2024, Vol. 6, Issue 3, Part A

Focusing on representative samples of important authors as Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, and George Eliot, the article shows the way that Victorian literature functioned both as a site for reflecting and questioning established moral and social values. These authors dealt with urgent social problems-the poverty, grimness of industrialization, gender inequalities, and constraints on women as well as on the working classes. These authors did not simply criticise the zeitgeist but looked towards the future and a more moral, responsible and precipitated society.

Morality and social reform were indissoluble in Victorian literature, the paper maintains. Although held up as a framework for the writers’ critiques, morality was also used as a way of imagining a more moral, fair society. “Victorian literature constituting in its focus on moral choices and social problems, moulded the conversation of society, and played a role in anchoring the underlying forces for social change during its time. In all this, the Victorian writers attempted to 'make the reader re-think, re-evaluate and re-formulate the world in more humane and egalitarian terms'; questioning the repressive social structures and moral attitudes of their day. Finally, I argue, if we understand how the language of disability worked socially, culturally and politically in the age of Dickens, it has the potential to shed important new light on contemporary questions of social justice and reform.