How did Carlyle's social thought in 'Past and Present' influence contemporary Victorian novelists like Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell?
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Correct answer: It shaped the 'Social Problem Novel,' including 'Hard Times' and 'North and South'.
Carlyle's dynamic diagnoses of the 'Condition-of-England' provided a direct blueprint for the social problem novels of the 1840s and 1850s. Dickens famously dedicated his industrial novel 'Hard Times' to Thomas Carlyle, drawing heavily on Carlyle's anti-utilitarian critiques, while Gaskell's 'North and South' dramatized the tragic human disconnect of the 'Cash Nexus' within the factory culture of Manchester.
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