SOURCE: "The Industrial Novels," in Culture and Society, 1780-1950, Columbia University Press, 1983, pp. 87-92, 109.

In the following essay, Williams argues that Mary Barton and North and South belong to a tradition of literature that he calls "industrial, " given their attempt to portray in careful and sympathetic detail the suffering engendered by Britain's self-transformation into a modern power.

Our understanding of the response to industrialism would be incomplete without reference to an interesting group of novels, written at the middle of the century, which not only provide some of the most vivid descriptions of life in an unsettled industrial society, but also illustrate certain common assumptions within which the direct response was undertaken. There are the facts of the new society, and there is this structure of feeling, which I will try to illustrate from Mary Barton, North and South, Hard Times, Sybil, Alton Locke, and Felix Holt.

Mary Barton (1848)