Please sir, could I read a good state of the nation novel? Credit: IMDB

Britain’s bestseller lists are usually dominated by rural parish murder mysteries, John Grisham thrillers, and historical fiction set in every age other than our own. Novels that detail contemporary life in unflinching, unsparing detail are missing. The song of our country, as it is now, is not being sung.
Their absence is perhaps understandable. In our age of mass-strikes, cost of living crises, and political turmoil, escapism ā even of the murderous kind ā seems like an appealing option.
This wasnāt the case in the 19th century, when everyone from Anthony Trollope and Elizabeth Gaskell to Benjamin Disraeli, turned their hand to writing novels which described āthe way we live nowā: itself the title of Trollopeās 1875 satire of financial scandals. Gaskellās North and South (1855) is an emotionally febrile exploration of the horrors of industrial England, as the initially naĆÆve and snobbish Margaret Hale is forced to leave the idyllic Helston ā a village like āin one of Tennysonās poemsā ā and move north. A few mill workersā riots, some tasteless northern wallpaper and one naval mutiny later, Margaret is morally improved and, perhaps more importantly, engaged.
Disraeliās novel, Sybil or The Two Nations (1845) is a similar exploration of āthe Condition of Englandā. The poverty of those living in Englandās industrial cities is so extreme as to seem to belong to another country. Many of Charles Dickensās works contain an element of reportage on the same places. Amidst the unstintingly ridiculous character names, putrid fog, and marauding donkeys, Hard Times (1854), David Copperfield (1850), Oliver Twist (1839), and Bleak House (1853) all attempted to reflect Britain back at the British.
MiddlemarchĀ (1872), George Eliotās āstudy of provincial lifeā, is the undisputed masterwork of this genre. Through granular examination of the lives of the inhabitants of a middle-England town, Eliot explores everything from medical developments to the status of women in the early 19th century. But its regular appearance on lists of āthe best state of the nation novelsā leaves me queasy. Is the book intended to be about national change and the passing of the 1832 Reform Act, or is it a universal examination of human psychology?
State of the nation novelsĀ have been definedĀ as those that “address social and political changes”. This seems simplistic, even trite: by its nature, a work of fiction inevitably addresses social questions. By that reckoning,Ā MiddlemarchĀ is certainly a state of the nation novel, but then so is Douglas AdamsāsĀ The Hitchhikerās Guide to the GalaxyĀ (1979). Eliot, like Adams, toys with āthe Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everythingā. She gives us a tangled web of human interconnectedness, heartbreak, and failure. The number 42 is conspicuously absent.
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