regshoe

Oh, yes, you should—definitely recommend both this one and Les Misérables.

That's certainly true about fantasy! I think you could probably draw a parallel between anti-monarchism and the First Age elves' rebellion against the Valar, on a grander scale, as it were, but of course Tolkien doesn't portray them as in the right. On the other hand, Terry Pratchett is an author who has the right ideas about monarchy, both in the context of fantasy monarchy tropes and in general—I should re-read some more of the Watch books sometime :D

The sorts of Victorian novels I read a lot of tend to have an amount of 'it's terrible that so many people are so poor, we should fix this', but they generally advocate gradual moderate-progressive reforms, often depending on private charity/paternalism, rather than overthrowing the government. Partly, of course, because they and their cultural background were reacting against the excesses of the French Revolution—it hangs over a lot of early 19th C British fiction.

Going back to FotH...what I find kind of tragic about the Highlands is that they seem to have gone straight from the feudal and patriarchal clan society to suck-out-the-profit proto-capitalism. The people who were critical of the rent-raising of the latter didn't turn to any sort of proto-socialism/republicanism, instead they idealized the past clan society and criticized the elite for abandoning their traditional obligations in that system.

Huh, that is kind of tragic... I suppose it's a question of what ideas people are familiar with/likely to find persuasive in their particular context.