While in the preceding Romantic period poetry had been the dominant genre, it was the novel that

was
most important in the Victorian period. Charles Dickens (1812-1870) dominated the first part of
Victoria's reign: his first novel, Pickwick Papers, was published in 1836, and his last Our Mutual Friend
between 1864-5. William Thackeray's (1811-1863) most famous work Vanity Fair appeared in 1848,
and the three Bront sisters, Charlotte (1816-55), Emily (1818-48) and Anne (1820-49), also published
significant works in the 1840s. A major later novel was George Eliot's (1819-80) Middlemarch (1872),
while the major novelist of the later part of Queen Victoria's reign was Thomas Hardy (1840-1928),
whose first novel, Under the Greenwood Tree, appeared in 1872 and his last, Jude the Obscure, in 1895.
Robert Browning (1812-89) and Alfred Tennyson (1809-92) were Victorian England's most famous
poets, though more recent taste has tended to prefer the poetry of Thomas Hardy, who, though he wrote
poetry throughout his life, did not publish a collection until 1898, as well of that of Gerald Manley
Hopkins (1844-89), whose poetry was published posthumously in 1918. Early poetry of W. B. Yeats was
also published in Victoria's reign.
With regard to the theatre into was not until the last decades of the nineteenth century that any
significant works were produced. This began with Gilbert and Sullivan's comic operas, from the 1870s,
various plays of George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) in the 1890s, and Oscar Wilde's (1854-1900) The
Importance of Being Earnest in 1895.
Charles Dickens is the most famous Victorian novelist. Extraordinarily popular in his day with his
characters taking on a life of their own beyond the page, Dickens is still one of the most popular and
read authors of that time. His first novel, The Pickwick Papers (1836), written when he was twenty-five,
was an overnight success, and all his subsequent works sold extremely well. The comedy of his first
novel has a satirical edge and this pervades his writing. Dickens worked diligently and prolifically to
produce the entertaining writing that the public wanted, but also to offer commentary on social problems
and the plight of the poor and oppressed. His most important works include Oliver Twist (1837-8),
Dombey and Son (1846-8), Bleak House (1852-3), Great Expectations (1860-61), Little Dorrit (1855-7),
and Our Mutual Friend (1864-5). There is a gradual trend in his fiction towards darker themes which
mirrors a tendency in much of the writing of the 19th century.
William Thackeray was Dickens' great rival in the first half of Queen Victoria's reign. With a similar
style but a slightly more detached, acerbic and barbed satirical view of his characters, he also tended to
depict a more middle class society than Dickens did. He is best known for his novel Vanity Fair (1848),
subtitled A Novel without a Hero, which is an example of a form popular in Victorian literature: an
historical novel in which recent history is depicted.
The Bront sisters wrote fiction rather different from that common at the time.
Away from the big cities and literary society, Haworth in West Yorkshire was the home of the Bront
sisters. Anne, Charlotte and Emily Bront had time in their short lives to produce masterpieces, although
these were not immediately appreciated by Victorian critics. Wuthering Heights (1847), 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 an example of Gothic Romanticism from
a woman's point of view, which examines class, myth, and gender. Jane Eyre (1847), by her sister
Charlotte, is another major nineteenth century novel that has gothic themes. Anne's second novel The
Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), written in realistic rather than romantic style, is mainly considered to be
the first sustained feminist novel.[1] Later in this period George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), published The
Mill on the Floss in 1860, and in 1872 her most famous work Middlemarch. Like the Bronts she
published under a masculine pseudonym.
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In the later decades of the Victorian era Thomas Hardy was the most important novelist. His works
include Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Mayor of
Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895)
Victorian novels tend 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 wrongdoers are suitably punished. They tended to be of an
improving nature with a central moral lesson at heart. While this formula was the basis for much of earlier
Victorian fiction, the situation became more complex as the century progressed.
The reclaiming of the past was a major part of Victorian literature with an interest in both classical literature but
also the medieval literature of England. The Victorians loved the heroic, chivalrous stories of knights of old and
they hoped to regain some of that noble, courtly behaviour and impress it upon the people both at home and in the
wider empire. The best example of this is Alfred Tennyson's Idylls of the King, which blended the stories of King
Arthur, particularly those by Thomas Malory, with contemporary concerns and ideas. The Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood also drew on myth and folklore for their art, with Dante Gabriel Rossetti contemporaneously
regarded as the chief poet amongst them, although his sister Christina is now held by scholars to be a stronger
poet. In drama, farces, musical burlesques, extravaganzas and comic operas competed with Shakespeare
productions and serious drama by the likes of James Planch and Thomas William Robertson. In 1855, the
German Reed Entertainments began a process of elevating the level of (formerly risqu) musical theatre in Britain
that culminated in the famous series of comic operas by Gilbert and Sullivan and were followed by the 1890s
with the first Edwardian musical comedies. The first play to achieve 500 consecutive performances was the
London comedy Our Boys by H. J. Byron, opening in 1875. Its astonishing new record of 1,362 performances
was bested in 1892 by Charley's Aunt by Brandon Thomas.[5] After W. S. Gilbert, Oscar Wilde became the leading
poet and dramatist of the late Victorian period.[4] Wilde's plays, in particular, stand apart from the many now
forgotten plays of Victorian times and have a much closer relationship to those of the Edwardian dramatists such
as George Bernard Shaw, many of whose most important works were written in the 20th century. Wilde's 1895
comic masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest, was the greatest of the plays in which he held an ironic
mirror to the aristocracy while displaying virtuosic mastery of wit and paradoxical wisdom. It has remained
extremely popular.

Science, philosophy and discovery

Charles Darwin's work On the Origin of Species affected society and thought in the Victoria era, and
still does today.
The Victorian era was an important time for the development of science and the Victorians had a
mission to describe and classify the entire natural world. Much of this writing does not rise to the level
of being regarded as literature but one book in particular, Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species,
remains famous. The theory of evolution contained within the work shook many of the ideas the
Victorians had about themselves and their place in the world. Although it took a long time to be widely
accepted, it would dramatically change subsequent thought and literature.
Other important non-fiction works of the time are the philosophical writings of John Stuart Mill
covering logic, economics, liberty and utilitarianism, and the large and influential histories of Thomas
Carlyle: The French Revolution, A History and On Heroes and Hero Worship, and Thomas Babington
Macaulay: The History of England from the Accession of James II. The greater number of novels that
contained overt criticism of religion did not stifle a vigorous list of publications on the subject of
religion. Two of the most important of these are John Henry Newman and Henry Edward Manning who
both wished to revitalise Anglicanism with a return to the Roman Catholic Church. In a somewhat
opposite direction, the ideas of socialism were permeating political thought at the time with Friedrich
Engels writing his Condition of the Working Classes in England and William Morris writing the early
2

socialist utopian novel News from Nowhere. One other important and monumental work begun in this
era was the Oxford English Dictionary which would eventually become the most important historical
dictionary of the English language.

Nature writing
See also: Nature writing
In the U.S.A., Henry David Thoreau's works and Susan Fenimore Cooper's Rural Hours (1850) were
canonical influences on Victorian nature writing. In the U.K., Philip Gosse and Sarah Bowdich Lee were
two of the most popular nature writers in the early part of the Victorian era.[6] The Illustrated London
News, founded in 1842, was the world's first illustrated weekly newspaper and often published articles
and illustrations dealing with nature; in the second half of the 19th century, books, articles, and
illustrations on nature became widespread and popular among an increasingly urbanized reading public.

Supernatural and fantastic literature

The old Gothic tales that came out of the late 19th century are the first examples of the genre of fantastic
fiction. These tales often centered on larger-than-life characters such as Sherlock Holmes, famous
detective of the times, Barry Lee, big time gang leader, Sexton Blake, Phileas Fogg, and other fictional
characters of the era, such as Dracula, Edward Hyde, The Invisible Man, and many other fictional
characters who often had exotic enemies to foil. Spanning the 18th and 19th centuries, there was a
particular type of story-writing known as gothic. Gothic literature combines romance and horror in
attempt to thrill and terrify the reader. Possible features in a gothic novel are foreign monsters, ghosts,
curses, hidden rooms and witchcraft. Gothic tales usually take place in locations such as castles,
monasteries, and cemeteries, although the gothic monsters sometimes cross over into the real world,
making appearances in cities such as London and Paris.

Victorian novel
It was in the Victorian era (18371901) that the novel became the leading form of literature in English.
Most writers were now more concerned to meet the tastes of a large middle class reading public than to
please aristocratic patrons. The 1830s saw a resurgence of the social novel, where sensationalized
accounts and stories of the working class poor were directed toward middle class audiences to incite
sympathy and action towards pushing for legal and moral change. Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South
contrasts the lifestyle in the industrial north of England with the wealthier south.
Most Victorian novels were long and closely wrought, full of intricate language, but the dominant
feature of Victorian novels might be their verisimilitude, that is, their close representation to the real
social life of the age. This social life was largely informed by the development of the emerging middle
class and the manners and expectations of this class, as opposed to the aristocrat forms dominating
previous ages.
Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens emerged on the literary scene in the 1830s, confirming the trend for serial publication.
Dickens wrote vividly about London life and struggles of the poor, in books such as Oliver Twist, but in
a good-humoured fashion, accessible to readers of all classes. The festive tale A Christmas Carol he
called his "little Christmas book". Great Expectations is a quest for maturity. A Tale of Two Cities is set
in London and Paris in the time of the French Revolution. Dickens' early works are masterpieces of

comedy, such as The Pickwick Papers. Later his works became darker, but continued to display his
genius for caricature.
The emotionally powerful works of the Bront sisters: Charlotte's Jane Eyre, Emily's Wuthering Heights
were released in 1847, and Anne's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in 1848 after their search to secure
publishers. William Makepeace Thackeray satirised British society in Vanity Fair (1847), while Anthony
Trollope's novels portrayed the lives of the landowning and professional classes of early Victorian
England.
Although pre-dated by John Ruskin's The King of the Golden River in 1841, the history of the modern
fantasy genre is generally said to begin with George MacDonald, influential author of The Princess and
the Goblin and Phantastes (1858). William Morris was a popular English poet who wrote several
fantasy novels during the latter part of the nineteenth century.
Key to Victorian style is the concept of the intrusive narrator and the address to the reader. For example,
the author might interrupt his/her narrative to pass judgment on a character, or pity or praise another,
while later seeming to exclaim "Dear Reader!" and inform or remind the reader of some other relevant
issue.
Wilkie Collins' epistolary novel The Moonstone (1868), is generally considered the first detective novel
in the English language. The Woman in White is regarded as one of the finest sensation novels.
The novels of George Eliot, such as Middlemarch, were a milestone of literary realism, and are
frequently held in the highest regard for their combination of high Victorian literary detail combined
with an intellectual breadth that removes them from the narrow geographic confines they often depict.
An interest in rural matters and the changing social and economic situation of the countryside is seen in
the novels of Thomas Hardy and others.
H. G. Wells, who, like Jules Verne, has been referred to as "The Father of Science Fiction", invented a
number of themes that are now classic in the science fiction genre. The War of the Worlds (1898),
describing an invasion of late Victorian England by Martians using tripod fighting machines equipped
with advanced weaponry, is a seminal depiction of an alien invasion of Earth. The Time Machine is
generally credited with the popularization of the concept of time travel using a vehicle that allows an
operator to travel purposefully and selectively. The term "time machine", coined by Wells, is now
universally used to refer to such a vehicle.

