class, novelists on the labor problem assert that the life of a worker oscillates between exhausting labor and being out of work — a reality both observed and experienced during the industrial century. The conclusions drawn from this premise vary, generating a formal diversity in these novels that incorporate elements of tragedy, melodrama, satire, and romance. By closely reading unemployment as a necessary feature of these texts, this dissertation examines the variety in literature of the working class while threading a continuous historicizing throughline. It brings together works of fiction from typically segregated genres — the social problem novel, the slum novel, the socialist novel — to argue that by paying attention to how each represents unemployment we can understand its author’s engagement with the contemporary iteration of the labor question.
This project makes both a literary historical and a narratological contribution to Victorian studies. It proposes a formal redefinition of the novel of the working class that bypasses the hyper-localization of class-oriented Victorian literary scholarship. At the same time, it attempts to account for the paradoxical absence of work represented as action in realist novels about workers. In these texts, unemployment is a positive absence, the lack of work rationalized and given a name so that writers may theorize labor. When work is scarce, literature can engage with contemporary discourses about what work is, how it should or should not be done, and the ways in which it shapes subjectivity. This project shows how the narrative treatment of unemployment — in other words, the representation of the lack of work — is the site of each text’s labor politics.