This literature review argues that from Scott’s historical fiction onward, literary representations of the traditional working class authorize claims about work, class, and historical development through a dual mechanism of moral urgency—the ethical imperative to address epochal suffering—and warrant claims—the text’s formal strategies that legitimize those imperatives as historically necessary. In tandem with the annotated bibliography, it maps primary texts chronologically, showing how authors like Scott, Engels, Dickens, Veblen, Polanyi, Lukács, and Thomas Mann refine this authorizing logic amid industrial capitalism’s unfolding crisis.