During the second half of the nineteenth century, the industrial revolution advanced, paralleled by increasing secularization in Western life and thought.  This chapter discusses the process of industrialization and the various expressions of secularism in thought and literature.

Beginning in late eighteenth-century Britain, the Industrial Revolution accelerated after 1850, spreading throughout Europe and the United States.  New sources of power and ways of processing raw materials enabled the factory to emerge as the principal means of production.  This revolution raised standards of living, generated unprecedented wealth, and created new possibilities for leisure.  However, it also forced terrible hardships on the new industrial working class in the form of poverty, uncertain and unsafe working conditions, and alienation from traditional communities.  Committed to laissez-faire principles, governments took steps to address these conditions only reluctantly.

As industry expanded, new nations began to assert themselves.  Although the revolutions of 1848 failed, nationalism continued to shape European politics, driving the unification movements in Italy and Germany.  Guided by the Realpolitik policies of Cavour and Bismarck, these movements were generally moderate, but they also contained elements of the extreme nationalism that emerged throughout Europe.  Fueled by ideas of national and racial destiny, such nationalism was not only conservative, but racist, warlike, imperialist, and anti-democratic.

The long process of secularization continued, finding expression in new intellectual movements.  Darwin's ideas of natural selection presented a radically new conception of biological development, a conception Social Darwinists applied to human society, thus justifying evils ranging from racism to militarism.  Darwin's vision of evolutionary time also undermined traditional religious beliefs about life and its purpose as set forth in Scripture.  Some Christian thinkers worked to accommodate Darwinism and Christianity.  However, traditional religion suffered further challenges from the new biblical scholarship that undermined the historical basis of belief; and from radical Protestant thinkers, including Feuerbach, who argued that religion is a form of self-alienation, and Kirkegaard, who proposed that faith is a matter of personal choice based on impassioned, even irrational belief.  Despite papal opposition, Catholic modernists questioned doctrinal tenets and papal authority while seeking to liberalize the church.  Marxism challenged religion by offering an alternative vision of reality.  Arguing from his theory of dialectical materialism, Marx prophesied the eventual overthrow of the capitalist order by the proletariat who would establish a just socialist society.

During this period, Liberalism gradually renounced laissez-faire principles and called on governments to act to preserve and extend individual rights.  Though suspicious of state intervention, Mill recognized its necessity for the sake of individual self-development.  Other liberal thinkers advocated the reform of capitalism to extend its benefits to all classes, thus laying the foundations of the modern welfare state.  Some liberals, particularly Mill, also supported the rising feminist movement in Europe and America.  Reinterpreting revolutionary ideals, feminists, including the Grimkés and Harriet Taylor, demanded that the principles of liberty and equality be extended to women.

Realism became the dominant literary mode of the period.  Rejecting the visionary flights of Romanticism, Realists focused on the human world as it was.  They described actual social environments, emphasizing the commonplace, and analyzing through their characters how people looked, worked, spoke, felt, and interacted.  Rather than abstract symbols, Realists used metaphors drawn from everyday life to highlight important elements of environment or character.  Realism's offshoot, Naturalism, took these principles further.  Influenced by Darwinism, Naturalists explored causal relationships between environment and behavior.  They also examined atypical social types and left the middle-class parlor for impoverished slums and the criminal underworld.  Realism flourished in France, Victorian Britain, Russia, and America, with authors turning their attention to a variety of social issues: the problem of marriage (Eliot, Flaubert, Sand, Tolstoy, and Howells); serfdom, slavery, and racism (Turgenev, Stowe, and Twain); the human costs of industrialism (Dickens and Zola); middle-class hypocrisy and social climbing (Thackeray, Balzac, and Ibsen); modern loneliness and spiritual torment (Crane and Dosteovski); and provincial life (Turgenev, Eliot, and Chekov).  As Realist fiction and drama developed, two distinctive voices emerged in American poetry: Whitman, whose poems present a complex vision of American national identity, and Dickinson, whose intense lyrics explore the experience of the private self.

Nineteenth-century Realists turned fiction into a tool of social commentary, drawing attention to a variety of abuses.  Twentieth-century novelists extended this tradition, using their art to attack industrial capitalism and totalitarianism, satirize religious hypocrisy, and examine the plight of women, displaced workers, and ethnic minorities.  Some of these works provoked concrete changes in government policy.  In any case, the best of them have succeeded in making readers consider social ills they might otherwise have ignored.