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English literature

The Victorian Age

The Reform Bill of 1832 gave the middle class the political power it needed to consolidate—and
to hold—the economic position it had already achieved. Industry and commerce burgeoned.
While the affluence of the middle class increased, the lower classes, thrown off their land and into
the cities to form the great urban working class, lived ever more wretchedly. The social changes
were so swift and brutal that Godwinian utopianism rapidly gave way to attempts either to justify
the new economic and urban conditions, or to change them. The intellectuals and artists of the
age had to deal in some way with the upheavals in society, the obvious inequities of abundance
for a few and squalor for many, and, emanating from the throne of Queen Victoria (1837–1901),
an emphasis on public rectitude and moral propriety.
The Novel
The Victorian era was the great age of the English novel—realistic, thickly plotted, crowded with
characters, and long. It was the ideal form to describe contemporary life and to entertain the
middle class. The novels of Charles Dickens, full to overflowing with drama, humor, and an
endless variety of vivid characters and plot complications, nonetheless spare nothing in their
portrayal of what urban life was like for all classes. William Makepeace Thackeray is best known
for Vanity Fair (1848), which wickedly satirizes hypocrisy and greed.
Emily Brontë's (see Brontë, family) single novel, Wuthering Heights (1847), is a unique
masterpiece propelled by a vision of elemental passions but controlled by an uncompromising
artistic sense. The fine novels of Emily's sister Charlotte Brontë, especially Jane Eyre (1847)
and Villette (1853), are more rooted in convention, but daring in their own ways. The novels of
George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) appeared during the 1860s and 70s. A woman of great erudition
and moral fervor, Eliot was concerned with ethical conflicts and social problems.
George Meredith produced comic novels noted for their psychological perception. Another
novelist of the late 19th cent. was the prolific AnthonyTrollope, famous for sequences of related
novels that explore social, ecclesiastical, and political life in England.
Thomas Hardy's profoundly pessimistic novels are all set in the harsh, punishing midland county
he called Wessex. Samuel Butler produced novels satirizing the Victorian ethos, and Robert
Louis Stevenson, a master of his craft, wrote arresting adventure fiction and children's verse. The
mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, writing under the name Lewis Carroll, produced the
complex and sophisticated children's classics Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
and Through the Looking Glass (1871). Lesser novelists of considerable merit include
BenjaminDisraeli, George Gissing, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Wilkie Collins. By the end of the period,
the novel was considered not only the premier form of entertainment but also a primary means of
analyzing and offering solutions to social and political problems.
Nonfiction
Among the Victorian masters of nonfiction were the great Whig historian Thomas Macaulay and
Thomas Carlyle, the historian, social critic, and prophet whose rhetoric thundered through the
age. Influential thinkers included John StuartMill, the great liberal scholar and philosopher;
Thomas Henry Huxley, a scientist and popularizer of Darwinian theory; and John Henry,
Cardinal Newman, who wrote earnestly of religion, philosophy, and education. The founders of
Communism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, researched and wrote their books in the free
environment of England. The great art historian and critic John Ruskin also concerned himself
with social and economic problems. MatthewArnold's theories of literature and culture laid the
foundations for modern literary criticism, and his poetry is also notable.
Poetry
The preeminent poet of the Victorian age was Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Although romantic in subject
matter, his poetry was tempered by personal melancholy; in its mixture of social certitude and
religious doubt it reflected the age. The poetry of Robert Browning and his wife, Elizabeth
Barrett Browning, was immensely popular, though Elizabeth's was more venerated during their
lifetimes. Browning is best remembered for his superb dramatic monologues. RudyardKipling, the
poet of the empire triumphant, captured the quality of the life of the soldiers of British expansion.
Some fine religious poetry was produced by Francis Thompson, Alice Meynell, Christina Rossetti,
and Lionel Johnson.
In the middle of the 19th cent. the so-called Pre-Raphaelites, led by the painter-poet Dante
Gabriel Rossetti, sought to revive what they judged to be the simple, natural values and
techniques of medieval life and art. Their quest for a rich symbolic art led them away, however,
from the mainstream. William Morris—designer, inventor, printer, poet, and social philosopher—
was the most versatile of the group, which included the poets Christina Rossetti and
CoventryPatmore.
Algernon Charles Swinburne began as a Pre-Raphaelite but soon developed his own classically
influenced, sometimes florid style. A. E. Housman and Thomas Hardy, Victorian figures who lived
on into the 20th cent., share a pessimistic view in their poetry, but Housman's well-constructed
verse is rather more superficial. The great innovator among the late Victorian poets was the
Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins. The concentration and originality of his imagery, as well as
his jolting meter ("sprung rhythm"), had a profound effect on 20th-century poetry.
During the 1890s the most conspicuous figures on the English literary scene were the decadents.
The principal figures in the group were Arthur Symons, Ernest Dowson, and, first among them in
both notoriety and talent, OscarWilde. The Decadents' disgust with bourgeois complacency led
them to extremes of behavior and expression. However limited their accomplishments, they
pointed out the hypocrisies in Victorian values and institutions. The sparkling, witty comedies of
Oscar Wilde and the comic operettas of W. S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan were perhaps the
brightest achievements of 19th-century British drama.

