Novel Possibilities

Joseph Childers contends that novels such as Benjamin Disraeli's Coningsby , Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton , and Charles Kingsley's Alton Locke were in direct competition with other forms of public discourse for interpretive dominance of their age. Childers examines the interactions between the novel and a set of texts generated by parliamentary and radical politics, the sanitation reform movement, and religion. Reversing the position of earlier studies of this period, he argues that the novel