Shift of Focus on Working Class Ideology

Victorian literature was, indeed, the literature of high and elite class; the age- was marked as the "age of material prosperity". The age was a novel dominated age and the novels were the chief sources of entertainment for high-class people.

The economy was under the control of a certain group so there was the domination in society, working class people used to be valued as nothing, just 'as machine, commodity. The "dehumanization and commodification of man" was- another important theme of the period.

The recent critics have been shifting their focus on such, unhealthy domination and on working class ideology. E.M. Thompson's Making of the English Working Class, along with some of the writing of Eric Hobsbawm, was very influential in shifting attention of literary scholars from the most obvious canonical works to the activities of writers concerned with the working class-political writers, G. Kitson Clark's Making of Victorian England is another example, which is depicting the shift of Victorian concern from large scale political events in the history of everyday things with its emphasis on the social and cultural life of common people.