The Spirit of Labor

Abstract

Although typically characterized as authors of social realism or social gospel fiction, respectively, Elizabeth Gaskell’s and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s nineteenth-century industrial novels defy traditional generic designations through their deployment of supernatural and spiritualist discourse to otherwise decidedly earthly and material subjects. Creating a genre that I call spiritual realism, these writers infused realist narratives with the spiritual motifs and images that colored the social and religious ideology of the nineteenth century in order to represent both the material and immaterial realities of their everyday experience. This new spiritual realism allowed writers to depict the nebulous, transitory, and incomprehensible aspects of their everyday reality in an increasingly modern, industrial, and transnational world. In order to establish the centrality of spiritual realism to our understanding of nineteenth-century industrial fiction, this essay examines Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855) and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Silent Partner (1871), emphasizing each author’s deployment of spiritualism to interrogate the morality of industrialization and the treatment of workers.