An amazing book; I can’t really remember reading anything like it from the 19th century. English realism - at least what I’ve read - doesn’t get close to this kind of insight into working-class life, not without a more bourgeois narrative perspective anyway. Captivating and grim. 

Plenty that for us today is appalling - most obviously paedophilia - but the narrative for the most part doesn’t flinch. Moral judgement, it seems, is besides the point, which is objective improvements in workers’ lives. And yet perhaps the most interesting tension in the book comes through Etienne’s increasing moral judgement of the working class he claims to fight alongside. The ending of the book proclaims the inevitability of a glorious revolution, and yet its hero marches into the new dawn alone, leaving his working class brethren behind.