In 1843 Thomas Carlyle characterized the boom and bust economy of laissez-faire capitalism—including its stunning production of unparalleled wealth and appalling poverty, of cure-all opiates and shoddy textiles—as “the condition of England” as if the country suffered from a set of medical symptoms which, given the incidence of cholera, typhoid and typhus, is not mere metaphor. In 1845 the novelist and future Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli described the division of rich and poor as “the two nations” living side-by-side in what we would normally think of as one nation. The “two nations,” while occupying more or less the same space, scarcely spoke the same language; they knew nothing of the conditions in which the other passed its days and nights, and they lived in mortal fear of each other. “Fear”, “sympathy” and “mystery” and “misery” enrich the vocabulary of an enormous literature in Britain and on the Continent throughout the “Hungry 40s,” the 1850s and beyond. We will study the fiction, journalism, poetry and visual arts of mid-Victorian England that set out to define (and improve) the “Condition” of that country. We will focus on novels by Charles Dickens (Hard Times (1854) which Dickens dedicated to Carlyle) and Elizabeth Gaskell (North and South, first published just after Hard Times in Dickens’ influential journal, Household Words, in 1855), along with texts that enlarge the context of these novels, including selections from Carlyle, Disraeli, Friedrich Engels (The Condition of the English Working Class in 1844), Karl Marx (Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)), Henry Mayew’s London Labour and London Poor (1849-51), John Ruskin (Stones of Venice (1851-53) along with the work of more recent historians and critics.