Victorian Novel/ 19th Century Novel

Victorian Novel

Some General Features of Victorian Age

Main Characteristics of the Victorian Novel

Various Social Legislations

Intellectual Ferment

A New Reading Public and Mode of Circulation on Novels

Notion of Respectability

Sex and Other Taboos

Realism

Importance of the characters in Victorian Novels

Victorian Characters as
Selections
Early Victorian Novelists V Later Victorian Novelists

Merits and Demerits of the Earlier Victorian Novel

They miss out so much of life

Sex is not the only important omission from books

They hardly stir profound feelings

They are hardly read now a day. (They have receded in to oblivision)

They made the story immediately and easily interesting

Their range is much larger than that of most writers today

Their range of subject is not larger than their range of mood

They possess the quality of creative imagination

The great Victorian novels are all pictures

Imagination shows itself still more in their humour

Victorians are all able to make their characters live

Salient Features of the Last Victorians

Historical Perspective of the Victorian Novel

Forerunners of the Victorian Novel

Charles Dickens and His School (The Humanitarian Group)

William Makepeace Thackeray and His School (The Satirical School)

George Eliot, George Meredith and Thomas Hardy

conclusion

The Nineteenth Century novel in English is one of the main achievements in our literature
comparable with the Elizabethan Drama. I should rank without hesitation Sir Walter Scott and
Charles Dickens among the greatest of the world’s novelists, and I should class, at least two
novels of Thackeray and George Eliot, and three of Thomas Hardy among the world’s greatest
works of fiction.

The Victorian novel is the revelation of the most typical product of English genius. In fact, the
Nineteenth Century novel occupies the same place in Victorian age, which drama established its
unique reputation in the age of Queen Elizabeth the first.

The renowned critic David Daiches is of the view that the Nineteenth century was the great age
of the English novel. He had brought home to us various social, economic and political
repercussion (consequence, effects) which profoundly affected the fiction of this era. The
Victorian novelists were realist, philosophers, humanitarians and satirists. The Nineteenth
Century was the great age of the English novel. This was partly because this essentially middle
class form of literary art was bound to flourish increasingly as the middle classes rose in power
and importance, partly because of the steady increase of the reading public with the growth of
lending libraries.

The ordinary reader may have had the illusion that what he was reading a kind of journalism, a
transcript of life as it was happening around him with out the modifying effects of literary form
and imagination. In fact, the great Victorian novelists often created complexes of symbolic
meaning that reached far deeper than the superficial pattern of social action suggested to the
casual reader.
Some General Features of Victorian Age

1) The Victorian accepted the voice of authority

2) They acknowledged the rule of the expert, in religion, politics, literature, and family life, in
science.

They Victorian believed that their constitution, the British Empire and Christian religion were
based on sound footing believed in the truth revealed in Bible and also accepted the new
scientific theories.

3) It was the era of piece but later there was social unrest.

4) There was material development

5) There was industrial revolution

6) It was an age of unrestricted competition

7) It was an age of uprising of middle class people.

8) It was an age of intellectual development

9) It was an age of democracy

10) There was conflict between science and religion

11) It was an age of doubt and pessimism

12) The writers were in search of balance and stability

13) It was age of classicism due to writer’s didacticism, reality and purposeful approach to life.

14) It was an age of romanticism due to social unrest, feverish life and devoid of emotions and
feelings, so the writers turned to romanticism.

15) It was the age of religious tolerance

16) There was belief in permanence of the institutions both secular and religious.

17) Victorian believes in self complacency (satisfaction)

18) There was integration of old values, like consciousness of social life, home sanctity
19) It was age increasing reading public and increasing machines.

Main Characteristics of the Victorian Novel

Here are main characteristics of the Victorian novel and various other influences which have
brought the English novel to the magnificent road of consummation.

Various Social Legislations

The mid-Victorian novel was profoundly affected by the various social legislations. The Reform
Bill (1832) gave to the middle class the political power which they deserved. Reform Bill was
also recognition of the fact that Great Britain had ceased to be an agricultural and had become a
manufacturing and commercial country. This change was emphasized by the agitation for the
repeal (cancel) of the Corn Laws, or duties on foodstuffs, which took place in 1846.The
Industrial Revolution had called into being an immense population of workers, and it had given
rise to a new set of social problems met by the Poor Law of 1834, which attempted scientific
treatment of poverty through the establishment of work-houses. The necessity of popular
education was recognized by the national education Act of 1852.

