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Theory and Practice

Edired by
Martin Middeke, Timo Miiller, Christina Wald, Hubert Zapf

Verlag J. B. Metzler Stuttgart ' Weimar

Prof. Dr'. Martin Middeke is Plofessor of English Literature at the University of Augsburg
and Visiting Professor of English at the University of Johannesbulg, South Aflica. Ymh$m mf #mrxtffingt$
Email: martin.middeke@phil.uni-augsburg.de.

Dr'. Tin-ro Mtiller is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Ar.rgsburg. Preface of the Editors XIII
Email: tirlo. mueller@pltil.uni-augsburg.de. Introductiot.t XIV

PD Dr. Christina Wald is Assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of Augsburg
Email: christina.wald@phil.uni-augsburg.de. Furt $: $-itmraryu Stq.sdies

Prof. Dr. Hubert Zapf is Professor of American Literature at the University of Augsburg.
En'rail: hubert.zapf@phil.uni-augsburg.de.
lntrodueing l.iternry Studies )
) Eritish l.iterary Flistory 5
Contact address: 2.1 The Middle Ages . . 7
Lehrstiihle fiir Amerikanistik und 2.1.1 Terrninology 7
Englische Literaturwissenscliaft Anglo-Saxon Literature
2.1.2 10
Philologisch-Historische Fakultdt
2.t.3 Middle English Court CLrlttrres . ... . 11
Universitdt Augsburg
Univelsitdtsstraf3e l0 2.1.4 Ronrarrces and Malory 13
D-86159 Augsburg 2.1.5 Late Medieval Religious LiteratLrre 14
2.r.6 Oppositions and SLlbversions . . . . 15
'r) The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries . . . 1B
2.2.1 Overview 1B
2.2.2 Transfornrations of Antiquity .. ... 19
2.2.3 New Scieuce and New Philosophy 24
2.2.4 Religious Literature: A Long Reformation 26

.AFSC
MIX
Papler aus vorantwor-
lungsvoll6n Ouell6n
2.2.5
2.2.6
The Literary Culture of the Court and Popular Literature
European Englishness? Cultural Exchange versus Nation-Building
30
-1.1
FSC" C012425 2.3 The Eighteenth Century 3/
2.3.1 Terminology and Ovelview 37
Gedruckt auf siure- und chlorfreiem, alterungsbestandigem Papier 2.3.2 The Enlightenment and the Public Sphere 38
Popeand Neoclassicisnr ... .. 40
Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek
2.3.4 The Public Spirere, Private Lives: The Novel 1719-1742 . . . 47
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen
Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet iiber 2.3.5 Scepticism, Sentimentalism, Sociability: The Novel After 1748 42
< http://dnb.d-nb.de > abrufbar. 2.3.6 Literature of the Sublime: Tl.re Cult of Medievalism, Solitude and Excess . . . . 44
2.4 Romanticism 46
ISBN 978-3-476-02306-3 2.4.1 Romanticism as a Cultural ldiom . 46
2.4.2 Theorising Romant icisrr 4B
Dieses Werk einschlieBlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschiitzt.
2.4.3 Modes of Romantic Poetry . 51
Jede Verwertung auBerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist
ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulissig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere
2.4.4 Other Genres 53
fiil
Vervielfdltigungen, Ubersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung 2.4.5 Historicising Romanticisrn 54
und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. 2.5 The Victorian Age . . 56
2.5.1 Overview 56
@ 20I2 J.B. Metzler'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung 2.5.2 The Spirit of the Age: Doubts, Unresolved Tensions, and the Triurnph of Time 59
und Carl Ernst Poeschel Verlag GmbH in Stuttgart 2.5.3 The Novel 66
rvww. metzlerverlag. de
2.5.4 Poetry . 1J
info@metzlerverlag.de
2.5.5 Drama . 75
Einbandgestaltung: Ingrid Gnoth 2.6 Modernism 78
Layout: Inglid Gnoth l GD 90 2.6.1 Terminology 7B
Satz: Claudia Wild, Konstanz 2.6.2 Scope and Periodization 7B
Druck und Bindung: Offizin Andersen Nexo Leipzig GmbH 2.6.3 Modelnist Aesthetics 80
2.6.4 Central Concerns of Modernist Literature B2
Printed in Cermany
Dezernber 2012
)', Postmodernism.... 88
)'1 1
Terminology 88
Verlag J. B. Metzler Stuttgart Weimar 2.7.2 Period, Genre, or Mode? . 8B
 British Litetary Flistr:ry
0ueen Victoria nf Creat
Britain and lreland, [m-
press of lndia (rBrg*r9eir)
2.5 I The Victorian Age
2.5.r lOverview
The Victorian Age (1832-1901J carries central
characteristic features of Romar.rticism forward, al-
though Victorian subjectivity presents itself as far
less excessive than the striving for the infinite in-
herent in the Romantic cult of subjectivity. The
Victorian self is constituted intersubjectiveiy in a
relation of self and society, but for the nost part
this interaction turns out to be a precarious one.
