The Victorian novel

The early Victorian novel. For the first themes of the inhumanity of the factory
time in literary history, in the Victorian system - in particular, the workers’ strike
Age the novel became the leading in a mining town — and the unnatural
genre. The greater part of the reading teaching methods of the utilitarian
public - including the upper class and the philosophy; it treats them with great
intellectuals - read novels. The novel participation and efficacy but, in the end,
reflected the practical bent of the age, the chooses a narrative solution that instead
new social and economic developments, of questioning the system of social
scientific discoveries, and the ethical relations and the organization of work
problems raised by the Industrial divides the characters into good ones and
Revolution. Novels were commonly read bad ones: a typically Victorian
aloud by well-to-do families, especially in compromise.
the evenings after dinner. Public readings
were also common among the lower
class, where larger groups - often the
families in a tenement house - listened to
the best (or the only) reader in the group.
The novelist clearly had to avoid topics
that could cause embarrassment to the
ladies or the children present in the
audience.

The writers' compromise. Generally

speaking, Victorian readers expected to
be instructed and at the same time to be
entertained. Novelists were conditioned -
whether consciously or unconsciously -
by their readers' expectations and so they
clearly show both the desire to please
and the fear to shock. This explains why
early Victorian novels present conformity
to accepted moral standards together
with a great liveliness.
Charles Dickens is the most
representative novelist of the age, and
England's all-time best-loved novelist. In
his great novels shows his consciousness
of social injustice, the poverty and
suffering of the mass of the people,
political incompetence and corruption.
Already in Oliver Twist (1837-38) his
social concerns are clear: the comic
element helps to highlight serious
issues such as the bad treatment of
orphans in workhouses and the gangs of
child-thieves in London. Dickens' social
concerns, however, don't make him
seriously question the foundations of
Victorian society. Hard Times (1854) is
typical of such ambiguity. It deals with the

Novels of romantic love. The
Romantic Age in England never produced
great novels of romantic love: in Jane
Austen, for instance, love is always
subordinated to social conventions,
Novels of romantic love came with two
early Victorian women novelists: Emily
Brontë and Charlotte Brontë. They
came from a small village on the wild and
desolate Yorkshire moors, a Romantic
scenery which figures prominently in
Emily's only and most famous novel:
Wuthering Heights (1847). They lived a
life of isolation among nature but they
also had an education. Emily's novel is
the archetypal novel of romantic love. Its
hero, Heathcliff, is a Romantic 'dark'
hero dominated by his self-destructive
passion for Catherine; Catherine, the
heroine, is madly in love with Heathcliff
but bends to social conventions and
marries another man. Their love will
continue after their death: their two
ghosts are said to walk together on the
moor — an ending that shows the
influence of Romantic and Gothic
themes. Charlotte's most famous novel is
Jane Eyre (1847), the story of the
heroine's life and her love for the
mysterious Mr Rochester. The book's
originality is in its mixture of realism and
romantic imagination. The novel's
strength derives from its heroine: Jane
Eyre shows a courage and a
determination uncommon to the heroines
of a Dickens or of Gothic fiction. She is
passionate but not passive.
Technical features od the early
Victorian novel. The general tendency
towards a mild realism. The characters
of the novel tended to be acceptable to
the majority of readers, and identification
on the part of the public was mainly in
terms of comedy (especially Dickens’
characters) or the drama of passion
(especially the Brontë sisters' heroines).
Narrators were generally all-knowing, at
different levels: the narrator in Dickens is
usually a companion to the reader and
shows sound common sense. The
exception is Emily Bronte, who in
Wuthering Heights makes use of three
different narrators involving a shifting
point of view.
The development of the American
novel. In the course of the 19th century
the American novel gradually moved
away from the literary influence of the
English models. Such a process went
together with the process of political
independence. Three American novelists
are highly representative of this tendency.