Serial novel
Many novels of the Victorian period were published in serial form; that is, individual chapters or
sections appearing in subsequent journal issues. As such, demand was high for each new appearance of
the novel to introduce some new element, whether it be a plot twist or a new character, so as to maintain
the reader's interest. Authors publishing serially were often paid by the installment, which helps account
for the popularity of the three-volume novel during this period. In part for these reasons, novels are
made up of a variety of plots and a large number of characters, appearing and reappearing as events
dictate.
Victorian Literature

If there is one transcending aspect to Victorian England life and society, that aspect is change or, more
accurately, upheaval. Everything that the previous centuries had held as sacred and indisputable truth
came under assault during the middle and latter parts of the nineteenth century. Nearly every institution
4

of society was shaken by rapid and unpredictable change. Improvements to steam engine technology led
to increased factory production. More manufacturing required more coal to be mined from the ground.
The economies of Europe expanded and accelerated, as the foundations of a completely global economy
were laid. Huge amounts of wealth were created, and the spirit of the times discouraged the regulation
of business practices. Today, this is called laissez-faire economics. This generation of wealth was to the
sole benefit of the newly risen middle class, an urbane, entrepreneurial segment of society which saw
itself as the natural successor to the nobles former position of influence. At the same time, scientific
advancements were undermining the position of the Church in daily life. Charles Darwins theories of
evolution and natural selection brought humanity down to the level of the animal, and seemingly
reduced the meaning of life to a bloody struggle for survival. Rather than a benign Creator, the world
was dominated and steered by strength alone. In the general population, the ever-present gap between
the haves and have-nots widened significantly during the Victorian period. The poorest of their poor
found their lot in life to be worse than it had ever been, as the new market economy favored industry
over agriculture. Large numbers of dispossessed farmers and peasants migrated from the countryside to
the cities, seeking work in the factories. The effects of that demographic shift can still be observed.
Conditions in the overwhelmed, sprawling cities degenerated as the infrastructure simply could not
handle the influx of new workers. Slums and shantytowns became the norm, and depredation was a fact
of life for the majority of the working class.
For some, the fundamental changes taking place in the world meant progress, and were a source of hope
and optimism. For the majority of writers and thinkers, however, the inequality present in Victorian
society was a kind of illness that would sooner or later come to a tipping point. Many intellectuals saw it
as their duty to speak out against the injustices of this new and frightening world. Essayists like Thomas
Carlyle railed against the systematic abuse he saw happening all around him. He saw machinery and the
Industrial Revolution as engines of destruction, stripping people of their very humanity. The level of
social consciousness and immediate relevancy one finds in much of Victorian writing was something not
witnessed before in English letters. Rather than turning inside or escaping into fantasy, essayists and
novelists chose to directly address the pressing social problems of the day. These problems ranged from
atrocious labor conditions and rampant poverty to the issue of womens place in the world what
contemporaries referred to as The Woman Question. Elizabeth Barrett-Brownings long-form poem
The Cry of the Children represents an attack on mining practices in England, specifically the
employment of young children to work deep in the mines. Barrett-Browning had been outraged by a
report she read detailing the practice and felt compelled to make her voice heard on the issue. She was
certainly not alone in this feeling. Novelist Charles Dickens made a cottage industry out of addressing
social ills in a light-hearted, optimistic tone. Each of his many novels called attention to real-world
problems that others might just as soon have swept under the rug. Dickens is also noteworthy for his
rock star status, attaining popularity that would not have been possible in the previous generation. He
wrote with a voice that was very accessible to the ordinary reader of the time, and yet couched within
his fiction were essential questions that society would sooner or later be forced to confront. One cannot
say exactly how much influence Dickens and others had on their society, but the fact that they tried to
change their world is what is important. Writers of the preceding era did not speak to a popular audience
nearly as much as the Victorians, or at least not as self-consciously. The Romantic Movement was
marked by introversion and abstraction; they were much less interested in commenting on, much less
altering the course of world events. Furthermore, the Romantics did not see leadership as a primary
objective for art. Victorians, on the other hand, tacitly agreed that encouraging society toward a higher
good was a righteous, noble occupation for any artist.
Not surprisingly, women in the Victorian world held very little power and had to fight hard for the
change they wanted in their lives. What one thinks of as feminism today had not yet taken form in the
Victorian period. The philosophy of female emancipation, however, became a rallying point for many
5

female Victorian writers and thinkers. Though their philosophies and methods were often quite
divergent, the ultimate goal of intellectual women in the nineteenth century was largely the same. Poets
and novelists frequently had to be coy when addressing their status in society. Christina Rossettis
Goblin Market combines early feminist imagery with many other concepts in a fairy-tale like world of
imagination. Her use of religious symbolism is especially fascinating. Though not as highly regarded,
Letitia Elizabeth Landon was also an accomplished and popular female poet. Charlotte and Emily
Bront crafted novels that have stood the test of time and taken their place as literary classics. These
women were exceptions to the rule. Patriarchy had been firmly entrenched in Western society for so
long that women writers faced an uphill climb to gain any level recognition and acceptance. Some
authors, like Mary Ann Evans, felt the need to work under a male pseudonym in order to receive
recognition. Evans published her first two novels, Adam Bede and Scenes of Clerical Life, under the
false name of George Eliot. Interestingly, even today Evans is more commonly known by her
pseudonym than her real name.
In the early years of the Victorian Period, poetry was still the most visible of literary forms. Like
everything else, poetry and poetics underwent an evolution during the nineteenth century. Both the
purpose of poetry and its basic style and tone changed drastically during the Victorian Period. In the first
half of the nineteenth century, poetry was still mired in the escapist, abstract imagery and themes of the
earlier generation. While essayists and novelists were confronting social issues head-on, poets for their
part remained ambivalent at best. This self-induced coma gradually lifted, and by mid-century most
poets had moved away from the abstractions and metaphysical tropes of the Romantics and fashioned a
more down-to-earth, realistic kind of verse. Alfred, Lord Tennyson was the master of simple, earthy
lyricism to which everyone could relate. His In Memoriam shows off this simplicity and economy of
verse, while remaining an effective and moving elegy for his deceased friend Arthur Hallam. The
obsession with the natural world and the imagination that so clearly distinguished the Romantic poets
was supplanted during the Victorian Period by a clear-headed, almost utilitarian kind of poetics. The
subject matter of Victorian poetry was quite often socially-oriented, but this was by no means set in
stone. Victorian poets were nothing if not masters of variety and inventiveness. Robert Brownings
dramatic monologues, for example, covered a wide array of subjects, from lucid dreams to the nature of
art and even the meaning of existence. Throughout his various aesthetic experiments, Browning never
failed to inject humanity into his subject matter. The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxeds Church,
one of Brownings most famous poems, demonstrates the intensity and psychological realism he was
able to portray in the space of a few hundred lines.
At some point in the Victorian era, the novel replaced the poem as the most fashionable vehicle for the
transmission of literature. This fundamental shift in popular taste has remained to the present day. Serial
publications in magazines and journals became more and more popular, and soon these pieces were
being bound and sold in their complete forms. Dickens made full use of the serial format, and his novels
betray the episodic arrangement of their original publication method. He was the first great popular
novelist in England, and was the forerunner of the artist-celebrity figure which in the twentieth century
would become the norm. The influence of Dickens was so severe that every novelist who came after him
had to work under his aesthetic shadow. Part of his appeal certainly owed to the fact that his literary
style, while always entertaining, put the ills of society under the microscope for everyone to see. His
Hard Times was a condemning portrait of societys obsession with logic and scientific advancement at
the expanse of the imagination. Until the Victorian Period, the novel had been frowned upon as a lesser
form of writing, incapable of the sublime reaches of lyric poetry. Critics saw that the novel appealed to a
popular, often female readership, and therefore dismissed it as artless and dull. The later Victorian
novelists, however, proved that the form could attain heights of artistic achievement previously reserved
only for poetry. Thomas Hardy, for example, pushed the novel to its limits, significantly expanding the
possibilities of the form. Although he thought of himself more as a poet, his first best talent lay in
6

