Is the Precariat the New Proletariat? A comparative study of justice in Charles Dickens’s Victorian novel Oliver Twist (1836) and Guy Gunaratne’s contemporary novel In Our Mad and Furious City (2018).

Abstract

This thesis, Is the Precariat the New Proletariat? A comparative study of justice in Charles Dickens’s Victorian novel Oliver Twist (1836) and Guy Gunaratne’s contemporary novel In Our Mad and Furious City (2018), argues that the precariat, a term coined by Guy Standing, is a new emerging social class that is represented in modern literature and is a continuation and modern equivalent to the previously established idea of a proletariat class in Victorian Britain. This thesis first discusses the existence of the Victorian proletariat as it is presented by Dickens in Oliver Twist in light of its historical context. Then the contemporary precariat, as presented by Gunaratne in In Our Mad and Furious City, is analysed using Guy Standing’s theory of the precariat as a new emerging social class. After conducting a thorough analysis of both Oliver Twist and In Our Mad and Furious City, I observed similar themes related to social issues such as crime, cross-cultural communication, and the portrayal of marginalized voices. These observations suggest that the precariat is a modern-day manifestation of the Victorian proletariat. In the thesis’ final section, I have discussed how the ideas of the novels as well as the theory used to analyse them relate to education and the LK20.