The Victorian novel reflects social changes, such as the Industrial Revolution, the struggle for democracy and the growth of towns. It became obvious during the 1840s that the first industrial civilization in the history of the world had reached a state of acute, generalized crisis that was recorded and analyzed in all the institutions of the new urban culture. It is not surprising therefore that the novel widely-read although not considered "great" art, should have found a new vitality and thanks to an important generation of writers, began to have a real impact on legislators, opinion-formers and those who could vote to change the world. This happened through the novelistic mixing of documentary and romance, sensationalism and prophecy. The novel allied itself to parliamentary reports on industry, agriculture, health, prison conditions and criminality.

The most characteristic theme in Victorian fiction is class. Although it would be oversimplified to describe the Victorian novel as a photograph of social reality, the problem of relationship between one class and another, the desire to rise and the fear of falling down the social ladder, and the problems that arose from exploitation of labour and corruption or inadequacy in the social services are all familiar and central themes in the early Victorian novel, up to the Great Exhibition of 1851. The problem was generally centered on the relationship between an individual and a group of society as a whole, and this relationship obviously had both a bad side and a good one. Than the main character's journey is usually between these two poles. It is, in any case, a fact that between 1830 and 1855, the period under consideration, social history became a vital part of the novel functioning both as witness and commentary.

The reason for this are not only to be found in the juxtaposition of classes and the contrast between the rich and the poor. The spread of publishing, of both literature and information, which began in the first years of the century and increased with the increase of literary and of the reading public is also responsible. This reading public was predominantly middle class and, in particular, lower middle class. The most popular subject for working writers in the first half of the century was, not surprisingly, family life, especially middle class family life. Dickens, Thackeray, The Brontėė sisters and Gaskell all came from the middle class. This explains two other important and characteristic elements in Victorian fiction.

On the one hand there is the realism derived from the 18^th-century narratives of Richardson, De Foe and Fielding, a realism that kept its precarious equilibrium between two equal and juxtaposed dimensions, pathos and the grotesque, which, on the other hand account for the exaggeration of the tones, characters and emotions which is most typically Victorian.

The villains in Victorian fiction are over villainous caricatures of evil, as we can see so often in the work of Dickens. On the other hand, the virtuous are often too virtuous and innocent and therefore the persecuted and defenseless victim designed to provide the sense of pathos which is so typical of Victorian fiction.

Children are often used to achieve this effect. Victorian upper-middle-classes felt protected by the industrial system that had created both their wealth and the new urban poverty. The rookeries and workhouses, the landscape of hunger and desperate object poverty in the cities, made the rich feel both guilty and afraid, guilty and therefore philanthropist, afraid and therefore cruelly repressive. As regards the lower middle classes these were always in danger of falling into the bottomless fit of the urban hell in the East End, the pathetic victims of circumstances and evil men alike supplied the petty bourgeois with a mirror-image of his fears.

The logic of Utilitarianism offered a sound excuse but was also the ideological as well practical cage. If on the one hand all this accounts for the pathetic side of Victorian art, on the other, it also explains much about the complementary side of the coin, the grotesque. If pathos was analogous to humanitarianism and  philanthropy as another manifestation, a symptom of the sense of guilt and fears of the middle classes the grotesque described the underworld according to peculiar, humorous strategies of discourse as the world of sin, vice and damnation, as the hell of the Victorian urban cosmos, the place of the sinful and therefore damned (id est poor). In doing so the novel gave the middle classes both an "alibi" and a way of exorcising all the ghosts of the middle classes' bad conscience.

Whenever the villains are the rich, caricature works as a filter giving the reader the possibility not to recognize his own image through the distorting mirror of the novel so that the image presented can raise both shudders of horror, disgust, laughter. Caricature pathetic and the grotesque also worked as a projection screen for the lower middle class, the clerks and the small businessman who lived in daily fear of poverty. In fact, this class aspired to a life-style modeled on the upper classes and yet lived in constant fears of the East End, debtor's prison and ruin. Novels of poverty were an expression of this fear and also provided a way of feeling above the world in the novel since both the pathetic and the grotesque imply the readers' superiority over the human subjects of the fiction.

Women in Victorian society, children, animals and pampers were inferior and defenseless, and therefore pathetic.