Despite the progress in techr.rology, Social reforrn,
individual freedom, and independence in the Victo-
rian era, by the end of the nineteenth century, the
formation of an individual self was accompanied
by all the psychological drawbacks of modern hu-
manity: estrangement from the world, alienation,
disorientation, loss of meaning. This irnpression
is further enhanced by the intensification of his-
toricism in all disciplines in the nineteenth cen-
tury, which since the cornerstone of the French
Revolntion has conceived of human beings, cul-
ture, and society as transient and ever-changing
phenomena. While Romanticisrn, in a famous defi-
nition by Henry H. H. Remak, has been looked
upon as "the attempt to heal the break in the uni-
verse" via imagination and "the painful awareness
of dualism coupled with the urge to resolve it in
organic monism" (35), by tl.re end of the Victorian
Age, such synthesising has to a large extent be-
come impossible; in fact, by that time, the wound
of the 'break in the universe' is gaping wider than
ever before.
Soeial and politieal elevelopments. The historl-
cal period of 'Victorianism' owes its name to the
extraordinarily long life and reign of Queen Victo-
ria, who succeeded William IV on the throne in
1837. Whiie the time span marked by Victoria's
enthronement and l-rer death in 1901 is thus rather
a coincidence, it would also be well justified to
make the Victorian Age start five years earlier with
the political landmark of the First Reform Biil in
1832. In a more generic denotation of the term
'Victorian Age' or 'Victorianism,' the Reform Bill
meant the beginning of a new age predominated
by the power of middle-class economic interests,
as it vitalised the British political landscape in the
period of the Industrial Revolution, which started
in the mid-eighteenth century and reached its cli-
max in nineteenth-century England and then
spread all over Europe, the United States, and Ja-
pan. The bill rnade the number of citizens entitled
to vote rise from 400,000 to 650,000; many, though
not a1l, of tl.re so-called 'rotten boroughs' (srnall
boroughs witl.r so few inhabitants that they were
felt to be oveuepresented in parliament). were dis-
enfranchised, while the nelv big industrial cities of
the north (i.e. Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield,
Leeds) were granted boroughs and tire right to
vote for representatives in parliament. Witl-r the
benefit of hindsight, the bill constitutes the begin-
ning of a modern democracy in Britain, although it
falls far sl.rort of solving all the problems inherent
in the Industrial Revolution and tl.re change frorn
an agricultural to an industrial society. Even
though a first attempt at universal suffrage was
made, 95 % of tire population (all women amongst
them) still did not have the vote. Huge social in-
equalities could not be alleviated because the right
to vote was bourld to the holding of property worth
the still respectable sum of I10. Whereas the bill
implied that aristocratic voices feared that the Re-
form Act gave too much strength to the House of
Commons, it also enhanced a split between the
working classes and the middle class, which gave
rise to the Chartist Movement, the first working
class mass movement that aimed at political re-
form between 1838 and 1848. Named after The
People's Charter in 1838, its beginnings were
among such skilled labourers as shoemakers,
printers, and tailors. For achieving their objectives
of universal male suffrage and secret ballots, for
instance, the Chartists endorsed strikes and did
not shy away from using violence.
r83z First Reform Bill
r8j8 'People's Charter' by the Chartist
Movement
185r Creat Exhibition of Science and ln-
dustry at the Crystal Palace, London
r859 Charles Darwin publishes Origin
of Species
1867 Karl Marx publishes Das Kapital;
Second Reform Bill
r87o Married Women's Property Act
1877 Queen Victoria made Empress
of lndia
r89r Free elementary education
1899 Anglo-Boer War
1901 Death of Queen Victoria
The Vietorian Age
!jrr!#Jisatisn' Historians have subdivided the 1900, voting rights were given to the
(male) working classes, Britain was
vir'torian Age into three major phases: Early-Vic-
torian (1830-1848), Mid- or High-Victorian the world's most powerful banker, had
(t S4S-1870), and Late-Victorian (1870/80-1901). the biggest merchant fleet in the
Surveying the entire nineteenth century world- world, and, by the end of the century,
wide, the Get'man historian Jiirgen Osterhammel the British Empire had also taken hold
has argued that the period of 1830 until 1BB0 con- of much of Africa reaching out fi'om
stitutes a time-span which, at least for Europe, the Cape to Cairo (see map).
