Preaching Pity

Preaching Pity situates such well-known Victorian authors as Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell within an important tradition of nineteenth-century British social reform writing - a tradition in which women writers used feminized, sentimental values like sympathy and spirituality to teach readers how to «read» and respond to social problems. This study contributes substantially to Victorian studies because it both investigates a largely unrecognized, but culturally significant, tradition of now-obscure women writers like Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna and Frances Trollope, and interrogates the gender politics of literary production and reception by looking at how this sentimentalist tradition affected the work and reception of canonical male and female writers.