‘Surface Appearance is not Everything’

“Nineteenth-century Britain has been described as the ‘first industrial nation’ (Mathias 1983)” (Guy & Small. 2011: 13). Britain’s industrialisation during the eighteenth and nineteenth-century brought about significant changes transforming society as the technological advancements affected all aspects of life, that of cultural, social, political and economic circumstances. In particular the modern advancements of steam power technology expanded the industrial processes of printing which stimulated the economic growth within the writing industry, opening up forms of literature to a wider readership. Whereas before, “members of the social elite” had power and control on “the nature of literary culture” the integrity of “their cultural authority” was now under threat, to what Matthew Arnold had referred to as the “mass of mankind who were always satisfied with very inadequate ideas” (Guy & Small. 2011: 13).

Through the innovations of technology, scenes on the domestic, intellectual as well as the industrial front dramatically began to change, which provoked nineteenth-century writers to explore and embrace new ideas and themes “as they attempted to come to terms with what later historians would characterise as the beginning of modernity” (Guy & Small. 2011: 13). During this age of anxiety, I intend to explore and discuss two representations of the undersides of life presented in the early and latter halves of the nineteenth-century, referring to the portrayal of madness and the supernatural within Charlotte Bronte’s (1816-1855) Jane Eyre (1847) and Henry James’ (1843-1916) The Turn of the Screw (1898).

Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre is a representation and reflection of the industrial era in which it was written. Depic...

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