How the late Victorian

novelists went slumming

The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction

By P. J. Keatinm

(Roirriedge £3.50)

Working-Class Stories of the 1890s

Edited by P. J. Keating

(Routledgc £1.60)

The Classic Slum By Robert Roberts

(Manchester University Press f2.64) If we take "working classes" to mean workiung classes and " Victorian " -to mnean Victorian (and I think we may), Mr Keating's title is too big for his book. His Preface confines the vorking classes he is concerned with to the urban and ind'uatriail, excluding the Jewish and the Utcopian, and his special interest to the last two decades of the last century. So as it works out, the true subject of this immensely interesting and questionprovokting .book is London sluim 0lctyon of the lateVitorian period as written " by mainly mniddle-and ulppeir-lass writers"

There.isn't, in fact, a great deal of this fiction, and what there is isn;t very good, its peaks represented by Gissing, by Ki'pling's "Badalia Herrods'foo't" and by Arthur Morrison, but since Mr Keating's interest is rather social than aesthetic, this doesn't matter. WVith, of course, special reference to Dickens and to Gaskell. he traces the various approaches to fEotional representation of ..the worLing-classcs-Hogarth, intercstinglv, Egan and the Newgate novels, though not, surprisingly, Moll Flanders-through Kingslev and Besant, annd not forgetting that element of descent from the classic pastoral likolly in upper-class writing about a counter-'elite. The writers' motivations differed: propaganda xas always limportant, whether directed at working-class readership or the middle classes (and with relation to the latter, Mr Keating might have been interested in children's books).

CGissing, unusually, wrote from personal detestation of conditions he believed himself uniquely equipped to present. Simple journalistic delight in discovery is another motive, often taking the convenficnal form of the journey from St James to St Giles--and later, to Wigan Pier. Sonm of this fiction, too little for Mr Keating's liking. was oDncerned wtkh hopcs of working-class solidarity, but, as he rather charmingly. puts it, the general tendency of middle-class writers was to try to " obliterate central issues by focusing attertion on the personal problems of individual characters ".

The important difference be-