In his masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter
(1850), set in 17th-century Boston,
Nathaniel Hawthorne deals with the
Puritan heritage of the first English
colonies in New England. The young
woman Hester Prynne has to wear on her
breast a scarlet letter — a purple A —
which points her out as an adulteress.
The Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, her
secret lover and the father of her
daughter, is the symbol of the Puritan
obsession with sin and guilt and the
necessity of bringing it out through public
confession. At the same time he cannot
acknowledge his own sin and share its
consequences with Hester, and so he
also becomes the symbol of Puritan
hypocrisy. With his American version of
the historical novel, Hawthorne is a most
acute explorer of the American past and
its influences on the present.
Herman Melville (1819-91) writes the
epic of the sea-faring young American
nation. His major novel, Moby Dick
(1851), is now considered a world's
classic and part of America's myth. The
book tells an adventure story: Captain
Ahab's life-long fight with the White
Whale that has bitten off his leg and the
whale's final sinking the boat with all its
crew. But the novel is really about Ahab's
obsession with the presence of evil in
the world, for him incarnated in Moby
Dick. Ahab's monomania finally drives
him and all his men to destruction. Mark
Twain (1835-1910) is one of America's
greatest humourists. He was a pilot on
the Mississippi River and he knew the
river and its people inside out. He
described their speech, habits, legends
and superstitions in one of the most
famous American novels: The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884),
which has the river and its unspoiled
nature as its setting.
The late Victorian novel: a general
realistic trend. The late Victorian
featured a tendency towards realism
much more decided than that of the early
Victorian novel. Following Darwin's
theories of the influence of the natural
environment on animals, Realism, as an
intellectual and literary movement,
carefully studied the influence of the
social environment on man and tended to
concentrate on a direct presentation of its
object, giving as precise and detailed a
picture of it as possible, and avoiding any
judgement or comment. Realism intended
to photograph reality. With its predilection
for poor and degraded social settings and
failed characters, it was in itself a
reaction against the triumphant
Victorian ideology and the official image
of England as an imperial power and the
world's leader in commerce and industry.
The divided self. Robert Louis
Stevenson is by far the best writer in the
horror and crime tradition, and one of the
greatest English novelists. His
masterpiece, The Strange Case of Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). on a first level
reads like a horror story which owes
something to the Gothic tradition and
even more to Edgar Allan Poe's tales of
terror: it is about the transformation of
the respected Dr Jekyll into the
monstrous and brutal Mr Hyde. On a
second and deeper level, however, the
book casts serious doubts about human
nature and progress: man is in part
inherently bad and science can-not hope
to separate the good from the bad
artificially, and so to solve all the
problems of mankind. The Strange Case
of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hide thus strikes at
the core of the Victorian compromise,
and the fundamental duplicity of the age's
moral standards.
Aestheticism. As the century went on,
novelists followed the general anti-
Victorian trend. This culminated in the
disengagement of the Aesthetic
Movement, with its belief in “Art for Art's
sake" — that is, total detachment from
social or moral issues. The aesthetic
creed derived from the French writer
Théophile Gautier's theory, summed up in
his slogan "I'Art pour l'Art”„ which implied
that art should have no moral basis or
purpose: it is good in its own right, an
end in itself. The movement spread all
over Europe during the last part of the
19th century and became a cultural force
in Britain particularly in the 1890s. Its
major representative was Oscar Wilde.
He only wrote one novel, The Picture of
Dorian Gray (1891), but it is the most
outstanding work of fiction in the aesthetic
tradition. The philosophy of the book is
the cult of beautiful things and a
proclaimed indifference to moral and
social issues.
The rise of science fiction. Mary
Shelley's Frankenstein was the
antecedent of the scientific romances of
Herbert George Wells (1866-1946),
which established science fiction as a
genre. Well's novels are examples of
adventures based on modern science
rather than legendary or traditional
backgrounds. In the War of the Worlds
(1898) he was the first to put in fictional
form the modern fear of the earth's
invasion by aliens coming from other
Planets — Mars, in this case. Well’s
science fiction has an ethical basis since
it poses fundamental questions about the
role of science and technology and the
survival of the human species in the
modern world - questions that are still
dramatically lacing us today.
