From Happy Individuals to Universal Sisterhood
From Happy Individuals to Universal Sisterhood
Affective Reforms in All Sorts and Conditions of Men and Children of Gibeon
This essay traces the shifting frameworks of affective reform proposed by Walter Besant in two of his novels about the East End, All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882) and Children of Gibeon (1886). While the cultivation of individual happiness based on bourgeois domesticity offers a strategy for reorienting working-class values in the former novel, the latter promotes a pursuit of communitarian values rooted in universal sisterhood, which supersedes familial bonds and class distinctions. Reading these two novels in conversation with each other reveals a narrative critique of rights-based individualism along the lines of revisionist liberal thought, and redirects affective attention toward fostering kinship associations for communal mutuality.
Keywords: Walter Besant, All Sorts and Conditions of Men, Children of Gibeon, Thomas Hill Green, East End, Affective Reform, Communitarian Liberalism, Happiness, Sisterhood, Domesticity
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