‘A space of stunted grass and dry rubbish’: realism and ‘equal ground’

‘A space of stunted grass and dry rubbish’: realism and ‘equal ground’

Speaker: Simon Grimble

In The Prelude , William Wordsworth discusses how he and his fellow students in Hawkshead and later in Cambridge stood ‘upon equal ground’ in institutions which ‘held something up to view / Of a Republic.’ This paper will consider the history of writers’ attempts to constitute ‘equal ground’ in literary texts in Britain since the early nineteenth century, here in particular relation to Charles Dickens’s Hard Times , a novel where the grounds for constituting human commonality seem very limited. In particular, I will consider the distance between the social claims of realism – that it should lead to ‘the awakening of social sympathies’ as George Eliot put it – and the fact that the world that realism addressed was, according to Thomas Piketty in his Capital (2014), one of heightened inequality. Yet the paper will argue, contrary to important recent work by Franco Moretti and Francis Mulhern, that the traces of the desire for both equality and fraternity remain tantalisingly everywhere in these works, even in such disappointing locations where all we can see is ‘a space of stunted grass and dry rubbish’ ( Hard Times ).