Introduction

Modernist 20th-century (documentary) industrial novels, partially or completely based on empirical facts and statistical data, constitute a typical 20th-century phenomenon. Before that time, starting with the first industrial revolution, a substantial number of industrial novels had already been written in various countries. But with some exceptions, such as Friedrich Engels's non-fictional reportage The Condition of the Working Class in England (Engels, 1845/1993) and Emile Zola's mineworker novel Germinal (Zola, 1885/1991), these were not intentionally based on empirical facts, but were fiction. One of the most renowned examples of a narrative industrial novel is Charles Dickens's Hard Times (Dickens, 1854/1993). In this novel Dickens questioned working conditions and labour relations in his fictional ‘Coketown’ (Manchester). Dickens was not unique. In the middle of the 19th century there were several other renowned British and American authors who published remarkable industrial novels. British literary critic and art historian Raymond Williams summarized a number of these novels in his seminal book Culture and Society 1780–1950 (Williams, 1958/1963). Williams considered mid-19th-century British authors of industrial novels as expressions of ‘industrialism’ – a new collective system composed of manufacturing and productive institutions and their general activities. In his view industrial novels such as Looking Backward (Bellamy, 1888), Mary Barton (Gaskell, 1854/2008), North and South (Gaskell, 1854–1855/1996), Hard Times (Dickens, 1854/1993), Sybil (Disraeli, 1845), Anton Locke (Kingsley, 1892/2016), and Felix Holt (George Eliot, 1866) ‘provide vivid descriptions of life in an unsettled industrial society, but also illustrate certain common assumptions within which direct response was undertaken’ (Williams, 1958/1963, pp. 13, 99).