The pervasive atmosphere of social reform in the nineteenth century, argues Amanda Claybaugh, functioned through the transatlantic literary marketplace and, at the same time, informed the production of a canon of specifically Anglo-American realism – the novel of purpose. Nineteenth-century social reform marks a departure from earlier forms of benevolence, such as charity, in its dependency on print culture – the condition needed to be reproduced in order to be resolved. The nineteenth-century novel of purpose, contends Claybaugh, borrowed verisimilitude from reformist writing on temperance, suffrage and anti-slavery, which was in its turn learning the art of empathy in its representation of social ills from the novel's focus on characterization.

Claybaugh's rationale is founded on the shifts in reformist agenda charted in Harriet Martineau's novels. Martineau set out to influence views of slavery in the US, but her work was concurrently informed by agitation on behalf of industrial workers in both Britain and America, demonstrating a specifically Anglo-American reciprocity of reformism within her realist literary endeavours. Martineau was a conscious agitator on behalf of reform; other writers discussed by Claybaugh, however, whilst following Martineau's literary–reformist model, were themselves “reluctant reformers” (7). Nevertheless, argues Claybaugh, reformist writings, whether parodied or perpetuated, informed the development of the realist novel, located as the dominant mode of writing in Great Britain and America in the nineteenth century. Charles Dickens's inventions of serial novels are considered alongside his transatlantic visitations and his urge to develop reform movements within the context of the national arena, whilst Anne Brontë and Elizabeth Stoddard are considered jointly as sharers of zeal for temperance within their novels. George Eliot and Henry James are linked in a study of gender and national typings; although the customary link between Eliot and James as writers of realist fictions is effectively reiterated, the reformist connection is less clear. Mark Twain's development from humorist to serious novelist of purpose is charted through his travels across the Atlantic, and Thomas Hardy is located as a significant marker of the fragmentation of the realist enterprise at the end of the nineteenth century, indicating a need for a shift in focus and a new literary vehicle for social-reform agendas.

Whilst perhaps narrowing parameters for critical approaches to the nineteenth-century novel – a diverse and multifaceted genre – this text introduces some very useful material to studies of the transatlantic in connecting writing and social reform across national boundaries.