constructing detailed, fatalistic plot-structures that still captivate readers. Novels like Jude the Obscure
share many qualities with Greek tragedy, of which Hardy was quite fond, but they also contain
psychologically sophisticated, realistic characterizations. His gift for characterization would influence
an entire generation of writers.
Thomas Hardy must be regarded as a key forerunner of the Modernist Movement in literature. His
novels and poetry all display tendencies that would reach their apex in the early twentieth century.
Hardy often created desolate, hopeless worlds where life had very little meaning. He also actively
questioned the relevance of modern institutions, in particular organized religion. Sentiments like these
would find accomplished spokespersons in poets like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Another skilled poet
who is often considered a precursor to Modernism is Gerard Manley Hopkins. Though he never
published in his lifetime, his work was greatly received after his death. His unusual use of language set
him apart from virtually every other poet of his day. Hopkins was very much concerned with religion
and the nature of Creation. However, he still preserved a healthy quantity of skepticism. It is this
existential doubt that, like Hardy, made Hopkins a favorite among the Modernist writers who would
later discover his work.
For many, the word Victorian conjures up images of over-dressed ladies and snooty gentlemen
gathered in parlors and reading rooms. The idea of manners essentially sums up the social climate of
middle-class England in the nineteenth century. Rules of personal conduct were in fact so inflexible that
the Victorians garnered a reputation for saying one thing while doing another an attack that the next
generation of writers would take up with vigor. In the world at large, change was happening faster than
many people could comprehend. A surging global economy was orchestrated by the might of the British
Empire. The nobility, formerly at the top of the pyramid in society, found their status reduced as
agriculture lost its preeminence in the now industrial economy. Mechanization and steam power led to
ruthless efficiency, while more often than not the poor suffered under the weight of the capitalist middle
class. Being impoverished in Victorian England was unpleasant to say the least, but there were efforts
underway to improve the lot of the poor. The Reform Bills of the nineteenth century extended voting
rights to men who were previously disenfranchised but not, of course, to women. That would require
years more of struggle. For all of the social inequalities which still persisted, the Victorians successfully
undermined some of humanitys most time-honored institutions. Some writers greeted these changes
with fear, and wanted desperately for society to check its relentless pace. Others embraced the new
world that was coming into being, thrilled at the progress of science and society. Together, these voices
comprise an important and sometimes overlooked era in English literary history.
This article is copyrighted 2011 by Jalic Inc. Do not reprint it without permission. Written by Josh
Rahn. Josh holds a Masters degree in English Literature from Morehead State University, and a Masters
degree in Library Science from the University of Kentucky.

ENGLISH REALISM: THE VICTORIAN ERA (1837-1901)

Realism is a literary movement that started in France in the 1850s as a reaction against Romanticism and
which tried to show "life as it was" in literature all over Europe. Although the concept is also questioned
by some critics, it is a useful term to understand the general spirit of the second half of the 19th century:
a reaction to Romanticism, a stress on reason and positivism, and a faith in the power of the artist to
show reality.
In England, this movement coincided approximately with the "Victorian era", a period ruled by Queen
Victoria (1837-1901) which meant the height of the British Empire and the Industrial Revolution. The
United Kingdom expanded its borders into America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania and became the first
7

economic and political world power. Many critics prefer to talk about the "Victorian Age", since many
of the best English novelists of the period are not "realistic" in the same sense as their French or Russian
counterparts. But whether more or less realistic, NOVELS are certainly the most important literary form
of the period, excellent novels read by an expanding educated middle class that had developed with
economic prosperity.
Walter Scott (1771-1832) started out as a writer of Romantic narrative verse and ended up as a
historical novelist. He wrote several historical novels, mainly about Scottish history. Ivanhoe (1819).
JANE AUSTEN (1775-1817) shared the chronological time with the Romantics, but she shares some of
the features of Realism. She has a unique talent and cannot really be assigned to any group. Her novels
(Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Emma (1816)) remain as popular and
critically acclaimed as ever. Her primary interest is people, not ideas, and her achievement lies in the
meticulously exact presentation of human situations and in the delineation of characters that are really
living creatures. Her novels deal with the life of rural land-owners, seen from a womans point of view,
have little action but are full of humour and true dialogue.
The Bront sisters wrote after Jane Austen but are the most Romantic of the Victorian novelists,
particularly Emily Bront (1818-1848), who wrote Wuthering Heights (1847), the epitome of the
Romantic novel, wild passion set against the Yorkshire moors. Charlotte Bront (1816-1855) wrote
Jane Eyre (1847), a love story of great realism.
CHARLES DICKENS (1812-1870) was perhaps the most popular novelist of the period. He serialized
most of his novels, which may explain some of his weak plots. Dickens wrote vividly about London life
and the struggles of the poor, but in a good-humoured fashion (with grotesque characters) which was
acceptable to readers of all classes. His early works such as the Pickwick Papers (1836) are
masterpieces of comedy. Later his works became darker, without losing his genius for caricature: Oliver
Twist (1837), David Copperfield (1850), Great Expectations (1861). A Christmas Carol (1843) is the
popular story of Mr. Scrooge visited by the four Christmas ghosts.
William M. Thackeray (1811-1863) wrote Vanity Fair (1847), a satire of high classes in English
society. George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans, 1819-1890) might be the most realistic of these writers:
Middlemarch (1874). Anthony Trollope (1815-1888) wrote novels about life in a provincial English
town. Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was a very pessimistic writer who wrote stories of people in the
countryside (the fictional county of Wessex) whose fate was governed by forces outside themselves
(which connects him to Naturalism). Jude the Obscure (1895), Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891).
The expansion of the reading middle classes allowed for the development of POPULAR
LITERATURE, like the Detective Stories written by Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), who,
following the example of Edgar Allan Poe, wrote his tales of Sherlock Holmes. G. K. Chesterton
(1874-1936) wrote his Father Brown detective stories as well as other non-genre novels. H.G. Wells
(1866-1946) wrote very interesting science fiction, like The Time Machine (1895) or The War of the
Worlds (1898) as well as non-genre novels.
Literature for children also developed in the Victorian Age as a separate genre. Some works become
globally well-known, such as those of Lewis Carroll (1832-1898), author of the extremely rich
fantasies Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1865). Adventure
novels, such as those by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), were written for adults, and although
they are now generally classified as for children and teenagers they are still powerful: Treasure Island
(1883), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). Helen Beatrix Potter (1866-1943) was an English author and
8

illustrator, best known for her childrens books, which featured animal characters: The Tale of Peter
Rabbit (1902).
Some Victorian poets worth mentioning are Robert and Elizabeth Browning (husband and wife),
Gerald Manley Hopkins (1844-1849), a precursor of Modernism, and the pre-Raphaelites (school of
painters and poets) Christina and Gabriel Rosseti (brother and sister). Lord (Alfred) Tennyson (18091892) was Poet Laureate during most of Queen Victorias reign and sang the values of the British
Empire and the Victorian Age in some of his poems, like The Charge of the Light Brigade (1854).
These Imperial values were also sung by Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) several years later in his poems
and in novels like The Man Who Would Be King (1888) and The Jungle Book (1894)
One of the aspects of romantic literature that defies realism is the tendency of good characters to end well while
bad characters end in dismay. This idealism suggests not only that people get what they deserve, but that every
person is either intrinsically good or bad. Reality disagrees, as actual people exhibit a complexity of character and
outcomes in their lives. Jane Austen created characters who were mostly flat, which aligned with her romantic
predecessors. However, in Mansfield Park, Austen has finally created a heroine who is not wholly ideal as a
heroine. Her theatrics call for negative attention not only from Edmund and her other family members, but from
the reader, and this annoying attribute makes her character seem more realistic.

Victorian Serial Novels

The serialization of literature began as early as the 17th century but it reached its zenith in Britain in
the 19th century. Throughout the Victorian period, novels in serial parts were published in abundance in
newspapers and magazines, by far the most popular form, or in discreet parts issued in instalments,
usually twenty monthly issues. Serial publication enabled middle class readers to purchase novels that
would be too expensive for them to purchase as a single edition. Most monthly part issues sold for
about one shilling, meaning the cost of a novel could be spread out over a year and a half. Magazines
and newspapers were even more affordable and many offered two or more novels running concurrently.
Illustrations were also an important feature of serial novels and Victorian artists, like John Everett
Millais, were well known for their illustrations for serial fiction. Advertising also appeared in
magazines and newspapers and in monthly part issues.
Serialization affected the form of the English novel. Each chapter had to engage the reader as a single
unit as well as working within the context of the whole novel. Authors adopted various strategies to
cope with tight deadlines and other challenges of the form, such as the requirement to produce parts of
a uniform length. Some wrote the complete novel beforehand and submitted all the monthly parts
together. Others let the novel evolve with each part. In such cases, the story could be interrupted or
delayed by illness. It was also important not to introduce any element to the story that a Victorian
audience might find offensive as many periodicals were aimed at a family audience. Part issues
eventually fell out of favour as magazines became the preferred format and inexpensive one-volume
reprints of original novels became available.
Many 19th century authors established themselves by first publishing original fiction in serial format.
Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, George Meredith,
Robert Louis Stevenson and more, all published serial novels, either in monthly magazines or as
discreet serial parts. Charles Dickens popularized the part serial format, beginning with his first novel,
the Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836-1837), one of the serial novels digitized as part of
the Victorian Serial Novels collection. Pickwick was not well-received until the fourth issue when sales
soared to 40,000 in one month. Dickens subsequently published eight other novels in part issue format,
including Martin Chuzzlewit (Jan. 1843-Jul. 1844), Dombey and Son (Oct. 1846-Apr. 1848), David
Copperfield (May 1849-Nov. 1850), Little Dorrit (Dec. 1855-Jun. 1857) and Our Mutual Friend (May
9

1864-Nov. 1865).

19th Century
Serialized fiction surged in popularity during Britain's Victorian era, due to a combination of the rise of
literacy, technological advances in printing, and improved economics of distribution.[5] A significant
majority of 'original' novels from the Victorian era actually first appeared in either monthly or weekly
installments in magazines or newspapers.[6] The wild success of Charles Dickens' The Pickwick Papers,
first published in 1836, is widely considered to have established the viability and appeal of the serialized
format within periodical literature. During that era, the line between "quality" and "commercial"
literature was not distinct. [7] In the German speaking countries, the serialized novel was widely
popularized by the weekly family magazine Die Gartenlaube, which reached a circulation of 382,000 by
1875.[8]
While American periodicals first syndicated British writers, over time they drew from a growing base of
domestic authors. The rise of the periodicals like Harpers and the Atlantic Monthly grew in symbiotic
tandem with American literary talent. The magazines nurtured and provided an economic sustainability
for writers, while the writers helped grow the periodicals' circulation base. During the late 19th century,
those that were considered the best American writers first published their work first in serial form and
then only later in a completed volume format.[9] As a piece in Scribner's Monthly explained in 1878, it is
only the "second and third rate novelist who could not get published in a magazine and is obliged to
publish in a volume, and it is in a magazine that the best novelists always appear first." Among the
American writers that wrote in serial form were Henry James, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Herman
Melville. A large part of the appeal for writers at the time was the broad audiences that serialization
could reach, which would then grow their following for published works.
One of the first significant American works to be released in serial format is Uncle Tom's Cabin, by
Harriet Beecher Stowe, which was published over a 40-week period by National Era, an abolitionist
periodical, starting with the June 5, 1851 issue.
Serialization was so standard in American literature that authors from that era often built installment
structure into their creative process. Henry James, for example, often had his works divided into multipart segments of similar length.[10] The consumption of fiction during that time was different than the
20th century. Instead of being read in single volume, a novel would often be consumered by readers in
installments over a period as long as a year, with the authors and periodicals often responding to
audience reaction.[11]
Serialization was also popular throughout Europe. In France, Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary was
serialized in La Revue de Paris in 1856. In Russia, The Russian Messenger serialized Leo Tolstoy's
Anna Karenina from 1873 to 1877 and Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov from 1879 to
1880.
Other famous English language writers who wrote serial literature for popular magazines included
Wilkie Collins, inventor of the English detective novel and author of The Moonstone; Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle, who created the Sherlock Holmes stories originally for serialization in The Strand magazine; and
the Polish writer Bolesaw Prus, author of the serialized novels The Outpost (188586), The Doll (1887
89), The New Woman (189093) and his sole historical novel, Pharaoh (the latter, exceptionally, written
entire over a year's time in 189495 and serialized only after completion, in 189596).