concentrates all the features generally held as dis- The uray cf progress and the sense of erisis. Child lahour in the
tinguishing tire nineteenth century worldwide. By Thus, the Victorian Age marks a period of change lndustrial Revr:l ution
contrast, for Osterhammel, the lBB0s mean the unprecedented in history. The seven decades until
rurning point of the Fin de Sidcle, which arguably Queen Victoria's death witnessed an enormous
lasts until the First World War. In a pan-European expansion of trade, corlmerce, manufacturing and
context ther.r, 'Victorianisrn' denotes the economi- economic growtir. London replaced Paris as the
cal and military predominance Britain held in the centre of European civilisation, and its population
world. It is also justified to speak of epoch-making grew from two to six and a half million inhabi-
characteristics of the Victorian age, as Britain was tants witirin Victoria's reign. The society changed
the first country to bring the rational use of re- from largely rural landownership to an urban
sources to perfection (Osterhammel 102-16). Since economy based on trade and manufacturing (see
the 1830s, the age of fossil fuels had begun, and Abrams and Greenblatt 2:1043-65). On the one
man- as well as animal-power were successively hand, these developments entailed such 'wonders'
leplaced by organic energy (coal). Looms, spind- of science, technology, and urbanisation as the in- The British Iimpire
les, pumps, ships, and railways were powered by terconnection of the globe with telegraph and rail- t9t>-/tila"
steam-engines, which allowed for mass produc-
tion and turned Victorian times into an age of
speed, acceleration, interconnectedness, nationai
integration and imperial control (Queen Victoria
became Empress of india in 1876).
The early phase of tl.re Victorian age was charac-
terised by severe economical crises, which brought
Blitain to the brink of revolution. Social grievances
and inequality were blatant, the industrial labourers
had to face dramatically increasing pauperisation,
which lead to Chartist uprisings in 1839 and 1849,
tlre ir.rtroduction of the l0-hour workday in 1847,
and-after more than ten Factory Acts-the restric-
tion of child labour to the minimum age of twelve in
1901. Since the first reforrn bill, a continuous pro-
cess of further political reform had involved the Sec-
ond and Third Reform Bills (1867 and 1884), the
latter of which at least bestowed voting rights to all
adult males. it seems remarkable that, in the seven
decades of the Victorian age, the will to democratic
reform pervaded all political parties, conservatives
('Tories') as well as liberals ('Whigs,' later 'Liber-
als'). The mid- or high-Victorian years can be seen
as years of consolidation, prosperity, and fiourishing
agriculture, trade and industry. If Victorian times
ever had the connotation of an optimistic look to-
rvards the future, such optimism wouid be grounded
in this rniddle period. London saw the Great Exhibi-
tion in 1851, compuisory education was introduced
in 1870, standard literacy was almost universal by
British Literary History The Vietorian Age

.Ir.islr Ouestiotr,' for iltstance, remained r'turesolved. Utilitarianism

r,,r*1,,,,,1 lratl shanteftrlly neglected
its irnperial dLI-
r814 steam locomotive Ceorge Stephenson British ,i,i .f utittg the Great Farnine
(1845-1848) and The etirical concept of utilitarianism is wide-
r8z5 electromagnet William Sturgeon Britis h the Irish desire for Home spread in nineteenth-centtlry ethics, social philos-
trepcc fr-rLtltel' instigated
r83r electric dynamo Michael Faraday British
ItrLle,which lead to the Easter Rising in 1916, the ophy, law and econornics. Though traces of utili-
mechanical calculator tarian tirought can be found in eighteenth-century
rtnglo-lrish War (1919-1921) and the Anglo-h'ish
1835 Charles Babbage British
r837 telegraph Samuel Morse American 'lielrty ancl the partition of Ireland in 1922. Further- philosophy (de Mandeville, Hobbes, Adam Srr.rith,
r839 hydrogen fuel cell William Robert Crove and others), its systematic conceptualisation hear-
British nore, the disasters of the h'rdian Mr"rtiuy, the Ja-
Jeremy Bentham
r855 sewing machine motor lsaac Singer American naica Rebelliou, the t.nassacre of Karthor-tm in the kens back to the English philosophets Jeremy ancl John 5tuart Mill
: lil:|.:
"r866 dynamite Alfred Nobel Swedish Sudan, and the Boer Wars, bitter
guerrilla waIS in Bentham and James Mill. It is fr.rrther developed Prnponents of
t876 telephone Alexander Graham Bell British which the Blitish sought to annex two colonies in by the latter's sou, John Stuart Mill. In his lrttro- util ita ri a n is m
cylinder phonograph Thomas Edison ductiott to the Principles of MoraLs and Legislati,on
the sor.rth of Africa, were very mucl.r unlikely to gen-
1877 American
1877 first moving pictures Eadward Muybridge British elate mucl] confideuce in the omnipotence of the Bentham claims that the per.rultirnate aim of utility
t878 electric light bulb Joseph Wilson Swan British 'age of the first capitalist globalisation' and the is a purely instrumental one-the best possible
