198- ] English Literature

198 - ] English Literature

The Victorian Age Novelists 

 Charles Dickens exemplifies the Victorian novelist better than any other writer. Extraordinarily popular in his day with his characters taking on a life of their own beyond the page, Dickens is still the most popular and read author of the time. The nineteenth century saw the rise of numerous literary journals that carried serial installments that were eagerly anticipated and widely read. His first real novel, The Pickwick Papers, written when he was only 25, was an overnight success, and all his subsequent works sold extremely well. He was in effect a self-made man who worked diligently and prolifically to produce exactly what the public wanted; often reacting to the public taste and changing the plot direction of his stories between monthly installments. The comedy of his first novel has a satirical edge which pervades his writings. These deal with the plight of the poor and oppressed and end with a ghost story cut short by his death. The slow trend in his fiction towards darker themes is mirrored in much of the writing of the century, and literature after his death in 1870 is notably different from that at the start of the era.

William Makepeace Thackeray was Dickens' great rival at the time. With a similar style but a slightly more detached, acerbic and barbed satirical view of his characters, he also tended to depict situations of a more middle class flavor than Dickens. He is best known for his novel Vanity Fair, subtitled A Novel without a Hero, which is also an example of a form popular in Victorian literature: the historical novel, in which very recent history is depicted. Anthony Trollope tended to write about a slightly different part of the structure, namely the landowning and professional classes.

Away from the big cities and the literary society, Haworth in West Yorkshire was the site of some of the era's most important novel writing: the home of the Brontë family. Anne, Charlotte and Emily Brontë had time in their short lives to produce masterpieces of fiction although these were not immediately appreciated by Victorian critics. Wuthering Heights, Emily's only work, in particular has violence, passion, the supernatural, heightened emotion, and emotional distance, an unusual mix for any novel but particularly at this time. It is a prime example of Gothic Romanticism from a woman's point of view during this period of time, examining class, myth, and gender. Another important writer of the period was George Eliot, a pseudonym which concealed a woman, Mary Ann Evans, who wished to write novels which would be taken seriously rather than the silly romances which all women of the time were supposed to write.

Charles Dickens: A Popular Victorian Author

In the same year that Queen Victoria ascended the throne, Charles Dickens published the first parts of his novel Oliver Twist, a story of an orphan and his struggle with poverty in the early part of the century. As the Industrial Revolution surged on, the class difference between the traditional aristocracy and the middle class was gradually getting reduced and with the passing of the Reform Act, the middle class got the right to vote and be politically engaged in the affairs of the nation. While the aristocracy criticized the work that the bourgeoisie had to do in the factories and the industries, to maintain the supremacy that they had the privilege of, the middle class in response promoted work as virtue. The result of this led to a further marginalization of those struck by poverty and were part of neither groups . The Poor Law that was passed made public assistance available to the economically downtrodden only through workhouses where they had to live and work. The conditions of these workhouses were deliberately made to be unbearable so as to avoid the poor from becoming totally dependent on assistance from outside. Families were split, food was inedible, and the circumstances were made inhospitable to urge the poor to work and fight a way through poverty. However, these ultimately became a web difficult to transgress and people chose living in the streets rather than seeking help from a workhouse. Dickens was aware of these concerns as a journalist and his own life and autobiographical experiences entered the novel through Oliver Twist. His novel enters the world of the workhouses, the dens of thieves and the streets and highlights that while there was economic prosperity on one side, there was poverty on the other and while morality, virtue were championed, hypocrisy was equally a part of society. His social commentary entered the world of his fiction.

In 1836, before Oliver Twist, his serials of Pickwick Papers were published which led him to instant recognition and popularity. It started the famous Victorian mode of serial novels which dominated the age till the end of the century. It not only made the reader anxious for the next serial to come and spread the popularity of the book itself, but also gave the writer a chance to alter his work according to the mood and expectation of his audience. His works enjoyed continuous popularity and acceptance and Dickens as a writer became famous for his wit, satire, social commentary and his in depth characters.

Bleak House, A Christmas Carroll, David Copperfield, Great Expectations are some of his other great works.

William Makepeace Thackeray: English Victorian Writer

Thackeray was born in Calcutta, India and was also an important writer but one who expressed his age very differently from Dickens and other writers. He is most noted for his satirical work Vanity Fair that portrays the many myriads of English society. Although he was seen as equally talented as Dickens, but his views were deemed old-fashioned which hindered his popularity  . He did not readily accept the changing values of the age. His work is seen almost as a reactionary voice. Vanity Fair for example has the subtitle ‘A novel without a Hero’ and in a period where other writers usually embarked on a portrayal of the coming of age of a hero, Thackeray himself very deliberately opposes it. While the protagonist of Dickens’ David Copperfield invites the reader to identify with him, Thackeray’s Becky Sharp is the conniving, cynical and clever. Even his novel Pendennis, is a complete opposite of the novel David Copperfield, although both were published the same year. Thackeray did not identify with the middle class because hence his novels lack a middle class hero. When novels were catering to reassure middle class self-worth, Thackeray denied to give that assurance. Even, Dobbin, a middle class character in Vanity Fair, is not completely granted hero status and a tone of criticism lingers on the character throughout the work.

