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Disability StudiesArticle 18 · Vol. 1, Issue 4, June 2026 · pp. 163–173
Industrial Bodies and Broken Minds: Disability, Labor, and Reform in Dickens’s Novels
Shalini Verma
Research Scholar, Department of Arts
Abstract
This study will investigate the interconnected constructions of disability, labor, and reform in Charles Dickens’s fiction and journalism. It suggests that Dickens exposes the ways industrial capitalism and bureaucratic systems produced and govern both material and moral disabilities. Through close readings of Hard Times, Oliver Twist, Little Dorrit, Our Mutual Friend, A Christmas Carol, Bleak House, and David Copperfield, this research shows how Dickens’s “broken” characters arise from abuse and neglect of labor power. It will engage with disability studies and place Dickens in the context of nineteenth-century conversations about reform, welfare, and moral economy. Although sometimes sentimental, Dickens’s narratives also present radical glimpses into the structural nature of disabling practices. They implicate how factory discipline, law, domestic ideology, and the workhouse construct ‘impairment’ and present disability as a collective, political condition that stands in opposition to Victorian concepts of productivity and human worth.
Keywords:
CapitalismDisabilityIndustrial ReformLabourVictorian Literature
How to Cite
Shalini Verma (2026). Industrial Bodies and Broken Minds: Disability, Labor, and Reform in Dickens’s Novels. Veritas: A Multidisciplinary Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, 1(4), 163–173.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21496422
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