r88o seismograph John Milne British 'prrne tirne of the capital' (see Osterhamrnel 44). maximising of benefit and pleasure for both indi-
r88z machine gun Hiram Stevens Maxim American vidr.ral and communal interests. In utilitarian eth-
t885/86 automobile C.Benz/C. Daimler Cerman ics, actions are not measured by inr.rer motives, but
r887 radio waves Heinrich Hertz Cerman exclusively by their consequences. What is tnore,
1895 x-ray diagnosis Wilhelm C. Roentgen Cerman 2.5.2 | The SPirit of the Age: the outcome of such actions must be rationally cal-
1895 cinematograph Lumidre Brothers French Doubts, U nresolved Tensions, culable and ernpirically verifiable. This is to guar-
and the TriumPh of Time antee the maximum of happiness for all hurnan-
ity. Legislation is deemed necessary in order to
way, and were further fuelled by ground-breaking \,Vith nolvhere vet to rest my head, 'l'he spirit of the Victorian age can therefore best remind the individual of his communal responsi-
discoveries and inventions which changed the Like these, 0n earth I lvait forlorn. be characterised as a period of transition, of unre- bility. In order to be able to influence individual
path of economical and historical civilisation and Their faith, ny tears, the rvoild deride- solved tensiot.ts, frictions, anxieties, irreconcilable behaviour accordingly, this includes'sanctions'
progress (see timeline). By the end of the century, I c0me t0 shed them at their side. (lines 85-90) diffelences, and contradictions. These can be ac- such as affection or tl.rar.rkfulness on the one hand,
steam power had been put to full exploit, electric- counted for in every area of public and private life, but also, if necessary, punishment on the other.
ity had been introduced, the railways had changed When he further on in the poem speaks of a "gloorn and these are also reflected in Victorian literature Bentham even transferred his instrumental ethics
the physiognomy of the British landscape, and profound," a "holy pain," an "exploded dream" and and culture: Pessimism stands besides optimism, and their empirical verifiability onto the architec-
steam-ships had conquered the ocean, and a sec- "melancholy," he gives expressiorl to a thorough the harking back to the past alongside positive and ture of prisons when he designed the panopti-
ond phase industrial revolution based on inno- sense of spiritual crisis which permeated Victorian luegatrve views of the future, fatalisrn next to activ- con-prison in an entirely utilitarian spirit, a circu-
vation in chemistry and electrical-engineering sensibilities and which bled out profusely in late ism and social criticism, utter conservatism next to lar structure with an inspection ]rouse at its centre
started. A1l this meant a triumph of progress and Victorian times-a feeling of utter displacement, irrnovation and experiment, enthusiasm towards which enables the prison staff to observe the in-
doubtlessly changed human life for the better. On alienation, and indeed melancholy, an uneasy sense the imperial mission adjacent to criticism of it. mates at al1 tirnes, who could never be sure
tire other hand, however, the severe social and that something was irretrievably lost on the way of Even with regard to ethics, the Victorian insistence whether they were being watched or not (for an
economical problems due to the unregulated na- progress. This sense of crisis concerned Victorian on niddle-class values such as the sacrosanct fam- illustration see entry II.4). From a utilitarian, in-
ture of the development became obvious to every- psychology, economy, and foreigr.r affairs where ily, rigid gender relations, moral earnestness and strumental point of view, all this makes perfect
one. The late Victorian phase from 1BB0 onwards Britain had to face major drawbacks. Germany, for duty, ir.rvolving a severe denial of treating sexuality sense, as lt leads to a reduction of costs for staff
changed the prevaiiing optimism into a more instance, began to threaten Britain's predominant opeuly, for.rnd their (hypocritical) counterparts and produced constant fear among the inmates-
sceptical, pessirnistic and often almost despaired position in trade and industry. After the Civil War, ancl llipsides in a discrimination and even pathol- yet at the same time entails unbearable psycholog-
wolld-view wl.rich permeated the economy, poli- the United States of America developed and spread ogisation of a self-conscious female identity that ical strain and dreadful psychological conse-
tics, and especialll, the arts and literature. The railways from the east to the west coast, unlocking would deviate from the gender norm. By the end quences (see Foucaultl. Thus, while this concept
Victorians could no longer hide the fact that the new ways of transportation of products from there, of the century, the allegedly dornesticated subcon- may be in accordance with utilitarian rules, it is
social, technological, and economic progress, and hence put pressure on industrial markets; like- scious had fully struck back when a new, modern- obviously counteracting modern ideas of justice
