Condition of England writing is the product of a perceived acceleration in the pace of social change. We owe the term to Carlyle, writing in the 1830s, when the 'Condition of England Question' largely turned on the nature of the link between a new form of economic activity (then just coming to be termed 'industrialism') which promised undreamed of material abundance, and a newly visible degradation in the living conditions of the urban poor. There had, of course, been forms of writing in previous centuries that had attempted to take the temperature of the body politic and in so doing to register novelty or bemoan loss. But the first half of the 19th century was confronted by what it experienced as a wholly new form of civilisation: writers such as Cobbett, Carlyle and Ruskin identified unprecedented change, which appeared to threaten a whole way of life.

LRB 8 March 2001 | PDF Download