Intellectual Ferment

There was a long domination of British politics by the Liberal Party. Liberalism was middle –
class philosophy. The Liberals trusted much to political action and legislation, which brought
upon them the wrath of a series of social prophets-Carlyle, Ruskin, Mathew Arnold who
denounced and rejected this reliance on machinery and insisted that spiritual regeneration was
the only way of social salvation. At the same time, the English Church was roused from its
lethargy by the Oxford movement of the thirties to combat the secularizing influence of
liberalism in thought as well as in ecclesiastical affairs.

A great change in the intellectual outlook came about as the result of the discoveries of science,
of which the most important in its effect on popular thought was the theory of evolution,
promulgated by Charles Darwin in his Origin of Species in 1859.

Natural science gradually assumed the first place among intellectual interests, and the theory of
biological evolution found its counterpart (equivalent) in the political theories of Karl Marx.
A New Reading Public and Mode of Circulation on Novels

The novel underwent immense expansion in the later nineteenth centaury as the result of the new
material and interests added by science, explorations, modern inventions, and the systematic
study of conditions in various departments of life war, the sea, the church, the factory, mine, or
rail road, the school, the university, business, art, society, politics, and crime. This expansion
and specialization of the novel would have been impossible without a corresponding expansion
of the reading public, to which the novel accommodated itself by changes in its material form
and mode of circulation.

With the increase of literacy the reading public lost its distinctive character, and the reading habit
became general, demanding an immense amount of matter, especially fiction, for its satisfaction,

Notion of Respectability

The idea of the respectability permeates (fills) the Victorian novel. In the middle of the
eighteenth century the word respectable was applied to person worth of respect for moral
excellence. Then the meaning changed some what; the word was applied to people of good or
fair social standing, with the moral qualities appropriate to this. A further shift of meaning
occurred, and the word was applied to anyone who was honest and decent in behavior and clean
in habits, irrespective of social position. This last meaning reveals how the idea behind the word
had captured all classes of society. The respectable artisan, in work and not in debt, who took his
wife and family to the Great exhibition, was respectable in the same way as the queen with her
Consort and young family.

Sex and Other Taboos

Lovett and Hughes have narrated the various taboos of the Victorian era-the fear of God, the fear
of death, the distrust of sex and the fear of Revolution. The novel as the most popular form of
literature affords the best representation of the culture, attitudes and patterns of conduct known
as Victorianism. The fear of God, the Victorians inherited from Puritanism. It had been
quickened by the Evangelical and Oxford Movements in the nineteenth. Religion is very frequent
a motive in fiction as in England.

The fear of death was a religious inheritance. We find in Victorian novelists a preoccupation
with death which finds expression in many of their most highly moving scenes.

The distrust of sex was partly religious an inheritance from Puritanism. The Victorian novelists
are generally extremely reticent (reserved) of the subject of sex. The sacredness of the British
home and family life, about which so much of the sentiment of the age gathered, was to be
protected, and the Queen herself led in the movement to make domestic purity fashionable.
The last fear of the Victorians was that of the revolution of which they had an instance in France
a generation before. Success in business and the accumulation of property became motives which
were duly celebrated in fiction; material comfort gave an air of good cheer to novels. And
Christmas stories.

Realism

Victorian realism is of two kinds; firstly, it is a sociological realism. Secondly, the Victorian
realism is marked by psychological reactions of the characters.

Appalled (shocked) by the cruelty of the Victorian social system Charles Dickens felt that he had
a message to convey to his hard-hearted generation. In David Copperfield, in Nicholas Nicklebe
and in Oliver Twist, satire is abundant and pathos is awe-inspiring than humour.

While in all his work Dickens is attacking the social conditions of his time, in Hard Time he
gives the theme a special emphasis. He satirizes the whole trade free (trade free from tax) system
of the Manchester school.

William Make peace Thackeray’s novels often reveal with penetrating truth the inner soul and
character of Victorian society, its essential pettiness and hypocrisy. Through his novels he
repeatedly strove to show

How very weak the very wise

How very small the very great are

Mrs. Gaskell’s social portrayal also revealed an amazing insight into the anomalies (differences)
of Victorian England. Charles Reed’s “It is Never too Late to Mend” with its exposure f the
prison system in the melodramatic narrative reminds us of Zola. Charlotte and Emily Bronte had
the courage to explore human life with greater fidelity than Victorian morality would allow.