First examples of colonial novels.
The greatest expansion of the British
Empire, in the last quarter of the 19th
century, corresponds to the first examples
of novels which both came from and were
about the overseas colonies. Rudyard
Kipling from an early age began writing
about India, its landscapes and peoples,
and was the first major writer to explore
the relations between the British and the
Indians. He never seems seriously to
question the right of the British to be in
India — the typical attitude of many
British was that they were there to "take
up the white man's burden", in Kipling's
own words, that is, to bring civilization to
a far less developed country. Kipling,
however, was seriously attached to and
fascinated by the Indian continent. His
best-known novel, Kim (1901), contains
colourful and passionate descriptions of
India's various races and beliefs.
Charles Dickens
Life and early works. Charles Dickens
was born at Portsmouth in 1812. When
he was ten moved to London and there
he was given regular schooling until. in
1824, his father was sent to prison for
debt. At the age of twelve Charles was
forced to go to work in a factory where he
stuck labels on bottles of polish. The
experience was traumatic. Prison, the
poor quarters of London, life in the city
streets and the other boys working in the
factory remained in his mind and pro-
foundly influenced his novels. At the age
of fourteen he went to work as a clerk in a
legal office. There he soon developed a
contempt for lawyers and the law as an
institution — another major theme in his
novels, lie also wrote for the comic
newspapers and entered serious
iournalism. This enabled him to meet a
wide range of people and to understand
the feelings and reactions of his readers.
lie adopted the pen name of 'Boz' and in
1836 two series of Sketches by Bo:. short
articles describing London people and
scenes. were published in instalments
and proved immensely popular. This
success led to The Pickwick Papers, his
first novel, relating the THE tadventures
of a group of eccentric people travelling
on the English roads —where the comic
and picaresque elements are mixed. It
was published in monthly instalments
between 1836 and 1837, and made
Dickens famous in Britain and the United
States. Other novels followed, as well as
two volumes about travels in the United
States, Italy and France. His life was cut
short by a stroke 193 PfccADILLI. in
1870.
PA Pet
Themes of Dicken's no..iets. Dickens was
deeply conscious of social injustice,
political incompetence, the poverty and
suffering o: the great mass of the people,
and the class conflicts of Victorian
England. The result was an increasingly
critical attitude towards con-temporary
society. An example is Oliver Twist
(1837-38), which recounts the sufferings
of an orphan brought up in a workhouse
who runs away to London and joins a
gang of thieves made up of children. In
Nicholas Nickleb:,' (1838-39 and :Jar/in
Ch. uzzlewit (1844) he attacks cruelty in
boarding schools, while in Hard Tiwes
(1854) he deals with the sufferings of the
factory system and the harm done by the
utilitarian philosophy. In the 1840s,
Dickens wrote a series of novels which
were more carefully plotted, and
organized more coherently around a
single theme or closely related themes.
Dombey and Son (1846-48), about the
failure of a rich and heartless London
merchant, is an open attack on some of
the worst aspects of Victorian soci-ety,
such as its love of money and its lack of
disinterested affections. Bleak House
(1852-53) is another complex work,
involving differ-ent themes. At the centre
of the book is an attack on the Court of
Chancery (which dealt especially with
inheritances) and on how the delays and
complications of the law may destroy the
lives of the common people. Dickens also
turned to semi-autobiographical themes.
David Copperfield (1849-50) is often
considered Dickens' masterpiece; mostly
auto-biographical, it is one of the greatest
portraits in English literature of the loves,
pains and wonders of childhood. Great
Expectations (1860-61) is a well-
organized novel, again on the theme of
'growing up' — the kind of novel generally
called a Bildungsmman. It also deals with
the social themes of pride and snobbery.
