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Condition of England Novels — A Top 10 Tuesday List #Top10 — 5 Comments

  1. Interesting – I’ve never come across the term ‘Condition of England’ before although I can see how these novels (at least the ones I’ve read) do share some themes. The Dickens and Gaskells would be well worth reading I would say – I’m a huge Dickens fan, but less so with Gaskell, although I appreciate her writing and certainly her skill in drawing a picture of society. Personally I’d skip Kingsley and Disraeli – I don’t think either writer will have aged well. Kingsley was very moralistic and preachy, and Disraeli’s characters were often thinly disguised caricatures of real people, most of whom we wouldn’t know about today.

  2. I’ve been reading a fair amount the Industrial Revolution in England myself–my mother’s family lived and worked in Oldham in the nineteenth century, having come from Ireland in the 1840s. I think Mary Barton and North and South are both far superior to Hard Times–Gaskell knew the world she was writing about, whereas Dickens was a Londoner and only breezed through.

    Shirley is on my reading list for…soon!

    Interesting list. Thanks for sharing.

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