Novel Possibilities

Joseph Childers contends that novels such as Benjamin Disraeli''s Coningsby, Elizabeth Gaskell''s Mary Barton, and Charles Kingsley''s Alton Locke were in direct competition with other forms of public discourse for interpretive dominance of their age. Childers examines the interactions between the novel and a set of texts generated by parliamentary and radical politics, the sanitation reform movem...