The emergence of capitalist forms of market society in England saw a myriad of textual genres attempting to represent the lives of people surviving at the margins: pirates, prostitutes, highwaymen, thieves, criminals, foundlings, slaves, and people who were just plain poor. This junior research seminar looks at some of these “lives” of the socially outcast, the different, and the down-and-out, both biographical and fictional, from the eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries. It serves as an introduction to the history of the novel from Eliza Haywood to Charles Dickens, to the genres of memoir and the slave narrative, and to various methods and frameworks for analysis, including Marxist theory, affect theory, and theories of the rise of the novel. Along the way, it encourages students to think about how the stories we tell shape (and are shaped by) our social institutions and our collective optimisms or despair.