In The History of Henry Esmond, Thackeray deals with questions of not only of the concerns of society at large but also of individual identity. While most writers supported the idea of innate goodness in the individual human self, Thackeray differed. For example the character of Henry Esmond is also not a completely positive character and the negatives of his self, is perhaps Thackeray’s critique of Victorian emphasis on the individual. An individualism that focused on personal virtue and morality is seen as Thackeray to at the risk of selfishness bordering on narcissism and self-absorption. His discontent with his age became more vocal in later works like Phillip and The New Comes. While the former is injected with autobiographical accounts and is goes back to the satirical tone of Vanity Fair, the latter is a harsh critique of the material greed of the age and a critique of the contemporary culture of the age.

As a result of his strong opinions of his society and its issues, and a critical rejection of the dominant concerns found in works of other writers of the same age, Thackeray stands in isolation as an outsider to this circle due his skepticism of the changing Victorian society. His stand did not change with time and lends to a social criticism and commentary of a very different sort in his works. Catherine, A Shabby Genteel Story, The Book of Snobs are some of his other works.

Women Novelists of the Victorian Era

The era saw a proliferation of women writers. The novel as a genre was initially seen as feminine literature and as the literacy rate among women increased, a new need for women writers catering to this segment was answered by these writers.

Mrs. Gaskell

Elizabeth Gaskell, popularly called Mrs. Gaskell wrote short stories and novels that dealt with presenting a social picture of her society in the 1850s. While it was a time when doubts about material progress reaching the actual lives of the ordinary man were starting to be raised, Gaskell mostly gave an optimistic view of the time. Gaskell’s North and South for example, seeks to present an answer to division and difference by presenting a form of a social reconciliation. There is an attempt at reconciliation of many divergent streams in the novel.

Mary Barton was her first novel, published in 1848 with a subtitle, ‘A Tale of Manchester Life’ and sticks to the Victorian concern of presenting the daily life of the middle class. Cranford came next in the form of a serial and was edited by Dickens for the magazine called Household Words. It was received positively and Gaskell gained immediate popularity for it. It centered on women characters like Mary Smith, Miss Deborah and the others. However the book was also critiqued for its lack of a significant story line. She was also famous for her gothic style in some of her works and this made Gaskell slightly different from other novelist of her time. Ruth, Sylvia’s Lovers, Wives and Daughters were other significant works by her.

George Eliot

Perhaps the one most famous women writers , George Eliot still maintains a canonical status. Her real name was Mary Ann Evans or Marian Evans and she adopted the pseudonym George Eliot to escape the stereotype attached with women writers and successfully entered the domain of ‘serious’ writing. She had a controversial personal life and there too was not hesitant to break the norms of societal feminine boundaries. Adam Bede was her first novel, published 1859, set in a rural landscape and deals with a love rectangle. It received critical appreciation for its psychological descriptions of the characters and a realistic description of rural life.

Mill on the Floss, 1860, revolves around the life of Tom and Maggie Tulliver and traces their life as they grow up near the River Floss. Historical, political references to those of the Napoleonic Wars and the Reform Bill of 1832 inform the novel and lend it a more intellectual and serious strain. Autobiographical elements also form a part of the novel as George Eliot fuses herself partly with Maggie, the protagonist of the book. After Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1863), Felix Holt the Radical, (1866) came Eliot’s most popular novel Middlemarch in the year 1871. The novel revolves around the life of complex characters and the Reform Bill of 1832. Subtitled ‘A Study of Provincial Life’ the plot is based in the fictitious town of Midlands. The greatness of the novel was because of the vast portraiture of country and urban life that it depicts, its complex plots and characters, and its stark realistic projection of the time its set in. The role of education , the women question, politics, social commentary , idealism are other complicated strands of the novel.

Bronte Sisters

Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte were the three famous novelist daughters of Patrick Bronte, a well-educated man and a writer himself; and Maria Bronte. The family together went through a series of tragedies where Maria Bronte died very early and none of the three sisters could reach the age of 40. Charlotte died at the age of just 39, Emily at 30 and Anne at 29. All three were educated by their father at home and all of them were fond of storytelling since childhood. Charlotte Bronte is famous for her novel Jane Eyre, published in 1847. The titular protagonist of the book, Jane Eyre, and her struggles in life and love for Mr. Rochester along with the process of her mental and spiritual growth are traced. The novel is believed to have a feminist tone to it and the famous ‘woman in the attic’ character of Bertha Mason raises several gender and feminist issues. Emily Bronte, the second of the trio, became famous for her novel Wuthering Heights, published in the year 1847 and the only book written by her. Like George Eliot, Emily wrote under the pseudonym of Ellis Bell but after her death Charlotte published the novel with her sister’s real name. The novel is the love story of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw. Anne Bronte, the last of the three, wrote two novels: Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) . The former was an autobiographical work and the latter is about a woman named  Helen Graham who transgresses marital and social boundaries to assert her freedom. It is seen a substantial piece of feminist writing .