10

Naturalism
The logical outgrowth of literary Realism was the point of view known as Naturalism. This literary
movement, like its predecessor, found expression almost exclusively within the novel. Naturalism also
found its greatest number of practitioners in America shortly before and after the turn of the twentieth
century. Naturalism sought to go further and be more explanatory than Realism by identifying the
underlying causes for a persons actions or beliefs. The thinking was that certain factors, such as
heredity and social conditions, were unavoidable determinants in ones life. A poor immigrant could not
escape their life of poverty because their preconditions were the only formative aspects in his or her
existence that mattered. Naturalism almost entirely dispensed with the notion of free will, or at least a
free will capable of enacting real change in lifes circumstances. The theories of Charles Darwin are
often identified as playing a role in the development of literary Naturalism; however, such a relationship
does not stand up to investigative rigor. Darwin never applied his theories to human social behavior, and
in doing so many authors seriously abused the actual science. There was in the late nineteenth century a
fashion in sociology to apply evolutionary theory to human social woes. This line of thinking came to be
knows as Social Darwinism, and today is recognized as the systematized, scientific racism that it is.
More than a few atrocities in world history were perpetrated by those who misguidedly applied
Darwinism to the social realm. Naturalism, for better or worse, is in some respects a form of Social
Darwinism played out in fiction
One could make the case that Naturalism merely a specialized variety of Realism. In fact, many authors
of the period are identified as both Naturalist and Realist. Edith Wharton for one is frequently identified
as perfectly representative of both aesthetic frameworks. However, Naturalism displayed some very
specific characteristics that delimit it from the contemporary literature that was merely realistic. The
environment, especially the social environment, played a large part in how the narrative developed. The
locale essentially becomes its own character, guiding the human characters in ways they do not fully
realize. Plot structure as such was secondary to the inner workings of character, which superficially
resembles how the Realists approached characterization. The work of Emile Zola provided inspiration
for many of the Naturalist authors, as well as the work of many Russian novelists. It would be fairer to
assert that all Naturalist fiction is Realist, but not all Realist fiction is Naturalist.
The dominant theme of Naturalist literature is that persons are fated to whatever station in life their
heredity, environment, and social conditions prepare them for. The power of primitive emotions to
negate human reason was also a recurring element. Writers like Zola and Frank Norris conceived of
their work as experiments in which characters were subjected to various stimuli in order to gauge
reactions. Adverse social conditions are taken as a matter of fact. The documentary style of narrative
makes no comment on the situation, and there is no sense of advocating for change. The Naturalist
simply takes the world as it is, for good or ill. The Naturalist novel is then a sort of laboratory of fiction,
with studies underway that ethically could not be performed in the real world.
The work of French novelist and playwright Emile Zola is often pinpointed as the genesis of the
Naturalist movement proper. His most famous contribution to Naturalism was Les Rougon-Macquart, a
sweeping collection of 20 novels that follow two families over the course of five generations. One of the
families is privileged, the other impoverished, but they each stumble into decay and failure. The action
takes place during the rule of Napoleon III, a time of great uncertainty for the French people. The
atmosphere in Paris, as well as in the novels, was one of dread and uncertainty. Zola crafts over 300
characters for his epic, yet on the whole they are rather thinly drawn. His concern is not with character
as such, but how characters react to circumstances. Often, an inanimate object or place is given as much
potency as a human character. Zolas often grim subject matter is couple with a sober and scientific
narration of details. There is a clinical aspect to his craft that is echoed in his descriptions of novel-

11

writing as a form of science. Later writers would concur, citing Zola as their major inspiration in
pursuing the Naturalist aesthetic in literature.
One of the first truly Naturalist works of literature, and certainly the first in America, was Stephen
Cranes Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. Crane spent a great deal of time in the Bowery of lower
Manhattan gathering material for his first novel. Like a research scientist accumulating data, Crane
wanted to learn as much as he could about life for the impoverished, mostly immigrant residents.
Maggie was unusual for the time in that it perfectly reproduced the ostensibly vulgar dialect of the
persons portrayed. An earlier novel treating the same subject may have romanticized the immigrant life,
but Crane portrayed abject poverty exactly as it was. The book was not a great seller, and he lost a hefty
sum of money on the venture, but those who did read it saw the promise of a new talent in American
literature. Like many of his fellow American novelists, Crane began his career as a journalist, and he
continued to travel and report on international stories for the remainder of his career. His total
contributions to the body of literature were relatively small, as he died before his thirtieth birthday.
Despite his short career, Stephen Cranes talent stands out above every other writer of the period. This
was not fully realized until many years after his death. Modernists like Ernest Hemingway worked hard
to rehabilitate the critical reputation of Crane, and today that reputation is resoundingly positive. Cranes
most celebrated and often misunderstood novel is The Red Badge of Courage. The novel was set during
the Civil War, and follows one young soldiers experience of that war. Whats truly remarkable is that
Crane wrote Red Badge with no actual experience of battle. His descriptions and scenery were inspired
by war and history magazines, which he found dry and too matter-of-fact. To Cranes mind, the stories
lacked any connection to the real feeling warfare, as dates and locations of battles cannot even begin to
reproduce the essence of combat. He saw an opportunity to craft the first novel that explored warfare
from the point of view of the psyche. In his own words, Crane envisioned a psychological portrait of
fear. He achieved this vision through intense, almost painterly prose. Characters speak in realistic
dialects. The story is not rooted in a specific locale. The soldiers cannot see the big picture of the war,
and neither can the reader. Many characters are nameless, even the protagonist Fleming is often just the
young soldier. Throughout the novel runs a current of deep, bitter irony. The glory of warfare is
replaced by ignorance, pain, and fear. Crane offers no sentimentality or mythology. He reports the events
in fine detail, but makes no authorial commentary. The Red Badge of Courage is frequently required
reading for high school English classes, yet the irony of the text is often lost. Crane abhorred the
mythmaking that surrounded armed combat, and his greatest novel is an attempt to show that humans
were not designed to commit such atrocities on each other.
Though she is frequently lumped together with the Realists, Edith Wharton often produced novels that
just as rightly belong in the category of Naturalism. Unlike the bulk of her contemporaries in the
Naturalist vein, Whartons novels dealt almost exclusively with the concerns of the upper crust of
society. Though she herself descended from enormous wealth, Wharton was able to step outside her own
experience and take an objective view of privilege and class. Her agenda was to show the unforgiving
nature of life at the top of the class structure. Her characters often fall from grace through their own
mistakes, miscalculation, and sometimes for no apparent reason at all. Interestingly, Wharton also had a
successful career as a designer of homes and landscapes. This attention to environmental details
certainly found expression with her literary productions. More so than most Naturalist writers, Wharton
displayed a real sympathy for her characters. Even when they meet unfortunate ends, Whartons
affection for the characters she creates is readily apparent. In that sense, her particular brand of
Naturalism was less cold and clinical than many of her contemporaries. Still, one cannot escape the
sense that Wharton subscribed to the notion of determinism a world devoid of free will.

12

In Ethan Frome, Wharton departs from her typical subject matter and attempts a thoroughly provincial
narrative. The setting is rural Massachusetts, and the characters are poverty-stricken and hopeless. There
is the faintest hint of romance, but all hopes of a happy resolution are dashed, quite literally. Unlike her
upper-class novels, in Ethan Frome Whartons tone is cold and unsparing. The poverty of the characters
is presented as a roadblock to even the slimmest chance of fulfillment. The lead characters are not even
permitted to end their suffering through suicide their fateful sledding accident only adding to the
tragedy of their existence. There is no epic sweep to the tragedy either. The world of Ethan Frome is
very small, and the characters attempt to escape from it makes it even smaller. The sense of irrevocable
fate is overpowering, as is the unforgiving, elemental nature of the harsh Massachusetts winter.
In Frank Norris, American literature found its most potent expression of Naturalism. Profoundly
influenced by evolutionary theory, Norriss chief concern was with how civilized man overcame the
brute, animal nature that still lived inside of him. His novels are Darwinian struggles played out in
fiction, and he was sometimes criticized for making literature that was too scientific and lacking in
sympathy. Like many Naturalists, Norris was interested in the trials of life of the poor and destitute. In
McTeague, his most famous novel, he studies how ambition and greed derail the life of a moderately
successful dentist. Characters are frequently referred to in animalistic terms, and there is an undercurrent
of unhealthy sexuality that permeates the first sections of the novel. Overall, McTeague is a grim
exposition on human natures inability to rise above instinct. The title character is small-minded, almost
childlike in his view of the world. Because of this, his well-meaning efforts to improve his economic
situation go hopeless awry. In the final scene, one gets the impression that the protagonist, if one can
call him that, could not have ended up anywhere else.
Despite the resounding pessimism of their literary output, the Naturalists for the most part were
genuinely concerned with improving the situation of the poor in America and the world. Frank Norris
wrote and campaigned on behalf of social reforms, and Stephen Cranes journalism reveals a mind
keenly aware of human suffering. There would seem to be a disconnect between the opinions of the
authors and the statements made in the contexts of their novels. However, closer study reveals this not to
be the case. Norris intended his novels to be warnings about the capacity for mankind to sink to its
lowest common denominator. Critics, both contemporary and modern, sometimes accuse the Naturalists
of ethnocentricity. True, the images presented of immigrant and ethnic groups are unflattering. However,
given their backgrounds in journalism, the Naturalist writers would probably argue that they simply
presented life as it appeared. If the life they saw was ugly or depraved, they were not to be held
responsible.
Naturalism was a relatively short-lived philosophical approach to crafting novels. Few writers of the
period experienced real success in the style, but those that did became titans of the art form. One
wonders at the profound literature that might have been produced had Stephen Crane not died before his
thirtieth birthday. Frank Norris likewise died before his time, an irony that should not escape modern
readers. It is difficult to gauge the total effects of Naturalism on the path of American literature. The fact
that Social Darwinism eventually came to be seen for the disguised racism that it is probably marred the
reputation of Naturalist writing. However, the sheer art and craft of the literature that the greatest
novelists of the period generated overcomes such handicaps.

