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

ROBERTS, Matthew (2021). Tory-Radical Feeling in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley, and Early Victorian England. Victorian Studies, 63 (1), 34-56.

PDF Roberts_Tory-RadicalFeeling(AM).pdf - Accepted Version Restricted to Repository staff only until 1 October 2022. All rights reserved. Download (212kB)

Abstract

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.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Expected to be published online April 2021
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Literary Studies; 2005 Literary Studies; 2103 Historical Studies
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.2979/victorianstudies.63.1.02
Page Range:	34-56
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Elements
Depositing User:	Symplectic Elements
Date Deposited:	29 Oct 2020 13:23
Last Modified:	21 Apr 2021 11:30
URI:	http://shura.shu.ac.uk/id/eprint/27505

Actions (login required)

View Item

Downloads

Publication Metrics