SOURCE: "Class and the Strategies of Sympathy," in The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America, edited by Shirley Samuels, Oxford University Press, 1992, pp. 128-42.

In the essay that follows, Lang contends that the sentimental novel displaces class issues by reducing them to race and gender issues.

In 1851 the North American Review published a series of articles on political economy written by Francis Bowen, editor of the Review from 1843 until 1854 and, later, Alvord Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity at Harvard University. "There is a danger," Bowen wrote, "from which no civilized community is entirely free, lest the several classes of its society should nourish mutual jealousy and hatred, which may finally break out into open hostilities, under the mistaken opinion that their interests are opposite, and that one or more of them possess an undue advantage, which they are always ready...