Realism
As Fiero (2010) notes, realism in the 19th century focused on depicting life as it really was—without the sentiment of the Romantics and without the pomposity of the Enlightened. Depictions of realism often focused on the commonplace—the common classes or the working class, as in the painting by Adolph Friedrich Erdmann Von Menzel, Iron Mill (1875). Writers approached realism by depicting characters and scenes that sprang from the page with authenticity—as in Dickens’ Old Curiosity Shop or in Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Then there was Marx, with his Communist Manifesto: not content to have a literary function, Marx wanted all-out revolution. He wanted the working class to rise up and take the means of production. In any case, each of these three writers had a sense of class differences and of the oppression that some classes suffered more than others. Each had a different take on it. Twain retained his humor throughout and showed how an innocent boy could befriend a runaway slave. Dickens showed how a suburb of “red-brick houses,” where not a leaf of greenery could be found to fill the soul with the type of meditative material that Wordsworth had such abundance of at Tintern Abbey, had a dreary and downtrodden effect on the lives of the common classes: “Men, women, children, wan in their looks and ragged in attire…” (Dickens, 1841, line 30 in Fiero). This paper will examine Marx’s Manifesto, Dickens’ Curiosity Shop and Twain’s Huckleberry Finn to show how writers in the 19th century expressed concern for social and economic inequalities.

Dickens was an advocate of social justice in the 19th century: he hated that children were exploited in industries and used like slaves for labor; he hated the legal system, which seemed inclined to sentence people to death rather too easily; he hated the materialistic impulses of the modern age (Diamond, 2003). He drew attention to the dreariness of the London scene, where people were packed like sardines into tin can alleyways of brick-houses where no life or light of nature’s green goodness could be found to grow. He described, for example, the aesthetic horrors of industrialization and urbanization on human life in the city: “on every side, as far as the eye could see into the heavy distance, tall chimneys, crowding each other, and presenting that endless repetition of the same dull, ugly form, which is the horror of oppressive dreams, poured out their plague of smoke, obscured the light, and made foul the melancholy air” (Dickens, 1841, lines 15-20...…in the 20th century wondering what had happened. What had happened was that the working class was never made up of revolutionaries. Marx had his finger on the pulse when he ranted about the exploitation of the laborer—that was happening, of course, as the industrialists were focused wholly on materialistic aims themselves. There were no unions to protect the worker and society had essentially become de-humanized following the Era of Enlightenment and the so-called Scientific Revolution. But Marx lacked realism in the sense that he did not recognize the spiritual side of man. The Romantics at least got that right. Dickens did not lose sight of that fact, for all his realistic portrayals of London life.

In conclusion, realism in the 19th century was depicted by artists to draw attention to the realities of life—to the coldness, depravity, hypocrisy, inhumanity and so on. It was about shedding the sentimental and pointing a finger at the honest truth. Some still got carried away, however (like Marx) and called for action of a sort that was simply incompatible with the reality. Others, like Dickens and Twain, contented themselves with depicting what they saw in humorous and/or horrific ways and leaving it at that for the public to decide how to take it.…