Reflection of Social, Economic and Cultural Changes in Britain in Selected Early Victorian Fiction

The thesis "The Reflection of Social, Economic and Cultural Changes in Britain in Selected Early Victorian Fiction" aims to investigate the relationship between the First Industrial Revolution in the Great Britain and the English fiction of this era. It deals with the question if the selected authors reflected major industrial and social changes in their writing and if so, what particular events they described. Further, it is focused on the relationship between the novelists and their works, in other words, if there is any connection between their class origin and their point of view of the social problematic displayed in particular novels. It also tries to find out if the prose writers identified themselves with their novel characters and/or if they projected their own life experience into their stories. The work concerns with literary movements represented in selected early Victorian novels: Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, Hard Times, Oliver Twist and The Personal History of David Copperfield the Younger and William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair. Key words: Social changes, the Industrial Revolution, the Victorian society, social mobility, the class conflict, the nove