firstly, could not do away with the widening gap wise, the United States and Canada were able to ist late-Victorian attitude towards life and sex had and even a vague idea of a prison reforming frather
between rich and poor and that, secondly, the l-ru- participate in the grain market worldwide, which pavc'cl its way into the twentieth century while it than breaking) its delinquents. In Utili,tarictnism
man psyche was not able to bear up against this meant lower grain prices and a totally new scale of was at the same time stigmatised as 'decadence' John Stuart Mill defended the utilitarian idea that
rapid change of society and experience. As early productivity in agricuiture, wl.ricl.r Britain could r.rot ol', in the words of the notorious Ausfiian critic any right was based on the idea of a general utility,
as 1850, in his "Stanzas From the Grande Char- even dream to match. Severe economical depres- Max Nordau, even as "degeneration." The reasons yet he also saw tire clash of utilitarian rules with
treuse," Matthew Arnold describes a feeling of sions followed in Britain in the 1870s, which led fol this contradictory attitude towarcl life indica- justice and that individual rights nust be consid-
many people to emigrate. Britair.r also had to pay the tive of Victorian life are manifolcl and can be tracecl ered regardless of the consequences for the com-
Wandering betrveen trvo worlds, one dead, high price of rebellions and ill-fated wars for being fulther by looking at the major intellectual trer.rds mon good. Hence, he somewhat mitigated rule
The other polerless to be born, the world's most powerful imperial power: The ot the tine. utilitarianisrn into a weaker form when he ac-
British Literary Histr:ry
knowledged that certain circumstances allowed
for an exception to the rule: saving a life, for in-
stance, might possibly necessitate lying or stealing
in order to satisfy the rule of striving for greatest
happiness of all.
It cannot corne as a surprise that the utilitarian
principle of utility, that any arbitrary action is ap-
proved of or dismissed ('sanctioned') by its ten-
dency to increase the happiness of tl.re party whose
interests are at issue, would seem cold-hearted
and materialistic and that it could easily be consid-
ered a 'carte blanche' justifying etl.rical egotism.
The entrepreneurs and factory-owners of the In-
dustrial Revolution could readily use utilitarian
principles to legitimate a laissez-faire capitalism
relying on the power of unregulated markets for
the 'common' good of secure economic growth
and international competitiveness while utterly
neglecting the individual conditions of work and
e ritique of capitalisnr health of their labourers. One of the nost influen-
tial and groundbreaking publications of the Victo-
rian age was Karl Marx's Capital: Critique of Poltt-
ical Economy. Marx argued that capitalism was
ultimately tantamount to the exploitation of la-
bour: the less you paid your worker the higher
your profit and potential surplus value would turn
out. In the capitalist process of growing mass-pro-
duction, Marx saw work turn to abstract work,
alienating worker and work from each other and
reducing individual work force to the cornmodity
of human capital. Marx severely attacked both
Bentham and Mill quite consistently for their utili-
tarian ethics and ridiculed the former as a "genius
of middle-class stupidity" (492, my trans.). Char-
acteristically too, there is no single renowned Vic-
torian literary work of art that would opt for utili-
tarian ethics. Certainly the most acrimonious
reckoning of utilitarianism is Charles Dickens's
novel Hard Times, which portrayed the industrial
workers as mere 'hands' in the eyes of their em-
ployers and which satirically castigated the utili-
tarian understanding of education of schoolmaster
Thomas Gradgrind and teacher Mr M'Choakum-
child and their absurd insistence on the instru-
mental measurability of educational success as the
mindless rehashing of positivist facts and, indeed,
the utilitarian 'cho(a)king' of all creative fancy and
imagination.
'Now, whal I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but
in life. Plant nothing else, ald root
Facts. Facts al0ne are lvanted
out evetything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning
animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to
then. This is the principle on rvhich I bring up my own children,
and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Srick
to Facts, sirl'(Hord Tirnes ch. 1l
The tension between liberal and conservative utili-
tarian thinking and its manifold critique represents
an unstabie equilibriun.r pervading the Victorian
age. It explains the coexistence of modernisation,
technological progress, capitalist interest, success-
ful efforts for reform (i.e. Reform Bills, New Poor
Law, Custody of Infant Act, trade-unionsJ, and also
(late-JVictorian, post-lndustrial Revolution pessi-
mism. It should not be concealed, however, that
this conflict lasts and tirat utilitarian ethics have
influenced philosophical, political and economical
thinking until today (i.e. Thatcherism).
