The Inadequacy of the Documentary Method

Abstract

From Taine to the present day critics have argued that literature reflects society in holding up a mirror to the age, thus revealing the surface details of contemporary social life. To the modern reader the nineteenth-century English novel offers a mine of documentary evidence about everyday social affairs, and it is no surprise that social historians have fastened on the novels of Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray and Trollope in search of raw material from which can be refined insights into the ways in which social forces operated on individuals, groups and classes, influencing life-styles and values, ways of thinking and patterns of behaviour. These literary illustrations of social forces at work have more recently attracted sociologists of literature whose research has been concerned with checking and commenting on the accuracy of these social reports, some of which, like Dickens’s description of workhouse conditions in the early chapters of Oliver Twist, have been reinforced by taking on a mythic identity.