Naturalism: A literary movement seeking to depict life as accurately as possible, without

artificial distortions of emotion, idealism, and literary convention. The school of thought is a
product of post-Darwinian biology in the nineteenth century. It asserts that human beings
exist entirely in the order of nature. Human beings do not have souls or any mode of
participating in a religious or spiritual world beyond the biological realm of nature, and any
13

such attempts to engage in a religious or spiritual world are acts of self-delusion and wishfulfillment. Humanity is thus a higher order animal whose character and behavior are, as M.
H. Abrams summarizes, entirely determined by two kinds of forces, hereditary and
environment. The individual's compulsive instincts toward sexuality, hunger, and
accumulation of goods are inherited via genetic compulsion and the social and economic
forces surrounding his or her upbringing. Naturalistic writers--including Zola, Frank Norris,
Stephen Crane, and Theodore Dreiser--try to present their subjects with scientific objectivity.
They often choose characters based on strong animal drives who are 'victims both of
glandular secretions within and of sociological pressures without' (Abrams 175). Typically,
naturalist writers avoid explicit emotional commentary in favor of medical frankness about
bodily functions and biological activities that would be almost unmentionable during earlier
literary movements like transcendentalism, Romanticism, and mainstream Victorian
literature. The end of the naturalistic novel is usually unpleasant or unhappy, perhaps even
'tragic,' though not in the cathartic sense Aristotle, Sophocles, or Elizabethan writers would
have understood by the term tragedy. Naturalists emphasize the smallness of humanity in the
universe, they remind readers of the immensity, power, and cruelty of the natural world,
which does not care whether humanity lives or dies. Examples of this include Stephen
Crane's 'The Open Boat,' which pits a crew of shipwrecked survivors in a raft against
starvation, dehydration, and sharks in the middle of the ocean, and Jack London's 'To Build a
Fire,' which reveals the inability of a Californian transplant to survive outside of his 'natural'
environment as he freezes to death in the Alaskan wilderness.
Naturalism was a literary movement taking place from the 1880s to 1940s that used detailed realism to suggest
that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character. It was
depicted as a literary movement that seeks to replicate a believable everyday reality, as opposed to such
movements as Romanticism or Surrealism, in which subjects may receive highly symbolic, idealistic, or even
supernatural treatment. Naturalism is the outgrowth of literary realism, a prominent literary movement in mid19th-century France and elsewhere. Naturalistic writers were influenced by Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.
[1]
They believed that one's heredity and social environment largely determine one's character. Whereas realism
seeks only to describe subjects as they really are, naturalism also attempts to determine "scientifically" the
underlying forces (e.g. the environment or heredity) influencing the actions of its subjects. Naturalistic works
often include uncouth or sordid subject matter; for example, mile Zola's works had a frankness about sexuality
along with a pervasive pessimism. Naturalistic works exposed the dark harshness of life, including poverty,
racism, violence, prejudice, disease, corruption, prostitution, and filth. As a result, naturalistic writers were
frequently criticized for focusing too much on human vice and misery.

There are defining characteristics of literary naturalism. One of these is pessimism. Very often, one or
more characters will continue to repeat one line or phrase that tends to have a pessimistic connotation,
sometimes emphasizing the inevitability of death.
For example Bernard Bonnejean quotes this passage of Huysmans where the symbolism of death is
visible, such an allegory, in a portrait of old woman:
[...] une vieille bique de cinquante ans, une longue efflanque qui blait la lune, campe sur ses
maigres tibias [...] crevant les draps de ses os en pointe[2]
[...] an old hag of fifty years, lonely and outstretched, bleating at the moon, poised on her skinny shins
[...] smashing the skin of her bones to a point (transl. Joiner)

14

Another characteristic of literary naturalism is detachment from the story. The author often tries to
maintain a tone that will be experienced as 'objective.' Also, an author will sometimes achieve
detachment by creating nameless characters (though, strictly speaking, this is more common among
modernists such as Ernest Hemingway). This puts the focus on the plot and what happens to the
character, rather than the characters themselves. Another characteristic of naturalism is determinism.
Determinism is basically the opposite of the notion of free will. For determinism, the idea that individual
characters have a direct influence on the course of their lives is supplanted by a focus on nature or fate.
Often, a naturalist author will lead the reader to believe a character's fate has been pre-determined,
usually by environmental factors, and that he/she can do nothing about it. Another common
characteristic is a surprising twist at the end of the story. Equally, there tends to be in naturalist novels
and stories a strong sense that nature is indifferent to human struggle. These are only a few of the
defining characteristics of naturalism, however.
Naturalism is an extension of realism, and may be better understood by study of the basic precepts of
that literary movement. The term naturalism itself may have been used in this sense for the first time by
mile Zola. It is believed that he sought a new idea to convince the reading public of something new
and more modern in his fiction. He argued that his innovation in fiction-writing was the creation of
characters and plots based on the scientific method.
Psychological

The psychological novel first appeared in 17th-century France, with Madame de La Fayettes Princesse
de Clves (1678), and the category was consolidated by works like the Abb Prvosts Manon Lescaut
(1731) in the century following. More primitive fiction had been characterized by a proliferation of
action and incidental characters; the psychological novel limited itself to a few characters whose
motives for action could be examined and analyzed. In England, the psychological novel did not appear
until the Victorian era, when George Eliot became its first great exponent. It has been assumed since
then that the serious novelists prime concern is the workings of the human mind, and hence much of the
greatest fiction must be termed psychological. Dostoyevskys Crime and Punishment deals less with the
ethical significance of a murder than with the soul of the murderer; Flauberts interest in Emma Bovary
has less to do with the consequences of her mode of life in terms of nemesic logic than with the patterns
of her mind; in Anna Karenina, Tolstoy presents a large-scale obsessive study of feminine psychology
that is almost excruciating in its relentless probing. The novels of Henry James are psychological in that
the crucial events occur in the souls of the protagonists, and it was perhaps James more than any serious
novelist before or since who convinced frivolous novel-readers that the psychological approach
guarantees a lack of action and excitement.
The theories of Sigmund Freud are credited as the source of the psychoanalytical novel. Freud was
anticipated, however, by Shakespeare (in, for example, his treatment of Lady Macbeths somnambulistic
guilt). Two 20th-century novelists of great psychological insightJoyce and Nabokovprofessed a
disdain for Freud. To write a novel with close attention to the Freudian or Jungian techniques of analysis
does not necessarily produce new prodigies of psychological revelation; Oedipus and Electra complexes
have become commonplaces of superficial novels and films. The great disclosures about human
motivation have been achieved more by the intuition and introspection of novelists and dramatists than
by the more systematic work of the clinicians.

Social novel
Social novels, also known as social problem novels or realist fiction, originated in the 18th century but
gained a popular following in the 19th center with the rise of the Victorian Era and in many ways was a
reaction to industrialization, social, political and economic issues and movements. In the 1830s the
15

social novel saw resurgence as emphasis on widespread reforms of government and society emerged,
and acted as a literary means of protest and awareness of abuses of government, industry and other
repercussions suffered by those who did not profit from England's economic prosperity.[1] The
sensationalized accounts and stories of the working class poor were directed toward middle class
audiences to help incite sympathy and action towards pushing for legal and moral changes, as with the
Reform Act of 1832, and crystallized different issues in periodicals and novels for a growing literate
population.

Elements of the Social Novel

Different sub-genres of the social novel included the industrial novel that focused on the countrys
working class rural and urban poor and also the later condition of England novel that was geared
toward education, suffrage and other social movements. Deplorable conditions in factories and mines,
the plight of child labor and endangered women, and the constant threat of rising criminality and
[epidemics] due to over-crowding and poor sanitation [2] were all laced into the storyline lines of these
novels. On a moral level the social novel became the medium for authors who either took in common
experiences of a marginalized group or those in the midst of dire circumstances and composed
sensationalized stories for members of the middle and upper classes of Victorian society. Many of the
different novels held a moral or supernatural element that linked reform to Christianity and played on
the perception that the middle class were more economically sound but also more devoted to their
religiosity, therefore more prone to assist the lower classes before the aristocracy. An example of this
was Charles Dickens' Christmas Carol where the lead character Scrooge is instructed by several ghosts
to live a Christian life and help his less fortunate neighbors and employees[3]. Though the majority of
these novels were to sensationalize and shock the middle class into political action and reform work,
opposition against these novels was rapid throughout their peak years during the 19th century. An
element of the growing mass culture that came with more economic prosperity and literacy in the middle
class led to a saturation of literature that combined the respectable and the scandalous and meant wealth
to the authors, editors and distributors of these novels.[4] This was often read as an underhanded way for
outsiders to make a profit off the struggles of disenfranchised, uneducated and underemployed
populations, but the genre of the social problem novel was also an indicator of the social changes within
Victorian society. Therefore the social novels did not determine the structures, government or
institutions of the nation but the social novel was determined and was a reflection of the nation.

