The mid-Victorian realist novel is the medium par excellence for an exposition of a sympathetic politics of care, and an effective vehicle for the perpetuation of the conditions for its realization. Its realism is orientated towards the caring conviction, which Gilligan observed in her female subjects, ‘that the solution to the dilemma will follow from its compelling representation’. Its personal focus, its realist enumeration of particularities and its emotional function make it a form that emphasizes connection and that cultivates the virtue of human sympathy, that weighs the subjective and emotional value of quotidian experience in dense and human terms, and that makes visible the delicate, fragile and underground lacework of social mycelia connecting the autonomous man-mushrooms of civil space. Even when its overt ‘message’ is individualistic it is led, by the very skill with which it mobilizes its fictional conventions, into an emotive revelation of human connection.

This same revelation is embodied, in different ways, in every novel to which I have turned my attention. It bursts the channels cut for it by any rational scheme of rights, and any rationalistic legitimation of or resignation to the status quo, and it bears the reader inexorably on to a hopeful and active desire for the social realization of human sympathy.