The Victorian Novel

- novel: essentially a reflection of the truth of everyday life, a parody of the elevated
genres
- David Lodge: novel: a synthesis of pre-existing narrative traditions rather than a
continuation of one of them or an entirely new literary phenomenon
- literary scene influenced by social and economic changes of the time
- Chartism influenced the Victorian literature deeply: Chartist literature, merely
documentary value
- predominance of the novel as the best suited literary form to express the feelings,
problems, and conflicts of the epoch
- posed problems of topical and humanitarian importance
- new background: industrial town
- a new hero: the workman
- a new climate: non-bourgeois habits of living and thinking
- Dickens, Gaskell, Eliot, Ch. Bronte: social novel
- a new world introduced into literature
- a new aesthetics is born, according to the Victorians’ democratic conviction
- an age of journals: appearance of periodicals as a consequence of new technology
- unparalleled influence on the minds of all classes
- made major themes public and popular
- literature published in weekly, fortnightly, monthly, quarterly periodicals
- novels published in cheap monthly parts, poetry in illustrated annuals
- cheaper printing, lower prices, speedy circulation
- expansion of education both for the poor and the rich
- some of the more important journals: Athenaeum, Ainsworth’s Magazine, Household
Words, Edinburgh Review, Quarterly, Blackwood’s Magazine, Fraser’s Magazine,
Cornhill Magazine

Birth of the 19th century novel

- a spontaneous response of the writers to the requirements and perplexities of their time
- medieval ancestor of the novel – the romance: presentation of reality as a mythic epos
or an ethical allegory (eg Spenser’s Fairie Queen, The Arthurian Legends)
- oriented towards mythic, allegorical, and symbolic forms
- the picaresque novel: a factual and anecdotic presentation of life
- interest shifted towards social and psychological inquiry
- realistic novel: many-sided social chronicle with serious critical implications
- necessity of reflecting truth, social, economic, individual
- need for entertainment but also for edification
- humanitarian appeal to imaginative understanding, moral sympathy and to the sense of
human solidarity
- concern with social injustice:
 In all my writings I hope to have taken every available opportunity to showing the
want of sanitary improvements in the neglected dwellings of the poor.(Ch. Dickens:
Martin Chuzzlewit)
- popular need to soften and make intelligible the harsh conditions of Victorian life:

The only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings is that those who read them
should be better able to imagine and feel the pain and the joys of those who differ
from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling, erring human
creatures…My artistic bent is directed not at all to the presentation of eminently
irreproachable characters, but to the presentation of mixed human beings in such a
way as to call forth tolerant judgement, pity and sympathy. (G. Eliot)
- Victorian writers helped to people the imagination, to exercise moral sympathies and
strengthen the feeling of human solidarity at a time of disruptive changes
- an extension of consciousness, gave life to life
- Victorian novel – descriptive of daily realities
- also preserved its speculative and ethical characteristics belonging to imagination
- Dickens: conflict between Good and Evil
- Thackeray: vanity of human endeavor
- E. Bronte: rebirth of the individual and society through love and understanding
- Th. Hardy: pathos and tragedy of human existence, great lesson of stoicism
- 19th century novel: realistic- facts and types of the epoch
- romantic: the writer’s imaginative interpretation of reality, sometimes taking the
form of an obsession, a mania
- ordinary places and beings raised to the stature of symbols: tangible signs of the
abstract
- The great age of the English novel
- a vehicle best equipped to present a picture of life lived in a given society against a
stable background of social and moral values
- symbolic situations reached far deeper than the superficial pattern of social action
- suggestion of desperate isolation of the individual
- the grotesque, the eccentric – almost the norm, life is atomistic and irrational
- novelists transcended the requirements of the 19th century audience: novels read by
later generations for different and profounder reasons
- more elevated status, ceasing to be a mere entertainment, becoming a debate on the
urgent matters of the day
- extended the social, spiritual and geographic area of fiction
- novelists pleaded for truth no matter how unpleasant it was
- revealed aspects which have been carefully veiled
- discovered the horrors of factory work for children and women, the miserable
dwellings ( eg Dickens, Gaskell)
- novelists wrote about matters the public was really concerned with
- Victorian novel has affinities with romance, allegory and myth, fairy-tale
- exploration of deep levels of consciousness, rendering of lunacy, obsession, extreme
passion
- imagery taken over from Gothic literature ( eg Dickens, Ch. Bronte, E. Bronte)
- philosophic meditation on human existence (eg Thackeray)
- romanticism and realism held in balance (eg Ch. Bronte, G. Eliot)
- tragic, fatalistic view on life (eg Th. Hardy)
- novels usually appeared in two or three volumes, very rarely in one book
- part-issue form, later serial novel in weekly/monthly publications: The Pickwick
Papers, Vanity Fair, Pendennis, The Newcomes, The Virginians, Middlemarch
- enhanced the role of suspense