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Working/Not Working: Labour, Un/Employment and the Deserving/Underserving Poor in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905) and Arnold Bennett’s The Card (1911)

John D. Attridge (Regent College London)

Published In:
Published Date:

January 2025

Keywords:

Labour, Unemployment, Class, Deserving Poor, Undeserving Poor

Abstract:

Literary constructions of labour in the long nineteenth century frequently rely on popular conceptions of the ‘deserving/undeserving poor’, which were utilised by politicians and welfare providers of the era to justify punitive measures against those who were unable to obtain or sustain traditional modes of full-time employment. By the turn of the century such conceptions were proving fiercely resilient, impacting not only representations of urban manual labour and the rural toil of the working classes, but literary depictions of other kinds of work altogether. In this article, I argue that Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905) and Arnold Bennett’s The Card (1911) are emblematic examples of this representational shift. Published just six years apart, both novels feature protagonists who struggle financially and awkwardly navigate non- traditional modes of work, labour and un/employment at the turn of the twentieth century. In clearly recognising the physical, social and emotional efforts required of their protagonists, however, Wharton and Bennett complicate social hierarchies, expose upper-class moral hypocrisies, and advocate for new kinds of social mobility and/or welfare reform which deviate from the ‘deserving/undeserving poor’ debate. In doing so, each author offers a similar – but ultimately alternative – model for rethinking the enduring mythos of the ‘deserving/undeserving poor’, each of which are keenly informed by the idiosyncrasies of their own nationalities, genders, and contrasting social backgrounds.

Published in:
ISSN:

2517-7850

Pages:

130 - 159

Date of Publication:

January 2025

About the author

John D. Attridge (Regent College London)

John D. Attridge (he/him) is an independent researcher in literary modernism and working-class studies, currently teaching academic skills at Regent College London. He earned a PhD from the University of Surrey in 2023, with a thesis centred on the relationship between class and identity politics in the novels of E. M. Forster. He has previously published in the Journal of Working-Class Studies and The Modernist Review, and his research interests include Marxism, cultural studies, Edwardian literature, and the interplay between class and teaching pedagogies in twenty-first century literary studies. At Surrey, he achieved the Lewis Elton Award for Innovation in Teaching.

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Romance, Revolution and Reform is an interdisciplinary PGR-led journal specialising in the long nineteenth century and run in association with the Southampton Centre for Nineteenth-Century Research.

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