The nineteenth-century political novel poses a continuing challenge to literary critics and literary historians. Whether identified as “the industrial novel,” “the social-problem novel,” or, the denomination I favor, “the political novel,” this particular genre has proved notoriously dificult to characterize and to classify. Generally, novels are placed into this category because they treat conditions and crises occasioned by the industrial revolution in Britain: the discontent and misery of the working classes; the negative effects of a world increasingly dominated by machinery, alienated labor, and the profit motive; and, not least, the impact of worker uprisings, strikes, and violence (with the example of the French Revolution always in the background). Beyond this constellation of concerns, there is one other key feature of the mid-nineteenth century political novel in England – it tends to position itself as an intervention. In addressing the problems it exposes, that is, the political novel profiers some sort of solution, even if that solution is only the reading of the novel itself (which thereby allows for insight into under-recognized problems, or prompts sympathy for suffering, or otherwise effects a transformation in the reader that might enable a constructive approach to the problems depicted). The nineteenth-century political novel is, in a word, typically sincere, regardless of its ideological orientation.