The story of how the conditions of women, children, and laborers enter the nineteenth-century English novel is a story, both true and false, about making visible individuals and groups who were previously invisible. False, because these groups' invisibility is a conceit nineteenth-century novels and their critics engage in. After all, it is only because women, children, and laborers are becoming increasingly more visible and felt presences in the social world, subjects who must be reckoned with, that the need for fictive representation arises. And yet true insofar as what is made visible through nineteenth-century novels is less documentary evidence of the real state of women, children, and laborers than imaginative constructions of those subjects produced in their name. The Molls and Roxanas, Pamelas and Clarissas of fiction had already opened the space to be filled by new representations in fiction of the lives of their heirs. The gap between fiction and reality, textuality and experience, is hardly something to bemoan; the gap defines the act of representation broadly, and realism specifically. But narratives that introduce emergent subjects also do something different: because their novelistic representations are demands for social redress, they highlight the distance between the “imaginary or formal ‘solutions’” they offer and the problems they set out to “solve.” They function as model ideological acts whose success lies paradoxically in their failure: their failure to paper over or mitigate the fact that the social problems they raise and represent are, in the end, “unresolvable social contradictions” (Jameson, The Political Unconscious 79).