Abstract
Collieries have always been dangerous and unpredictable underground spaces, and this was especially so in the nineteenth century. As collieries expanded, accidents became disasters, and these events grew to cataclysmic effect as the century progressed. Mining injury captured the popular imagination: with hundreds of lives at stake, large-scale disasters produced stories of both heroism and tragedy. Yet despite the narrative potential of mining injury, critics have taken for granted Raymond Williams’ famous but erroneous claim that few nineteenth-century novels were set in ‘the ironworks, the rapidly developing coalmines, the docks.’1 This thesis challenges that assumption, uncovering a self-conscious tradition of mining stories running through the fictions of novelists including Charles Dickens, G. A Henty, E. H. Burnett, George Eliot, Edward Tirebuck, Henry Nevinson and H.G. Wells. Taken together, these writers’ works demonstrate that the culture of coal mining, and its devastating effects on miners’ lives and bodies, had a transformative effect on long nineteenth-century fiction, culture and politics.In their representations of mining, long nineteenth-century novelists contributed to developing medical discourses on injury, accident and disability. Mining was perhaps the most dangerous, and yet the most critical, of occupations. It frequently dominated newspaper headlines, but the novel had a specific role to play in articulating new definitions of accident and in developing new narratives around disaster and injury. In particular, British novels of the period rescued the actions of the mine workers from the narrative invisibility afforded by other forms. By creating narratives that exposed chains of cause and effect, coalfields novelists developed what I call a pragmatic realism, in which collective human action was responsible both for mining accident and for managing its causes and consequences. Instead of being helpless victims of industrial society, miners came to be represented as self-governing, autonomous, authoritative agents, uniquely placed to retrieve life and meaning from the mine. Such representations contributed to socialist thought in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and ultimately to the rise of the modern welfare state as we have known it.
| Date of Award | 1 Feb 2019 |
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| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
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| Supervisor | Adelene Buckland (Supervisor), Clare Pettitt (Supervisor) & Josephine McDonagh (Supervisor) |