The Novel.
The dominant genre during the Victorian era was prose, particularly the novel. The novel came into its own
in the mid 1800s with such greats as Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, George
Eliot, and many others. We would not have time in the intensity of a mod combined witha survey course to
do justice to the novel of the 1800s (which is why I run a course on this every other year). The Victorian
novel was very much a product of an explosion of middle class literacy and a growing publishing industry.
Novels were, for the most part, a form of high entertainment. Most novels were published in serial format in
newspapers in England, where people could follow on a weekly basis a novel by, say, Dickens. They were,
in a sense, the “soap operas” of the 1800s. In fact, most novels serialized in newspapers were extravagantly
illustrated withincredible prints and drawings, an element that is lost from our experience with the reprinted
book format.
Poetry.
Poetry underwent changes (many would argue, including me, not for the better). A dominant group of poets,
like Robert Browning, reacted against what they felt was the soppy, rose-colored, sweet and flighty poetry of
late Romanticism (think Shelley), and developed a more prosey poetry that focuses more on narrative,
concrete issues in a “real” world. But, as the 1800s moved on, there was also a growing group of poets who
react against the increasingly prosaic “realism” of the 1800s, and write a very romantic poetry that grows at
times as ridiculously sweet and vacuous at the same time that it can be beautiful. In the early 1900s, T.S.
Eliot would famously argue that since the 1700s, poetry has undergone a radical and unfortunate shift:
poetry is either intellectual / cerebral, or it is emotional / romantic. Never again, he argued, since the
Metaphysical poets of the late 1600s has poetry fused both intellect and emotion. It would be the really
soppy, moody poetry of the late 1800s that Eliot reacts against with his groundbreaking modernist poems in
the 1910s and 1920s.
Prose–The Essay.
Prose, particularly the essay, becomes just as central as the novel during this period. I’ve already talked
about the earth-shaking effects of people like Darwin’s published books. The dominance of the essay mirrors
the growing concern with the world around us, the real social issues of people, during Victorianism. The
terms “Realism” has often been used to describe this period. Most Victorian novelists and essayists were
interested in realism, in depicting the world as accurately as possible. A result of looking at the world head
on is a growing criticism and suspicion of what authors see. Hence, Dickens many novels that expose social
ills.
Matthew Arnold: Critic and, Possibly, Cultural Prophet.
Matthew Arnold is one of the great social voices of the Victorian era. He is the era’s greatest critic, while at
the same time he is also the epitome of Victorianism in his belief that we all can change and reform
everything (the idea of Utopianism has its explosion during this era).
Particularly in Culture and Anrachy, Arnold criticizes the narrow-minded, mechanical, industrial and material
mindset of Victorian England, particularly amonst its middle class. He believed that industry and the machine
had developed a “Puritanical” British middle class, one more intereted in moralisms and rules designed to
benefit social/financial advancement. Arnold hankers for a return to “Hellenistic” thought. By this, he means
a mind (like the ancient Greeks) that breaks from its narrow, material concerns, and roams over all
possibilities, all interests, particularly cultural interests.
Arnold (rightfully, I believe) feared that the material culture of England was developing minds growing
narrower, more concerned with self-interest, expediancy, and industry. He feared this would lead to
ignorance and bigotry. He famously called the puritanical middle class in England, “Philistines,” which has
come to mean shallow, narrow minded and uncultured. What Arnold envisioned was an England that would
shift more emphasis to the study of literature, art and music (now that England was Empire and had excelled
in industry) in order to cultivate minds for a more literate future. His notion of studying the “touchstones of
history” had a huge effect on our present day notion of a literary “canon,” the implicitly accepted list of works
that appear on a syllabus and that a student reads and studies in secondary school and college.

Genres of the Victorian novel and major authors

A Bildungsroman is a novel which concerns itself with the development of a


youthful protagonist as he or she matures. It is analogous in many ways to the
"Apprenticeship Novel" (the so-called Erziehungsroman) or "Education novel,"
which explores the youth and young adulthood of a sensitive protagonist who is
in search of the meaning of life and the nature of the world.