The Effects of the Social Novel

A debate rages over whether or not the social novel ever declined but elements of the genre have
permeated into different mediums since the 1850s. The social problem novels were not confined to
England but were written throughout Europe and the United States. An example is Russian author Leo
Tolstoy, who championed reform for his own country, particularly in education and added his novels
War and Peace and Anna Karenina to the realist fiction genre. Newspapers would continue to
sensationalize stories and novels would continue to inspire and thrill the public and elements of social
novels still provide the messages of marginalized parts of different societies today.[5]

Practitioners
Practitioners include Charlotte Bront, Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, George Eliot, Elizabeth
Gaskell, Charles Kingsley and Harriet Martineau; later authors such as Thomas Hardy and George
Gissing are sometimes included as well.[6].

16

Bildungsroman
In literary criticism, a Bildungsroman (German pronunciation: [blds.oman]; German: "formation
novel")[1] or coming-of-age story is a literary genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth
of the protagonist from youth to adulthood (coming of age),[2] and in which character change is thus
extremely important.[3] The term was coined in 1819 by philologist Karl Morgenstern in his university
lectures, and later famously reprised by Wilhelm Dilthey, who legitimized it in 1870 and popularized it
in 1905.[1][4] The genre is further characterized by a number of formal, topical, and thematic features.[5]
The term coming-of-age novel is sometimes used interchangeably with Bildungsroman, but its use is
usually wider and less technical.
The birth of the Bildungsroman is normally dated to the publication of Goethes The Apprenticeship of
Wilhelm Meister in 179596.[6] Although the Bildungsroman arose in Germany, it has had extensive
influence first in Europe and later throughout the world. Thomas Carlyle translated Goethes novel into
English, and after its publication in 1824, many British authors wrote novels inspired by it.[citation needed] In
the 20th century, it has spread to Germany, Britain, France,[7] and several other countries around the
globe.[citation needed]
The genre translates fairly directly into cinematic form, the coming-of-age film.
A Bildungsroman tells about the growing up or coming of age of a sensitive person who is looking for
answers and experience. The genre evolved from folklore tales of a dunce or youngest son going out in
the world to seek his fortune. Usually in the beginning of the story there is an emotional loss which
makes the protagonist leave on his journey. In a Bildungsroman, the goal is maturity, and the protagonist
achieves it gradually and with difficulty. The genre often features a main conflict between the main
character and society. Typically, the values of society are gradually accepted by the protagonist and he is
ultimately accepted into society the protagonist's mistakes and disappointments are over. In some
works, the protagonist is able to reach out and help others after having achieved maturity.
There are many variations and subgenres of Bildungsroman that focus on the growth of an individual.
An Entwicklungsroman ("development novel") is a story of general growth rather than self-cultivation.
An Erziehungsroman ("education novel") focuses on training and formal schooling,[citation needed] while a
Knstlerroman ("artist novel") is about the development of an artist and shows a growth of the self.[8]
Pre-Raphaelite Movement - Description
The Pre-Raphaelites, a group of 19th century English painters, poets, and critics who reacted against
Victorian materialism and the outworn neo-classical conventions of academic art by producing earnest
quasi-religious works inspired by medieval and early Renaissance painters up to the time of the Italian
painter and architect Raphael. They were also influenced by the Nazarenes, young German artists who
formed a brotherhood in Rome in 1810 to restore Christian art to its medieval purity.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was established in 1848, and its central figure was the painter and poet
Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Other members were his brother, William Michael Rossetti, John Everett
Millais, Frederick George Stephens, James Collinson, and Thomas Woolner.
Essentially Christian in outlook, the brotherhood deplored the imitative historical and genre painting of
their day. Together they sought to revitalise art through a simpler, more positive vision. In portrait
painting, for example, the group eschewed the sombre colours and formal structure preferred by the
17

Royal Academy. They found their inspiration in the comparatively sincere and religious, and
scrupulously detailed, art of the Middle Ages. Pre-Raphaelite art became distinctive for its blend of
archaic, romantic, and materialistic qualities, but much of it has been criticised as superficial and
sentimental, if not artificial. Millais eventually left the group, but other artists joined it, including
Edward C Burne-Jones and William Morris. The eminent art critic John Ruskin was an ardent supporter
of the movement.
Rossetti & the Pre-Raphaelite Movement
from A History of English Literature
1918
by Robert Huntington Fletcher
ROSSETTI AND THE PRE-RAPHAELITE MOVEMENT.
Many of the secondary Victorian poets must here be passed by, but several of them are too important to be dismissed without
at least brief notice. The middle of the century is marked by a new Romantic impulse, the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, which
begins with Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Rossetti was born in London in 1828. His father was an Italian, a liberal refugee from the
outrageous government of Naples, and his mother was also half Italian. The household, though poor, was a center for other
Italian exiles, but this early and tempestuous political atmosphere created in the poet, by reaction, a lifelong aversion for
politics. His desultory education was mostly in the lines of painting and the Italian and English poets. His own practice in
poetry began as early as is usual with poets, and before he was nineteen, by a special inspiration, he wrote his best and most
famous poem, 'The Blessed Damosel.' In the school of the Royal Academy of Painting, in 1848, he met William Holman
Hunt and John E. Millais, and the three formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, in which Rossetti, whose disposition
throughout his life was extremely self-assertive, or even domineering, took the lead. The purpose of the Brotherhood was to
restore to painting and literature the qualities which the three enthusiasts found in the fifteenth century Italian painters, those
who just preceded Raphael. Rossetti and his friends did not decry the noble idealism of Raphael himself, but they felt that in
trying to follow his grand style the art of their own time had become too abstract and conventional. They wished to renew
emphasis on serious emotion, imagination, individuality, and fidelity to truth; and in doing so they gave special attention to
elaboration of details in a fashion distinctly reminiscent of medievalism. Their work had much, also, of medieval mysticism
and symbolism. Besides painting pictures they published a very short-lived periodical, 'The Germ,' containing both literary
material and drawings. Ruskin, now arriving at fame and influence, wrote vigorously in their favor, and though the
Brotherhood did not last long as an organization, it has exerted a great influence on subsequent painting.
Rossetti's impulses were generous, but his habits were eccentric and selfish, and his life unfortunate. His engagement with
Miss Eleanor Siddal, a milliner's apprentice (whose face appears in many of his pictures), was prolonged by his lack of
means for nine years; further, he was an agnostic, while she held a simple religious faith, and she was carrying on a losing
struggle with tuberculosis. Sixteen months after their marriage she died, and on a morbid impulse of remorse for
inconsiderateness in his treatment of her Rossetti buried his poems, still unpublished, in her coffin. After some years,
however, he was persuaded to disinter and publish them. Meanwhile he had formed friendships with the slightly younger
artists William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, and they established a company for the manufacture of furniture and other
articles, to be made beautiful as well as useful, and thus to aid in spreading the esthetic sense among the English people.
After some years Rossetti and Burne-Jones withdrew from the enterprise, leaving it to Morris. Rossetti continued all his life
to produce both poetry and paintings. His pictures are among the best and most gorgeous products of recent romantic
art--'Dante's Dream,' 'Beata Beatrix,' 'The Blessed Damosel,' and many others. During his later years he earned a large
income, and he lived in a large house in Cheyne Row, Chelsea (near Carlyle), where for a while, as long as his irregular
habits permitted, the novelist George Meredith and the poet Swinburne were also inmates. He gradually grew more morbid,
and became a rather pitiful victim of insomnia, the drug chloral, and spiritualistic delusions about his wife. He died in 1882.
Rossetti's poetry is absolutely unlike that of any other English poet, and the difference is clearly due in large part to his
Italian race and his painter's instinct. He has, in the didactic sense, absolutely no religious, moral, or social interests; he is an
artist almost purely for art's sake, writing to give beautiful embodiment to moods, experiences, and striking moments. If it is
true of Tennyson, however, that he stands aloof from actual life, this is far truer of Rossetti. His world is a vague and languid
region of enchantment, full of whispering winds, indistinct forms of personified abstractions, and the murmur of hidden
streams; its landscape sometimes bright, sometimes shadowy, but always delicate, exquisitely arranged for luxurious
decorative effect. In his ballad-romances, to be sure, such as, 'The King's Tragedy,' there is much dramatic vigor; yet there is
still more of medieval weirdness. Rossetti, like Dante, has much of spiritual mysticism, and his interest centers in the inner

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rather than the outer life; but his method, that of a painter and a southern Italian, is always highly sensuous. His melody is
superb and depends partly on a highly Latinized vocabulary, archaic pronunciations, and a delicate genius in soundmodulation, the effect being heightened also by frequent alliteration and masterly use of refrains. 'Sister Helen,' obviously
influenced by the popular ballad 'Edward, Edward,' derives much of its tremendous tragic power from the refrain, and in the
use of this device is perhaps the most effective poem in the world. Rossetti is especially facile also with the sonnet. His
sonnet sequence, 'The House of Life,' one of the most notable in English, exalts earthly Love as the central force in the world
and in rather fragmentary fashion traces the tragic influence of Change in both life and love.

