In England of the 1840s and '50s what we know in our time of the roller coaster of tech stocks and the collapse of Lehman brothers would have been called "Capitalism"; the chorus of resistance, including the movement to Occupy Wall Street, was called "Communism." That is, our mature economic system in its robust youth already displayed much of its celebrated energy, punctuated by periodic collapse and a tendency to generate dissent. It was, in short, the best of times and the worst of times. For this and other reasons mid-Victorian England may be said to resemble several North Atlantic democracies in the early 21st century. In other respects the two periods are wildly different. We will focus on these similarities and differences in order to better understand the fiction, the political prose and the poetry of England in the middle of the 19th century. Readings include Hard Times by Charles Dickens (1854), selections from Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (1843), Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (1851) along with poems by Tennyson, Browning (Robert and Elizabeth Barrett), and Matthew Arnold. We will also examine We will look at the art and architecture of the period. Lecture, discussion, short essays.