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In the 1840s, the time of Sir Robert Peel's great ministry, the British House of Commons debated and voted upon a number of substantial political issues. The Parliament of 1841–47 not only repealed the Corn Laws; it also placed on the statute books important legislation regulating factories, banks, railways and mines. It approved the income tax, reintroduced by Peel in 1842, and the Poor Law, which was renewed in 1842 and again in 1847. It discussed and voted upon, though it was far from approving, proposals for the extension of the franchise, the adoption of the secret ballot and the restriction of the special legal privileges of landowners. There were divisions as well on various aspects of the Irish question, religious questions and the position of the Church of England, army reform, fiscal reform and other matters.

The economic distress and the new concern with social problems in England in the 1840's, which underlay the reformulations of political economy in that decade, had also an extensive and significant reflection in imaginative literature. While the novel with a thesis, even a social thesis, was nothing new, it was only in the forties that English literature began to deal on a major scale with the social problems raised by the industrial revolution. One can sense in the novels of this decade an increased urgency and pressure, a more daring and direct attack. This emphasis is so marked that one critic has attempted a correlation between literature and socialism, and has sought to find in the novels of Dickens the same type of social observation and emotional reaction that prompted the analyses of Karl Marx. While such a thesis goes too far and is almost certainly invalid, one can nevertheless find in these novels a historical meaning of a different sort, more complex, but also more interesting and suggestive to the historian.