All three sisters hence larger societal questions through mostly women characters and the plot focusses on their life with themes of love and passion . They hence enjoyed a large female readership and have achieved status as classics of literature.

Late Victorian Novelists

Thomas Hardy was the most important writer in the later part of the Victorian Era. He was influenced by both the romanticism of the earlier era and the social commentary of Dickens. He is famous for the conception of the fictional town of Wessex. Far from the Madding Crowd published in 1874, The Mayor of Casterbridge in 1886, Tess of the d’Urbervilles in 1891, and Jude the Obscure in 1895 are his famous novels but Hardy was also known for his poetry. The late part of the period also saw the rise of the ‘sensational’ novels by writers like Wilkie Collins and they too were based on the life of the middle class. The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868) are Collins famous sensational novels. Anthony Trollope, another writer in the second half of the era, was himself from a middle class background and wrote the Phineas Finn (1869) and The Way we Live (1874). It was the time when Lewis Carroll wrote his famous Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland published in 1865 and stood very different from other because of the child fiction genre it became a classic of the Carroll’s different dreamy world that stood in direct contrast with the realistic tone of novels that was at its peak . George Gissing, George Moore, Samuel Butler, Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson were other novels of the era. Rudyard Kipling and his short stories based in India pointed to the larger historical process of colonialism happening at the time. It was in 1877 that Queen Victoria became the Empress of India. Then also came George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde, another two most famous writers of the time. 

The style of the Victorian novel

Virginia Woolf in her series of essays The Common Reader called George Eliot's Middlemarch "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people." This criticism, although rather broadly covering as it does all English literature, is rather a fair comment on much of the fiction of the Victorian Era. Influenced as they were by the large sprawling novels of sensibility of the preceding age they tended to be idealized portraits of difficult lives in which hard work, perseverance, love and luck win out in the end; virtue would be rewarded and wrong-doers are suitably punished. They tended to be of an improving nature with a central moral lesson at heart, informing the reader how to be a good Victorian. This formula was the basis for much of earlier Victorian fiction but as the century progressed the tone grew darker.

Eliot in particular strove for realism in her fiction and tried to banish the picturesque and the burlesque from her work. Another woman writer Elizabeth Gaskell wrote even grimmer, grittier books about the poor in the north of England but even these usually had happy endings. After the death of Dickens in 1870 happy endings became less common . Such a major literary figure as Charles Dickens tended to dictate the direction of all literature of the era, not least because he edited All the Year Round a literary journal of the time. His fondness for a happy ending with all the loose ends neatly tied up is clear and although he is well known for writing about the lives of the poor they are sentimentalized portraits, made acceptable for people of character to read; to be shocked but not disgusted. The more unpleasant underworld of Victorian city life was revealed by Henry Mayhew in his articles and book London Labour and the London Poor.

This change in style in Victorian fiction was slow coming but clear by the end of the century, with the books in the 1880s and 1890s having a more realistic and often grimmer cast. Even writers of the high Victorian age were censured for their plots attacking the conventions of the day; Adam Bede was called "the vile outpourings of a lewd woman's mind" and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall "utterly unfit to be put into the hands of girls." The disgust of the reading audience perhaps reached a peak with Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure which was reportedly burnt by an outraged Bishop of Wakefield. The cause of such fury was Hardy's frank treatment of sex, religion and his disregard for the subject of marriage; a subject close to the Victorians' heart. The prevailing plot of the Victorian novel is sometimes described as a search for a correct marriage.

Hardy had started his career as seemingly a rather safe novelist writing bucolic scenes of rural life but his disaffection with some of the institutions of Victorian Britain was present as well as an underlying sorrow for the changing nature of the English countryside. He responded to the hostile reception to Jude in 1895 by giving up his novel writing, but he continued writing poetry into the mid 1920s. Other authors such as Samuel Butler and George Gissing confronted their antipathies to certain aspects of marriage, religion or Victorian morality and peppered their fiction with controversial anti-heros. Butler's Erewhon, for one, is a utopian novel satirizing many aspects of Victorian society with Butler's particular dislike of the religious hypocrisy the focus of his greatest scorn in the depiction of "Musical Banks."

While many great writers were at work at the time, the large numbers of voracious but uncritical readers meant that poor writers, producing salacious and lurid novels or accounts, found eager audiences. Many of the faults common to much better writers were used abundantly by writers now mostly forgotten: over-sentimentality, unrealistic plots and moralizing that obscured the story. Although immensely popular in his day, Edward Bulwer-Lytton is now held up as an example of the very worst of Victorian literature with his sensationalist story-lines and his over-boiled style of prose. Other writers popular at the time but largely forgotten now are: Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charlotte Mary Yonge, Charles Kingsley, R. D. Blackmore, and even Benjamin Disraeli, a future Prime Minister.