The terms derive from German literary criticism. Goethe's Wilhelm Meister is
the prototypical Apprenticeship novel, but there have been many written in
English: Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, which is in part a parody of the genre, Samuel
Butler's The Way of All Flesh, James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man, Dickens's David Copperfield (technically a Kunstleroman, since it deals with
the development of a writer), and, of course, Great Expectations.
Victorian Novelists

 Brontë

Family of English novelists...

 Brontë, Anne (1820 - 1849)

Anne Brontë was the youngest of the famous trio of literary


sisters...

 Brontë, Charlotte (1816 - 1855)

English novelist and member of the Brontë family. Her most famous novels are
Jane Eyre (1847) and Villette (1853).

 Butler, Samuel (1835 - 1902)

English author. He was the son and grandson of eminent clergymen...

 Carroll, Lewis Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832 - 1898)

pen-name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, an English author of the children's


classics Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its...

 Collins, [William] Wilkie (1824-1889)

Say “Wilkie Collins” to a late Victorian reader of fiction and he or she (Collins
appealed to both) would have fired back two words: “sensation” and “bohemian.”

 Collins, [William] Wilkie (Obituary)

Taken from: Great Victorian Lives: An Era in Obituaries

 Conrad, Joseph (1857 - 1924)

Pen-name of Teodor Józef Konrad Nałȩcz Korzeniowski, a British novelist, born


in Ukraine...

 Dickens, Charles (1812 - 1870)


1812–70, English author, b. Portsmouth, one of the world's
most popular, prolific...

 Dickens, Charles (Obituary)

Taken from: Great Victorian Lives: An Era in Obituaries

 Disraeli, Benjamin (1804 - 1881)

British Conservative politician and novelist. Authored the novel trilogy Coningsby,
Sybil, and Tancred (1847).

 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan (1859 - 1930)

Writer, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, born in Edinburgh, EC Scotland, UK. He


studied medicine at Edinburgh, but poverty...

 Gaskell, Elizabeth (1810 - 1865)

born Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson [article] English novelist. Her most popular
book, Cranford (1853)...

 Hardy, Thomas (1840 - 1928)

1840–1928, English novelist and poet, b. near Dorchester, one of the great
English writers of the 19th cent...

 Kingsley, Charles (1819 - 1875)

Kingsley was born on 12 June 1819 at Holne Vicarage, Devonshire...

 Meredith, George (1828 - 1909)

English novelist and poet. His realistic psychological novel The Ordeal of Richard
Feverel (1859) engendered both scandal and...

 Stevenson, Robert Louis (1850 - 1894)

Writer, born in Edinburgh, EC Scotland, UK. He studied at Edinburgh, became a


lawyer (1875), then turned to writing travel...

 Stevenson, Robert Louis (Obituary)


Taken from: Great Victorian Lives: An Era in Obituaries

 Thackeray, William Makepeace (1811 - 1863)

He is important not only as a great novelist but also as a brilliant satirist...

 Trollope, Anthony (1815 - 1882)

1815–82, one of the great English novelists...

Essayists, Critics & Reformers

 Carlyle, Thomas (1795-1881)

British historian and essayist whose works, such as The French Revolution
(1837), are characterized by

 Carlyle, Thomas (Obituary)

Taken from: Great Victorian Lives: An Era in Obituaries

 Darwin, Charles (1809 - 1882)

Born 1809, Shrewsbury, England Died 1882, Downe, England Nat British Ints
Physiological and...

 Darwin, Charles (Obituary)

Taken from: Great Victorian Lives: An Era in Obituaries

 Jefferies, (John) Richard (1848 - 1887)

English naturalist and writer. His books on the countryside include Gamekeeper
at Home...

 Manning, Henry Edward (1808 - 1892)

English churchman, cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church. Early Life and
Anglican Churchman Manning was born of a Low Church...

 Mill, John Stuart (1806 - 1873)


British philosopher and economist known especially for his
interpretations of empiricism and utilitarianism...

 Morris, William (1834 - 1896)

English poet, designer, craftsman, and socialist writer. He


founded the Kelmscott Press (1890).

 Newman, John Henry (1801 - 1890)

English churchman, cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, one of the founders
of the Oxford movement...

 Ruskin, John (1819 - 1900)

English art critic and social reformer....

 Ruskin, John (Obituary)

Taken from: Great Victorian Lives: An Era in Obituaries

 Stephen, Sir Leslie (1832-1904)

English author and critic. The first serious critic of the novel, he was also editor of
the great Dictionary of National Biography...

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