Settings of his novels. Dickens' novels
present a variety of settings: the
countryside and merry old England of The
Pickicick Papers; the provincial towns
which figure in most of his stories; the
industrial settlements of the North in Hard
Times. However, Dickens' most typical
scenery is London: the vast, crowded city
where different classes and social groups
live next to each other and yet do not
communicate.
Characters and plots. Dickens was a
great entertainer who created lively
unforgettable characters, especially
eccentrics, vagabonds, criminals,
orphans. He portrays a vivid pic-ture of
Victorian England. His characters are
mainly from the lower and middle class,
and their physical features, clothes,
gestures, Accents are captured by
Dickens. Upper-class And aristocratic
characters are not portrayed A S well and
tend to fall into stereotypes. A frequently
found with his characters is that they are
too easily divided — particularly in his
early novels — into good and bad, to the
point of becoming almost purely symbolic.
As for the plots of his novels, they involve
many characters, many parallel stories —
plot and sub-plots —, intrigue, often
mystery, and incredible coincidences.
Dicken's style. Dickens is a great master
of the English language. He is also very
good mixing social criticism with lively
portraits cat universal characters —
combining the pathetic with the comic.
His ability to create dialogue is
unmatched by any other English novelist.
The main strength of Dickens' style is his
humour, through which he makes the
strong points of his novels unforgettable,
and also manages to hide — or make
more acceptable — his weaknesses:
melodramatic or openly didactic
passages.
The novelist's reputation. Dickens is the
most popular English novelist, the only
writer who may compare with
Shakespeare in the creation of a fictitious
world that for millions of readers has
become real. He profoundly influenced
many of his contemporaries and
successors, even abroad: Dostovevskv
and Kafka are only a few. Earlier critics
tended to regard him as a great comic
writer and entertainer, whose plots were
implausible and whose characterization
was superficial. Contemporary critics now
tend to see his works — especially the
later ones — as combining social realism
with the poetical devices of metaphor and
symbolism. These allow him to explore
the depths of the human psyche and to
represent social conflict and evil.
Dickens' melodrama. is perhaps Dickens'
most internationally famous novel. It
came out in instalments and it tells the
adven-tures of an orphan who manages
to preserve his almost angelic character
despite a very hard life. Oliver Twist is a
perfect example of the best qualities of
Dickens' art. The reasons for its
popularity are apparent: Dickens
combines the sentimental, melodramatic
story of an orphan child exploited by a
gang of thieves —typical of romances
about crime written by the `Newgate
School' of novelists, named after
London's prison — with keen social satire
xi, realism. I his (ig& important social
issues: the th: which assigned poor
people to u, which living conditions
resembl, prison. Dickens is also very
gong
social criticism with sal characters such
as Mr Bumble or Mrs Mann in the parish
where Oliv-er is brought up —combining
the pathetic with the comic.
lively portraits 11111' 7
....
Issues and themes • the comic element
helps to highlight seri-ous issues such as
social injustice • the bad treatment of
orphans in workhouses
Oliver is a foundling. When he is nine
years old, he is taken hack to the
workhouse in which he was born, where
he lives a miserable life, is underfed and
receives no education. He then runs
away and on the road meets a young
pickpocket. Oliv-er thinks he has found a
friend and follows him to London where
he is introduced to other 'friends', who
say they will give him food and lodging.
The new friends turn out to be a gang of
young criminals led by Fagin, an old Jew
who is one of Dickens' best characteriza-
tions. The thieves force Oliver to help
them in their criminal activi-ties. Oliver is
temporarily rescued by Mr Brownlow, a
benevolent gentleman, but some
members of the gang kidnap the boy.
After many incidents, some involving a
mysterious character called Monks —
reminiscent of the dark hero of Gothic
tales — the gang is caught by the police
and Oliver is discovered to be a relation
of Mr Brownlow's. He has finally found a
family.