Poverty was the social problem in late nineteenth-century Britain – and it remains one of the most urgent social issues in twenty-first century Britain. Then, the causes of poverty and the conditions of the poor were represented in sensationalized language for the purposes of calling attention to what one social reformer called “a crisis of history.” Now, as we face an economic crisis of global proportions, poverty tends to be connected to class, wealth inequality, dispossession, racial capitalism, and other forms of oppression.

This course considers nineteenth and twentieth-century British fiction that speaks to the paradox that industrialization has yielded wealth and poverty. What theories and methods of reading does literature about poverty require? How does literature help us to understand changing attitudes to poverty in Britain? Does it provide us with a language for talking about poverty as a mode of experience as well as a socioeconomic condition? At the same time, what are the ethical challenges for us, as readers, in assessing literary representations of poverty?

Likely texts include: Walter Besant, All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882); Margaret Harkness, In Darkest London (1889/1891); Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago (1896); Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman (1987); Zadie Smith, White Teeth (2000); Monica Ali, Brick Lane (2003).

This course fulfills the following English major/minor requirements: Pre-1900.