Darwinism, Theory of Evolution, Religion
eharles llarwin. In the entire human cultural his-
tory there are only very few scientists and scholars
who have changed the self-understanding of hu-
mankind as profoundly and irreversibly as Charles
Darwin has done. Building on earlier research
done by Carl von Linn6, who had also doubted the
constancy of species, Immanuel Kant, Jean Bap-
tiste de Lamarck, and Charles Lyell's Principles of
Geology, Darwin's On the Origin of Species con-
stitutes a culmination point of historicism, a world
view which had begun in the eighteenth century,
was celebrated by the French Revolution and Ro-
manticism and then truly spread with the system-
atic rise of the humanities and sciences in the
nineteenth century. When Darwin returned from
his'five-year journey on the HMS Beagle (1831-
1836) and started analysing the observations he
had made of flora, fauna, and geology, he realised
horv far his findings had taken him away from bib-
lical genesis. He felt that his theories came close to
"confessing a murder" (of God), and conscience
had taken him away from publishing his findings
for more than twenty years. Darwin's central the-
sis is a twofold one: all species have a common
origin and, in a process of transmutation, no spe-
cies in nature is ever constant.
On the contrary, all species have emerged and
reside in an evolutionary process over tremendous
periods of time. This insight discards all Christian
belief in divine creation. Darwin defines the prin-
ciple of natural selection as the preserving of sur-
vivable variants and, at the same time, as the ex-
tinction of less survivable, disadvantageous, or
even harmful variants of a species. Both pro-
and extinction-follow a mecha-
cesses--survival
nisnr in which organisms better adjusted ('fitter')
have a Sreater chance for
,u ,ir.ir surroundings
siilr,ival and for the reproduction of the species
lhan Iess adjusted ones who, in the course of evo-
lution, are superseded and eventually die out. The
proccss of natural selection, therefore, is subject to
'struggle for existeuce.' Dar-
.r fig,ht for survival, a
will knew that 'natural selection' and 'struggle
were complex metaphors only,
for existence'
denoted abstract processes completely cut
which
off from human influence and teleological action'
Ilarwin's work unsettled the Victorian society to
its core, as the Victorians all of a sudden peered
ir.rto the abyss of a godless universe, in which hu-
man beings are only minor characters, barely more
than a complex accident in an evolutionary pro-
cess beyond their control. Darwin himself always
believed that, by using their intelligence, human
beings were ableto face the conditions of their
biotope and thus reach for ultimate perfection.
The biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, by contrast,
in a much more pessimist fashion, also took a ret-
loglade evolution of mankind into consideration,
and the late-Victorian winged words of 'degenera-
tion,' 'decadence,' and 'depression' among other
things reflected this regressive, uncertain aware-
ness of life generated by the theory of evolution.
iic*iai Darwinism. In a mucl.r different and, from
today's perspective, altogether pejorative way, the
telm 'social Darwinism' has transferred Darwin's
ideas of natural selection of species to the realms of
sociology, economics, and politics. Indeed it was
the eminent sociologist Herbert Spencer, who
coined the phrase of the 'survival of the fittest.'
Thomas Robert Malthus had argued earlier in his
Essay on the Principle of PopuLation that distress in
a society (and especially in the working classes)
rvas due to overpopuiation and that the benefit of a
whole society was dependent upon holding the in-
crease of a population within resource limits. So-
cial Darwinism, then, takes Darwin's metaphor of
the 'stluggie for existence' literally as a justification
for social inequalities: Some individuals (groups,
nations, races) are able to support themselves, oth-
ers are not, and this is merely considered a matter
of being 'fitter' (i.e. better adapting to the circum-
stances) and finding the right survival tactics. It
goes without saying that laissez-faire capitalism,
imperialism, or racism would unhesitatingly luxu-
riate in Social Darwinist settings.
5**ularisation. Not only have Darwinism and
Evolution Theory (generally in unison with the
The Victoriarr Age
proceeding secularisation brought about by the In-
dustrial Revolution and capitalism) cast most se-
vere doubt on the existence of God in that they
literally contradicted the belief in a biblical genesis
of the world and of liuman beings, they also rnade
God "disappear" (Miller) in a figurative sense.