We find in almost every case a definite purpose to sweep away error and to reveal the underlying
truth of human life.

The general character of George Eliot’s novels may be described in author’s own terms as
psychological realism. This means that Eliot sought to do in her novels what Browning
attempted in his poetry that is to represent the inner struggle of a soul, and to reveal the motives,
impulses and hereditary (genetic) influences which govern human action. Browning generally
stops when he tells his story, and either lets you draw your own conclusion or else gives you his
in a few striking lines. But George Eliot is not content until she has minutely explained the
motives of her characters and the moral lessons to be learned from them.

When we meet the heroes of Dickens and Thackeray, their characters are already formed and we
can be sure of what they will do under given circumstances. In George Eliot’s novels the
characters develop gradually as we come to know them. They go from weakness to strength or
from strength to weakness.
Her great novels are Adam Bede, Silas Marner, Romala, Mill on the Floss and Middle March. In
each of these novels we find evidence of psychological penetration and intellectual analysis of
the problems of life.

Every where Meredith displays a rare penetration into the characters of men and women. He
excels in presenting the bare springs of egotism. The Egoist is his masterpiece and one of the
great works of the century.

Importance of the characters in Victorian Novels

The Victorian novelists have strong ability to create characters and it is the absence of
memorable and outstanding characters which constitutes the chief difference between the
Victorian novel and the modern.

The Victorian novels, it is obvious, stand or fall by their characters and on the whole they
victoriously stand. Thackeray and Dickens, George Eliot and the Bronte, Trollope and Mrs.
Gaskell, all possessed the gift of creating characters. Their books teem with real live people, as
round and rich and vital as their flesh and blood prototypes (samples). Many of them, and Weller
and Micawber, Becky Sharp, and Mrs.Poyser, Heath cliff and Paul and Mrs. Proudie are among
the most memorable achievements of fiction in any age or country.

The elaborate introduction of the characters, symptomatic of the importance of the place which
they occupy in the novel, is characteristic of all the great Victorian writers.

Victorian Characters as Selections

When we contrast the men and women portrayed by these later writers with their Victorian
predecessors, we can not avoid being struck by the fact that the memorableness of the Victorian
characters is largely achieved by means of a process of rigid selection. Each character embodies
two or three dominant characteristics and no more.

Nineteenth-century characters approximate very closely to the humours of the Elizabethan

drama. Each is or represents a particular aspect of human nature, none are whole people.

Nineteenth-century characters do not develop. What they were at the beginning of the book, with
unimportant modifications they are at the end. Heat cliff Micawber, Uriah Heep, Amelia Sedley,
Mrs. Proudie and the rest do not change.
I have never deserted Mr. Micawber is Mrs. Micaber’s special talk, the special noise by which
she is to be recognized all through the book as if a clock work doll had been wound up to say its
appointed script writing. She is saying it at the end, as she said it at the beginning.

Early Victorian Novelists V Later Victorian Novelists

William Makepeace Thackeray

Charles Dickens

Anthony Trollope

Charlotte Bronte

Emily Bronte

Mrs. Gaskell

Charles Reade

Charles Kingsley

Willkie Collins

George Eliot

George Meredith

Samuel Butler

Thomas Hardy, George Gissing

They do not form a coherent body. We shall see that they have much more in common with one
another than they have with the younger men. What they have in common is a special climate of
ideas and feelings, a set of fundamental assumptions. They identified themselves with their age
and were its spokesmen. The later novelists were writing in some sense against their age; they
were critical, even hostile to its dominant assumption. Their relation to the reading public was
nearer than to the early Victorians.

Merits and Demerits of the Earlier Victorian Novel

David Cecil has enumerated the merits and demerits of the early Victorian novelist as follows:
Firstly, the chief drawback of the early Victorian Novelists is that they miss out so much of life
and so much of the important parts of it. They avoid any detailed treatment of the animal side of
human nature.

Secondly, sex is not the only important omission from the books. We find little about the
impersonal objects that occupy mankind, his relation to thought, to art, to public affairs. This
limitation of subject-matter limits their range of characters. The deeper issues of human life
which are the main interests of such characters do not form any part of the Victorian Subject-
matter.

Thirdly they hardly ever stir those profounder feelings to which the very greatest art appeals.

Finally, they have receded in to oblivision. The supreme masters of English novel named
Dickens and Thackeray who are hardly read now days by the serious students. To the modern
man they seem to be the denizens (residents) of different world.

