Tory-Radical Feeling in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley, and Early Victorian England

The moral issues that Charlotte Brontë addresses in her novel Shirley can be read as a Tory-radical exploration of the tensions and contradictions in early Victorian popular Toryism. The term Tory-radical is used heuristically to draw attention to the tensions and contradictions which faced popular Tories like Brontë, Benjamin Disraeli, Richard Oastler, Frances Trollope, and Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna as they responded to working-class unrest and poverty in the 1830s and 1840s. Drawing on recent work on the history of emotions, this essay casts new light on sympathetic feeling in Tory-radical fiction, which was key to its rise but also ultimately its failure as a subgenre and variant of popular Toryism.