SOURCE: "The Two Traditions, 1820-80," in The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971, pp. 1-30.

In this excerpt from a book about the working classes in Victorian fiction, Keating provides an overview and analysis of mid-century industrial and urban fiction.

I

'If you look for the working classes in fiction,' wrote George Orwell in 1940, 'and especially English fiction, all you find is a hole.' He goes on to qualify this statement:

For reasons that are easy enough to see, the agricultural labourer (in England a proletarian) gets a fairly good showing in fiction, and a great deal has been written about criminals, derelicts and, more recently, the working-class intelligentsia. But the ordinary town proletariat, the people who make the wheels go round, have always been ignored by novelists. When they do find their way between the covers of a book, it is nearly...