Lord David Cecil depicts the other side of the early Victorian novelists.

They have extraordinary merits which are so noticeably absent from the novels of our
contemporaries. Apart from anything else, they tell the story so well. The primary object foe
which novels were written, mankind wanted to be told a story.

Victorian novels are panoramas (scene)of whole society.

They write equally for the train journey and for all time. They crowd realism and fantasy, thrills
and theories.

They have strong quality of creative imagination which the Victorian novelists possess in such a
supreme degree. It is their distinguishing characteristic. The material of the novelist is the work
of human beings and their relations to each other.

The great Victorian novels are all pictures. Some time they are fanciful and romantic connected
with reality and some times they are close to the facts of actual existence. A street in London
described by Dickens is very like a street in London; but it is still more a street in Dickens.
Dickens has used the real world to create his own world. And so have done Trollope, Thackeray,
Charlotte Bronte and the rest of them.

The setting of these stories is unforgettable scenery: Dickens’ London, hazed with fog, lived with
gaslight, with its shabby, clamorous, cheerful streets, its cosy interiors, its stagnant waterside.

The different London of Thackeray: the West End of London on a summer afternoon, with its
clubs and parks and pot- houses, mellow,(rich), modish (stylish), full of bustle and idleness. .
The elemental moorland of the Bronte and the countryside of Mrs. Gaskell is the beautiful setting
of their novels.
Their humour shows that they are creative. Vanity Fair, David Copperfield and Barchester
Towers are full of humour.

The Victorian are all able to make their characters live.. Their books linger in the memory not as
stories, but as crowds; crowds of breathing, crying, laughing, and living people.

Salient Features of the Last Victorians

After about 1870 the apparently secular foundation of the world of London and Manchester
business men began to be shaken. The process of disintegration had been going on. The late
Victorian seems to us superficially an era of stability, of the respectable elderly queen, of stuffy
clothes and heavy architecture, of comfortable middle class i9ncomes from the Stock Exchange,
of English Sunday and the gradual extension of t5he franchise and of free education. But it was
also an era of desperation of a hectic and bloody imperial race against new upstart competitions,
of the first modern economic slump( fall), of the rise of the Labour Movement of the dock strike
and Bloody Sunday, of the impact of the Darwin etc.

In Samuel Butler and Thomas Hardy it is quite clearly the latter aspects of the age –the opposite
of stability that we find most strikingly expressed. They are the novelist of the disintegration,
rebels and critics crying out the sanctities, and ethics of the Victorian bourgeois world. Butler is
very much a part of that world and it has effects on his writing. Thomas Hardy ,the country man,
soaked in the older, pre capitalist culture o f peasant Wessex, is less involved in the values, he is
attaching and achieves in his two final novels., Tess and Jude the Obscure,

These novelists of the Victorian age are socially revolutionaries, but each of them had something
new to say and therefore had to discover new means of expression, new ways of modifying or
transforming existing techniques to meet new needs.

Hardy uses and only slightly modifies the conventional nineteenth-century novel structure.

Henry James is far more striking degree an innovator.

Historical Perspective of the Victorian Novel

Forerunners of the Victorian Novel

Among the fore runners of the Victorian novelists, following can be mentioned:

Bulwer Lytton, the writer of historical novels a novel of crime

Mrs. Gore, the writer of aristocratic novels

Pierce Egan, the writer of the novel of low life

Benjamin Disraeli, the writer of social and political novels

William H. Ainsworth the writer of historical and romantic novels

William Carleton, the writer of realistic novels.

Charles Dickens and His School (The Humanitarian Group)

Charles Dickens is the foremost representative novelist of the Victorian era. He was born in
lower-class society. Dickens was brought up in an atmosphere of adversity and educated in the
school of suffering.

Sketches by Boz

Pickwick Papers

Oliver Twist,

Nicholas Nickleby

Old Curiosity Shop

Martin Chuzzlewit

David Copperfield

A Tale of Two Cities

Great Expectations are some of his well known novels. Dickens became the most popular
novelist of his time.