Decadence and Aestheticism

Many may wonder if the era of the 1890s was the beginning, end, or change of a new age. The era can often be
described as modern, advanced, and different. Many people were experimenting, inventing, and trying new
things. Decadence and Aestheticism arose.
Decadence emerged as a dark side of Romanticism in that it involved forbidden experiences. Decadence was
referred to as moral, social, and artistic. As Beckson says, "The dark side of Romanticism derived from Poe and
other writers who defined it as strangers united with beauty"(Page 40).
The distinguishing feature of a Decadent is the retreat of reality. For example in "The Importance of Being
Earnest" by Oscar Wilde, Algernon and Jack have a pretend character that they often used as an escape from
reality.
Decadence represented Symbolism and Impressionism. Also known as fin de siecle, Decadence is described by
Arthur Symons, a participant observer who said, "it has all the qualities that mark the end of great periods, the
qualities that we find in the Greek, the Latin, the Decadence, an intense self consciousness, a restless curiosity in
research , and a spiritual and moral perversity."(Altick Page 296).
In Aestheticism, life is viewed as an art. Aesthetes found beauty in art and in whatever was attractive in the world.
Altick said, "The connecting link was Rosetti, whose poetry and painting inspired the Aesthetes"(page 291). Arts
purpose for the Aesthete was for pleasure. The Aesthetics interpreted his artistic aim as the pursuit of beauty
separated form social meaning. Oscar Wildes theory towards Aestheticism was that the only reality worth
seeking was not material goods but the individual experience. And so Aestheticism involved a complete revulsion
against received standards of values.
Aesthetics found that through their great interest in beauty, pleasure that is derived form objects of art is more
beautiful than other pleasures.
The truth about an Aesthete is that the mind is usually more active in a creative sense in the appreciation of nature
than in the enjoyment of a finished work of art. An Aesthete has a great appreciation for nature. One may look at
an object, place, or person and perceive it a different way than another person may perceive it. He does not
actually see them the way they appear but his imagination gives his perception a memory picture of them. For an
Aesthete to obtain pleasure, "it is the perspectives of perception that is necessary to an understanding of both
appreciation and creation"(Langfield page 24).
A frequently seen definition is that Aesthetics is a philosophy of beauty. Langfield writes that, "Professor Sully
has written that Aesthetics is a branch of study variously defined as the philosophy or science of the beautiful, of
taste or of fine arts" (page 33). However, the more present explanation for Aesthetes is stated by Sir Sidney
Colvin in the Encyclopedia Britanicca, "the name Aesthetics is intended to designate a scientific doctrine or
account of beauty, in nature and art, and for the enjoyment and originating beauty which exists in man"(Langfield
page 34).
While a serious discussion of the stylistic aspects of Decadence was going on. However, the public had caught
hold of the more sensational and moral aspects of the word and the movement. An essay by Max Beerbohm 1880,
which had appeared in the fourth volume of the Yellow Book explains the characteristics of the outward
19

appearance of the Decadents: "Decadents had long hair, the world weary attitude, the infantile nature of
impressionist pictures, and the lack of enthusiasm for exercise"(Thornton page 21).
The Decadent Movement on May 25, 1895 was given a fatal blow when Oscar Wilde was found guilty of acts of
gross indecency with other males and sentenced to two
years imprisonment with hard labor. Not only Wildes homosexual behavior was being tried; the relationship
between the ideas, morality, literature and Aestheticism were on trial as well.

Aestheticism (or the Aesthetic Movement) is an art movement supporting the emphasis of aesthetic
values more than socio-political themes for literature, fine art, music and other arts.[1][2] It was
particularly prominent in Europe during the 19th century, but contemporary critics are also associated
with the movement, such as Harold Bloom, who has recently argued against projecting ideology onto
literary works, which he believes has been a growing problem in humanities departments over the last
century.
In the 19th century, it was related to other movements such as symbolism or decadence represented in
France, or decadentismo represented in Italy, and may be considered the British version of the same
style.[citation needed]

What was the historical context in 'The Picture of Dorian Gray'?

Historical Context
Aestheticism and Decadence
Aestheticism was a literary movement in late nineteenth-century France and Britain. It was a reaction to
the notion that all art should have a utilitarian or social value. According to the Aesthetic Movement, art
justifies its own existence by expressing and embodying beauty. The slogan of the movement was "art
for art's sake," and it contrasted the perfection possible through art with what it regarded as the
imperfections of nature and of real life. The artist should not concern himself with political or social
issues.
In France, Aestheticism was associated with the work of Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Flaubert, and
Stphane Mallarm. In England, its chief theorist was Walter Pater (1839 - 1894), who was a professor
of classics at Oxford University. In contrast to the usual Victorian emphasis on work and social
responsibility, Pater emphasized the fleeting nature of life and argued that the most important thing was
to relish the exquisite sensations life brings, especially those stimulated by a work of art. The aim was to
be fully present and to live vividly in each passing moment. As Pater put it in the "Conclusion" to his
work Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), which is in effect a manifesto of the Aesthetic
Movement in England, "To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is
success in life." This is in complete opposition to the prevailing Victorian mentality, with its emphasis
on hard work, moral earnestness, and material success.
Wilde was an admirer of Pater, and it was Wilde who later became the representative figure of
Aestheticism. Pater's influence on The Picture of Dorian Gray was profound. When Dorian adopts Lord
Henry's belief that the aim of the new Hedonism "was to be experience itself, and not the fruits of
experience" he is virtually quoting Pater's "Conclusion," in which he writes, "Not the fruit of experience,
but experience itself, is the end."

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Pater was a key figure in the emergence of the later movement in England and France known as
Decadence. This movement flourished in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, a period also
known as fin de sicle (end of the century). Decadent writers believed that Western civilization was in a
condition of decay, and they attacked the accepted moral and ethical standards of the day. The theory of
Decadence was that all "natural" forms and behaviors were inherently flawed; therefore, highly
artificial, "unnatural" forms and styles were to be cultivated, in life as well as art. Many Decadent
writers therefore experimented with lifestyles that involved drugs and depravity (just as Dorian does in
The Picture of Dorian Gray).
One influential work of the Decadent movement was Rebours (Against the Grain), a novel by French
writer, J. K. Huysmans, published in 1884. The protagonist is estranged from Parisian society and
continually seeks out strange and new experiences. It is generally accepted that Rebours is the novel
that Lord Henry sends to Dorian Gray and which fascinates and grips Dorian for years.
Another example of Decadent literature is Wilde's play Salom, with its lurid subject and imagery of
blood, sex, and death. In addition to Wilde, Decadence in England was associated with the poets
Algernon Swinburne and Ernest Dowson, and the painter, Aubrey Beardsley.
Compare & Contrast

1890s: Male homosexuality is a crime in England, punishable by imprisonment.

Today: Homosexuality is no longer a crime. In law, homosexual people are treated the same as everyone else.
However, many people holding conservative and religious views based on the Bible still regard homosexuality as
a sin.

1890s: Britain is the foremost power in the world but faces increasing rivalry from the growing
industrial and military strength of Germany.
Today: Britain and Germany, having fought against each other in two world wars, are now allies within the
European Community and NATO. Britain is no longer the leading power in the world.

1890s: Class divisions are emphatic in Britain, and there is a wide contrast in dress, manners, and
way of life between those who are comfortably off and those who are poor. Families are large. Only working class
women take employment outside the home. University education is not available for women of any class or for
the working classes.
Today: Britain is a more egalitarian society than at any time in its history. The influence of mass culture, through
television, films, and advertising, has tended to erode differences between classes in dress and manners. Women
of all classes now make up a large percentage of the workforce, and higher education is open to all.

Sensation novel
The sensation novel was a literary genre of fiction popular in Great Britain in the 1860s and 1870s,
following on from earlier melodramatic novels and the Newgate novels, which focused on tales woven
around criminal biographies, also descend from the gothic and romantic genres of fiction. Ellen Wood's
controversial East Lynne (1861) was the first novel to be critically dubbed "sensational" and began a
trend whose main exponents also included Wilkie Collins (The Woman in White, 1859; The Moonstone,
1868), Charles Reade, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon (Lady Audley's Secret, 1862).

Themes and reception

Typically the sensation novel focused on shocking subject matter including adultery, theft, kidnapping,
insanity, bigamy, forgery, seduction and murder.[1] It distinguished itself from other contemporary
genres, including the Gothic novel, by setting these themes in ordinary, familiar and often domestic
21

settings, thereby undermining the common Victorian-era assumption that sensational events were
something foreign and divorced from comfortable middle-class life. W. S. Gilbert satirised these works
in his 1871 comic opera, A Sensation Novel.
When sensation novels burst upon a quiescent England these novels became immediate best sellers,
surpassing all previous book sales records. However, high brow critics writing in academic journals of
the day decried the phenomenon and criticized its practitioners (and readers) in the harshest terms. The
added notoriety derived from reading the novels probably served only to contribute to their popularity.[2]

Notable examples

The Woman in White (185960)

Great Expectations (186061)

East Lynne (1861)

Lady Audley's Secret (1862)

Aurora Floyd (1863)

The Shadow of Ashlydyat (1864)

Griffith Gaunt (186566)

Armadale (1866)

Foul Play (1868)

Several mid-century phenomena led to the popularity of the Sensation Novel:

the abolition of the stamp duty on printing paper in 1855,

the concomitant increase in the circulation of newspapers,

an increase in numbers of readers in mid-Victorian Britain,

the dramatic increase in the number of circulating libraries,

new weekly and monthly (often illustrated) literary magazines

high-interest, serialised fiction to maintain a stable readership.

notorious trials such as that of the poisoner Palmer,

tabloid journalism,

reforms in divorce procedures

public education
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Thus, writing in 1863, H. L. Mansel castigated the new subgenre as "preaching to the nerves instead of
the judgment" (357). Since early in his anti-Sensation diatribe Mansel refers to "A pale young lady in a
white dress" (358), we can be certain that his chief target is Wilkie Collins, whose The Woman in White
(1860) initiated the Sensation mania. The typical practitioner of the new form, contends Mansel, aims at
creating excitement alone in order "to supply the cravings of a diseased appetite" (357) prevalent in the
recently augmented reading public: "No divine influence can be imagined as presiding over the birth of
his work; no more immortality is dreamed of for it than for the fashions of the current season. A
commercial atmosphere floats around works of this class, redolent of the manufactory and the shop"
[357].
Although Wilkie Collins may well have been "The King of Sensation," the royal family of this new
subgenre was by no means small, the most popular writers including

Charles Reade,

Ellen Price (Mrs. Henry Wood)

Ouida (Marie Louise de la Rame)

James Payn

William Black

Mary Elizabeth (M. E.) Braddon ("The Queen of the Circulating Libraries")