Darwinist thought, just like l.ristoricism in general,
has assulned "the relativity of any particulal Ufe
and culture" (MilleL 9), stable world views are all
of a sudden replaced by a rnultitude of perspec-
tives, belief systems, gradually corroding a social
and rnoral consensus and tl.rreatening to plunge
individuals into an abyss of psychological nothing-
ness and existential isolation. The historicist un-
derstanding of the world ultimately amounts to the
Title page of the first
doubting of the validity of any world view or phi- printing of An the Arigin oJ
Iosophy, the interrogation of institutions, beliefs, Species by f harles 0arwin
laws, morals, and customs, and tl.re awareness that (rBsc)
the articles of faith could no longer be bror-rght to
s
satisfactory proof (see, for example, Miller 12-13;
Houghton 95-180; Giimour 63-110). Phenomena
of secularisation and modernisation such as a
growing indifference towards religious matters and
agnosticism were evidentially hollowing out the
Anglican Church.
Religious renewal. At the same time, however,
tl.re Victorian Age witnessed powerful attempts at
religious renewal. The Church of England in the
mid-nineteenth century consisted of three major
branches: Low Church, Broad Church, and High
Church. Religious life also saw protestant groups
outside the Church of England, known as Non-
conformists or Dissenters, such as Methodists,
Baptists, or Congregationalists. The Low Church
movement of the Evangelicals, for instance, was
responsible for the abolition of slavery in the Brit-
ish Empire in 1833, and very influentially advo-
cated for a strict Christian life following severe
Puritan standards demonising all wordliness. Dog-
matism, rigidity, duty, and earnestness (Houghton)
were the moral keywords of the age intentionally
set against the alienating forces of religious and
social crisis, rigidly tabooing human sexuality and,
consequently, accounting for what is today almost
proverbially called'Victorian prudery.'
Though human passion is hardly to be con-
trolled by either concealment or censorship, the
Evangelical movement was the primary sotlrce of
the revival of the ethic of purity. Furthermore,
since the mid-1830s, religious iife in the Victorian
age had also witnessed High Church reform, which
accentuated the Catholic principles within tire An-
glican Church and opted for a rehabilitation of tra-
 British Literary History
In the Victolian horne swarming with childrelt sex was a secret. [t r.vas the skele-
toll in the palental chamber. No one melltioned it. Any untoward questiolls were
answered with a white lie (it was the great age of the stork) or a shocked rebuke.
Frorn none of his eldels-parent, teachet; or ntinister-did the Victorian child
hear'so much as one woLd in explanation of the true nature and functions of the
reproductive organs.'This conspiracy ofsilence was partly a mistaken effort to
pl'otect the child, especially the boy, from temptation (initially fron rnasturba'
tion, r'vhich was condemned on grounds of health as well as morals), but at bot-
tom it sprang fiom a personal feeling of revulsion. F'or the sexual act was associ-
ated by many wives only with a duty and by nrost husbands with a necessary if
pleasurable yielding to one's basel natule: by felv, therefore, lvith an iunocent
and joyful experience. The silence, which first aroused in the child a vague setise
of shame, was in fact a reflectiou of parental shame, and oDe suspects that some
women, at any rate, would have been happy if the stork had been a reality.
(Houghton 353)
dition and autirority. The most important move-
ment in the context is known as the Oxford
Movement or Tractarianism. Foilowing the tenets
of their major representatives John Keble, Edward
Bouverie Pusey, and Jol.rn Henry Cardinal New-
man, who all taught at Oxford University, the trac-
tarians argued against liberal tendencies and at-
tempted to renew the Church by, for instance,
strengthening medieval elements of religious and
Churcl.r ritual. Both Evangelicalism and the Oxford
Movement embodied a counterculture to the pre-
vailing sense of doubt in the Victorian age-sheet
anchors, as it were, in the stormy "Sea of Faith"
Matthew Arnold described in his poem "Dover
Beacl.t" (1867; see interpretation below)
.
Uncertainty without sceptieism. In order not to
confuse these anxieties with the relativism of a
postmodernist bend, for instance, it must be noted
that the alleged sense of doubt which character-
ised the Victorian age only gradually changed to
downright scepticism. The feeling of arbitrariness,
telatlvity, and historical contingency grew from
the 1830s to the Fin de Sidcle. The early- and
mid-Victorian sentiment of doubt was felt by peo-
ple who were uneasy and truly baffled about what
to believe in, or how to cope with a world which
was-with breath-taking speed-brir-rging about a
vast increase of scientific and historical knowl-
edge. Sorne lost their belief in God, others did not;
some lamented the loss of faith, others, like Tenny-
son, quietly acquiesced: "So be it. It is God's will.
I still believe, though I cannot see. And I have faith
that God will be waiting for me when I have
crossed the bar" (qtd. in Milier 13). Until 1870,
doubts never reached that epistemological vantage
poit.tt when the mind was no longer regarded as a
valid instrument of finding the truth.