A pioneer –writer of lower middle-class society and of the town-folk in their varied ways,
Dickens is a social novelist as well as social reformer, a writer who moralises with a smile on his
lips. Dickens helped to intensify the suggestion of active charity. This is what made Dickens as
apostle and his work a gospel of humanitarianism. Dickens is also a prophet of sentimentalism
taking his stand against the advocates of rationalism. Humour and humanity are two other
outstanding characteristics of dickens as a novelist. Dickens is a man of people who wrote for the
people. Dickens is the spokesman of the masses and the creator of the democratic novel.
William Makepeace Thackeray and His School (The Satirical School)

In some respects he is a contrast to Dickens. William Thackeray is an equally great novelist

.Whereas Dickens dealt the lower middle class society, Thackeray concerned himself with the
upper-class society. Whereas Dickens used humour to great advantage .Thackeray wielded satire
with delicate art. Both Dickens and
Thackeray enlarged the scope and possibility of art of fiction. Both are masters of prose,
dialogue and narration, and both are creators of immortal characters. Thackeray was more
interested in the manners and morals of the aristocracy than in the great upheavals of the age. He
is a realist who paints life as he sees it. He says of himself, “I have no brain above my eyes” I
describe what I see. He gives in his novels accurate and true picture of various elements of
society.

Vanity Fair, this novel is with out a hero.

Pendennis, it was an autobiography.

New comes, here he paints contemporary manners.

The Virginians,

Anthony Trollope, And Charles Reade, both called themselves realists. Reade recorded
improbabilities, (impossibilities) while Trollope was content to feign (fake) probabilities.

Charlotte, the oldest and most active of the three sisters who wrote under the Bronte name, her
famous novel is Jane Eyre. Emily Bronte, her famous novel is Wuthering Heights.

George Eliot, George Meredith and Thomas Hardy

George Eliot

The real name of George Eliot was Mary Ann Evans. For a long time her writing was critical and
philosophic in character. Her first novel appeared when she was 38 years old.

She is gifted with wonderful faculty of observation

She is producer of manners; habits and speech of rustic life. She is preacher and moralizer.

Scenes of clerical Life

Adam Bede
Mill on the Floss

Silas Marner

Romola

Middle March

She was born in Warwickshire. It was her Warwickshire experience which provided the
substance of most of her novels. She has a thorough knowledge of the country side and the
country people, their standards of value so she could give a complete picture of their life. . She
could portray the humour and pathos of these simple folk. As Dickens gives the pictures of the
city streets and Thackeray shows the vanities of society and, she presents the reflection of the
country life in England.

The unity of plot construction was lacking in the English novel before George Eliot appeared on
the scene. This was a singular contribution of hers to the development of the English novel.

All the novels of George Eliot are examples of psychological realism.

George Meredith

The Ordeal of Richard

The Egoist

The Amazing Marriage

Another great figure not only in fiction but in the general field of literature during the late
Victorian period was Meredith, who though a poet at heart expressed himself in the medium of
the novel. He did not follow any established tradition, nor did he found a school. In fact he was
more of a poet and philosopher than a novelist. He confined himself principally to the upper
classes of society, and his attitude to life is that of a thinker and poet. Meredith loves to trace the
calamities which befall (happen) those who provoke Nature by obstinately running counter to
her laws. Like George Eliot, Meredith is a psychologist. He tries to unravel (unstitch) the
mastery of the human personality and probe and search the hidden springs there.

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy is one of the venerable of English fiction. He has added might and majesty,
greatness and grandeur and breadth and depth to the English Novel.

“God kills and enjoys our misery as a wanton boy kills flies for his own pleasures”
He has innate sympathy for poor

He deals with fundamental of life

He has acute and closes observation. His novels are full of chance, coincidence, and fate.

The great novels of Hardy are:

The Woodlanders

Far from Madding Crowd

The Return of the Native

The Mayor of Casterbridge

Tess of the D’Urbervilles

Jude the Obscure

Hardy like Meredith was a poet at heart, and expressed himself also in verse. But unlike
Meredith whose attitude to life is optimistic and who had written comedies, Hardy’s attitude to
life is rather pessimistic and he has written tragedies. Hardy thinks that there is some malignant
and cruel power which controls and rules this universe which defeats man in all his plans. It is
especially hostile to those who try to assert themselves and have their own way.

He missed the award of the Nobel Prize for literature, but he has not failed to become one of the
Immortals in the history of the English Novel.

Conclusion

In Victorian age The English novel underwent immense expansion. It was due to the new
material and interests added by science, exploration, modern invention, and the systematic study
of conditions in various departments of life: war, the sea, the church , the factory, , mine railroad,
the school, the university, business ,art society, politics and crime. There was also a fast growth
of the reading public. To cater (provide) to the increasing reading habit of the public, novelist
took to the serial devices in popular periodicals.