Edmund Yates

Henry Kingsley

Although the form is often spoken of as a phenomenon of two decades, its influences may well be
detected in works written after 1880, including the novels of Thomas Hardy (whose first effort,
Desperate Remedies is very much in the Sensation vein), George Moore, Robert Louis Stevenson, and
George Du Maurier, whose diabolical Svengali in Trilby (1896) is very much a Collinsian villain, except
for his lack of gentlemanly status.
Ira B. Nadel in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 18, has attributed the success of Collins
among a crowded field of practitioners of the new form to his "expert plotting with carefully described
settings" (62), so evident in the novel that appears to initiated the public's mania for Sensation Novels,
The Woman in White (1860). T. S. Eliot and Dorothy L. Sayers regard Collins's second best-seller in the
genre, The Moonstone (1868), as the first detective novel in English, although Edgar Allen Poe initiated
the crime-and-detection story two decades earlier. Whether one is considering Ellen Price Wood's East
Lynne (1861) or M. E. Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862) or Collins's early Sensation Novels, one
will find the pattern of "criminality and passion beneath respectable surfaces" (Kalikoff 120); often, the
Sensation Novel features a beautiful, clever young woman who, like Magdalen Vanstone in Collins's No
Name (1862), is adept at disguise and deception such women are doubly dangerous and generate
social instability because they possess and threaten to use secret knowledge. Other strategies employed
by Sensation authors include the exposure of hypocrisy in polite society, intentional and unintentional
bigamy, adultery, hidden illegitimacy, extreme emotionalism, melodramatic dialogue and plotting, and
the brilliant but eccentric villain with gentlemanly pretensions. Reginald C. Terry in Victorian Popular
Fiction, 1860-80 employs the term "detailism" to describe yet another aspect of the Sensation Novel, its
23

rigorous realism that catered to a contemporary "taste for the factual" (55) in its descriptions and
settings, a feature that novelists such as Collins skillfully blended with the exciting "ingredients of
suspense, melodrama and extremes of behaviour" (55). In addition, Terry notes how the plots of such
novels often utilized "the apparatus of ruined heiresses, impossible wills, damning letters, skeletons in
cupboards, [and] misappropriated legacies" (74). P. D. Edwards adds yet further "ingredients" to the
Sensation formula: "arson, blackmail, madness, and persecuted innocence (usually young and female),
acted out in the most ordinary and respectable social settings and narrated with ostentatious care for
factual accuracy and fulness of circumstantial detail" (703). To all of these features we should add the
realistic and sympathetic investigation of individual psychology and an exploration of the female psyche
in the manner of George Eliot and Charlotte Bront. The prevalence of these "ingredients" in the popular
fiction of the 1860s and 1870s suggests that the Sensation Novel drew its energy from a popular midVictorian reaction to middle-class stodginess and prudery, a reaction that continued well past 1880 and
is evident in such late Victorian works as Du Maurier's Trilby (1894) (whose arch-villain, Svengali, is
reminiscent of the highly manipulative criminal master-minds of Collins, but lacks their breeding) and
Stevenson's Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde (1886).
P. D. Edwards notes that the term "Sensation Novel" was originally applied disparagingly to a broad
range of crime, mystery, and horror novels written in the early 1860s: "A writer in the Literary Budget,
November 1861, asserted that the term originated in America" (1860). The subgenre was effectively
defined in a two-year period by the novels of Wilkie Collins, Ellen Price Wood, and Mary Elizabeth
Braddon, first serialised in the new literary magazines before appearing in the triple-decker format
favoured by the lending-libraries. Reginald C. Terry in Victorian Popular Fiction, 1860-80 contends that
B. F. Fisher's in the 16 February 1861 number of the London Review is the earliest reference to
"sensation novelists" in a discussion of a current trend in American literature, "although in a general way
'sensation' had been applied to Wilkie Collins in 1855 reviews of Antonia and Basil" (181).
The question of identity is integral to this [The Woman in White] as to other sensation fictions. Mistaken
identity, hidden identities, are the staple of Collins's No Name (1862) and Armadale (1866), and Mary
Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862), and are often concerned with questions of inheritance, with
legal identity, but the language of psychology allowed other dimensions of the question to be addressed.
What precisely constitutes identity comes into question as the workings of memory are investigated, and
found to be lacking [in The Moonstone (1868)]. [Marshall, "Psychology and the sensation novel," 5859]
The features commonly associated with the publishing phenomenon of the 1860s known as the
Sensation Novel include the following:

bigamous marriages

misdirected letters

romantic triangles

heroines placed in physical danger

drugs, potions, and/or poisons

characters adopt disguises

trained coincidences
24

aristocratic villains

heightened suspense detailism

These narrative features, common to most Sensation Novels of the early '60s, were soon parodied:
This Journal will be devoted chiefly to the following objects; namely, Harrowing the Mind, Making the
Flesh Creep, Causing the Hair to Stand on End, Giving Shocks to the Nervous System, Destroying
Conventional Moralities, and generally Unfitting the Public for the Prosaic Avocations of Life. (mock
advertisement "The Sensation Times, and Chronicle of Excitement" in Punch, 1863; cited in Hughes 3)
The parodist promises the public graphic accounts of violent crimes, corporal punishments, and animal
cruelty, as well as a Sensation Novel (presumably in serial) full of "hitherto undreamed of" atrocities and
written by an "eminent" writer shortly to be released from a penitentiary. The novels that are the subject
of this lampoon are not immediately obvious, but were undoubtedly all available for a modest annual
"lending" fee at Mudie's Library or in the bookstalls of most railway stations.
In The Maniac in the Cellar (1980), Winifred Hughes associates the rise of the Sensation Novel in the
early 1860s with the continued popular taste for the Gothic Novel of the previous century (particularly
the goosebump gothicism of Ann Radcliffe and the more gruesome gothicism of Matthew G. "Monk"
Lewis, the historical romances of Sir Walter Scott, the oriental tales of Lord Byron) and the more recent
Newgate Novel, as pioneered by Harrison Ainsworth, Edward G. D. Bulwer-Lytton, and Charles
Dickens. Conservative critics, she contends, regarded this new subgenre, as exemplified by the early
'60s novels of Wilkie Collins, Ellen Price Wood, and M. E. Braddon, as "brash, vulgar, and subversive"
(6). In his autobiography, novelist Anthony Trollope went so far as to label the Sensation Novel
"unrealistic" by the mid-1870s in that he held "The novelists who are considered to be anti-sensational
are generally called realistic" (1883: Vol. 2, p. 41; cited in Hughes, p. 39). He might well have added
"dramatic," "theatrical," or "melodramatic" to his indictment since a number of Sensation writers acted
and wrote for the stage, and since novels such as East Lynne and Lady Audley's Secret proved popular
with audiences when adapted for the theatre.
According to Hughes, "what distinguishes the true sensation genre as it appeared in its prime during the
1860s is the violent yoking of romance and realism, traditionally the two contradictory modes of literary
perception" (16). If we take the early novels of Collins as our locus classicus, we can see that the new
subgenre indeed fused opposites, both possible and improbable, solidly English and yet exotic, sordid
and yet respectable, refined yet violent, scientific and yet superstitious, documentary and yet far-fetched,
realistic and yet romantic, rational and at the same time absurdist, but above all romantic and
suspenseful, "a kind of civilized melodrama, modernized and domesticated not only an everyday
gothic, minus the supernatural and aristocratic trappings, but also a middle-class Newgate, featuring
spectacular crime unconnected with the usual criminal classes. [Hughes 16]
George Augustus Sala in "On the 'Sensational' in Literature and Art" (Belgravia, IV, 1868, p. 455),
undoubtedly trying to legitimize the extreme form that had recently appeared, attributed the founding of
the Sensation Novel to no less a figure than Charles Dickens. Although some of Dickens's later works,
especially The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), exhibit some of the tendencies of Sensation fiction, in
his last novel he was more likely responding to the new form, as produced by his apprentice and
associate at All the Year Round, Wilkie Collins, rather than merely aping it. Collins and Reade,
however, may have borrowed their aesthetic theory from Dickens, dwelling, as Bleak House remarks,
upon "the romantic side of familiar things." A holdover from an earlier generation of writers, Dickens so
strenuously objected to the explicit sexuality and social radicalism of Charles Reade's Very Hard Cash
25

(1863) that he adopted the (for him) unusual expedient of publishing a disclaimer at the conclusion of
the novel's final instalment in All the Year Round. Lillian Nayder estimates that Dickens was correct in
assuming that Reade's candour lost him readers "in droves" (Pilgrim Letters 10: 237), "perhaps as many
as three thousand" (Nayder 137). Whereas, moreover, in Dickens, plot no matter how convoluted or
complicated and character no matter how eccentric or whimsical are always enlisted in the
service of theme, in much Sensation fiction plot and incident rendered complicated for their own
sakes predominate because the writer's chief intention is to delight and horrify rather than to instruct
and reform. Typically, no sooner has a Sensation writer solved one mystery or resolved one dilemma for
us than he or she must introduce another in order to escalate suspense. "The difficulty with this [pattern],
of course, is that climax becomes the routine, subjecting the reader to an endless roller-coaster effect
that eventually loses its thrill" (Hughes 19).
However, as Hughes is quick to point out, Collins's handling of "drawn-out mystification or impending
menace" (19), particularly in The Moonstone, is so masterful and so controlled and metred out that the
reader revels not so much in successive rises as in the final denouement, which harmonizes all
competing narratives and executes Nemesis character by character. No sooner had the new subgenre
won a popular following than M. E. Braddon and other Punch writers, as we have seen, lampooned it.
Hughes makes a convincing case (based on that presented by H. J. W. Milley in "The Eustace Diamonds
[run serially in the Fortnightly Review in 1871] and The Moonstone" [run serially in All the Year Round
in 1868], Studies in Philology, October 1939, pp. 651-63) for Trollope's The Eustace Diamonds as a
parody of Collins's The Moonstone, complete with a young lady's falling under suspicion of having
stolen her own jewels, two robberies, and a bumbling detective. At about the same time, the prospect of
the royalties from producing a best-seller probably inspired young architect Thomas Hardy to write his
own Sensation Novel, Desperate Remedies. Published anonymously, the potboiler utilizes many of
Collins's strategies, albeit far less effectively: "murder, blackmail, illegitimacy, impersonation,
eavesdropping, multiple secrets, a suggestion of bigamy, [and] amateur and professional detectives"
(Hughes 173) are all present. Even those scholars and critics who assert that Hardy was one of the most
original prose-fiction writers of the latter part of the nineteenth century must concede that, as the plots of
even some of greater novels such as The Mayor of Casterbridge and Tess of the D'Urbervilles attest,
Hardy never quite lost his taste for Sensation, even if the reading public had tired of it after 1880. In
particular, Hardy had a fondness for such standard Sensation strategies as the instalment closings known
as "curtains," strongly delineated characters. numerous coincidences upon which the plot seems to
hinge, bigamous or secret marriages, illegitimacy, and the "return-from-the dead" scenario, even
providing what H. L. Mansel in 1863 had termed "some demon in human shape" (360) in the person of
Alec D'Urberville.

26