The loss of faith and rnanifold attempts at its
renewal constituted a characteristically unstable
equilibrium. Victorians were uncertain about tl.reir
position ir.r tl.reir society, they were uncertain about
the new theories they were confronted with, but,
then, their principal capacity to arrive at truth ra-
tionally was not fundarnentally questioned-in
fact, the conseusus that truth is attainable some-
how is the one Victorian certainty left, politically,
sociologically, economically, and, as we shall see
later, aesthetically. John Ruskin argued against the
utilitarian spirit of the age by tuming to art history,
and Matthew Arr.rold, otherwise thoroughly pessi-
mistic about the signs of the times, adhered to tire
redeeming value of culture and still points out in
1869, at a time when high-Victorianism was well
on the wane:
Now, then, is the moment fol cLrlture to be of service, cul-
ture which believes in making reason and the lvill of God
prevail, believes in perfection, is the study and pursuit of
perfection, and is no longel debarred, by a rigid invincible
exclusiorr of whatever is new, from getting acceptance for
its ideas, simply because they are new.
The moment this view of culture is seized, the moment it
is regarded not solely as the endeavour to see thlngs ds
tlrcy are, to draw towards a knowledge of tlrc uniuersal
order which seems to be intended and aimed at in the
world, and which it is a man's happiness to go along with
or his rnisery to go cor,lnter to,-to learn, in short, t/re rulll
of God,-rhe rnoment, I say, cnlture is considered not
melely as the endeavour to see and learn this, but as the
endeavour, also, to make it prevail, the moral, social,
and beneficent character of culture becomes manifest.
(Arnold 32; my ernphasis)
It was not until about 1870 when this belief in
"things as they are" and in the existence of a "uni-
versal order of things" was more and more shat-
tered, quite in proportion to how the relativity of
knowledge and the subjective character of
thought were likewise enhanced. It no longer
seemed a question of what unmistakably and im-
mutably ls, but in what particular light a situation,
a character, a cultLlre, or the world appear. More
and more gradually, the autonomy of conscious-
ness was established, which decidedly contra-
dicted the causal connection of what people saw
happening around them and which produced bro-
ken images of countless perspectives in which r.rl-
timate truths were dissolving by degrees. Graphic
examples of this process are Vincent van Gogh's
famous impressionist sunflower paintings pro-
ctiicecl between IBB8 ancl 1889. The meticulotts
painting a singular object
cli{ierer.rces making each
there is potentially a myriad of perspec-
rcveal that
tives of looking at a sunflower, reflecting upon
rnLrltiple attitudes towat'ds life.
Victorian Gender Relations
'fhis transfolrnation of attitude gradually yet fun-
construction of gender roles
clan.rentally affects the
as well, especially the view of women in the Victo-
rian Age. The reiation of men and women was tra-
ciitionally characterised by separate spheres,
which, most of all, can be regarded as an irnplica-
tion of tl.re Industrial Revolution. While fomrerly
farnily nernbers worked side by side in and around
therr home, tire shift from such l.rorne-based activ-
ities to factory production made r.nen leave the
hoLlse to earn tireir wages and wo[ren stay at
horne to perform (unpaid) domestic work. In Vic-
torian society, marriage, domesticity, ar.rd moth-
erhood were largely considered well sufficient
enrotional fulfilment for women. The role rnodel of
this attitLlde was Queen Victoria herself, whose
rnalriage to her beloved husband Albert was
rnostly centred around the private sphere of Bal-
moral Castle, surrounded by their many children,
suggesting to the people an image of marital bliss
and a haven of hornely comfort. Followir-rg the
evarrgelical ideal of constancy in marriage and
\'volran's innate purity and goodness, an idealisa-
tion of woman occurred that envisaged women as
dutiful, subordinate, virtuous, comforting, passive
yet thoroughly busy, upright and morally superior,
albeit hardly human, creatures. Another epony-
rrious role model was what Coventry Patmore in
the (otherwise minor) poem of the same title
called the "The Angel in the House":
rllon nrust be pleased; but him to please
Is tuomo['s pleasure; down the gulf
0l his condoled uecessities
cash her besr, s/re fllngs hersel/.
S/rr:
Horv olten flings lor nought, and yokes 5 tual deification of the 'Angel in the House' and its
HeL heart to an icicle oL rvhin,
!Vhose each impatient word provokes
Another, not from heL, but him;
!\'hile she, too gentle even to force
l{is peuitence by kind replies, l0
![aits by, expecting his renorse,
With pardon in her pitying eyes;
t\nd il he once, by shame oppress'd,
A comfortable lvoLd confers,
)'he Vietorian Age
She leans ctd ueeps agolnst his brecst, 15
And seems to thi.nk tlrc sln uos /rers;
0r any eye to
see her charms;
At any tine, she's still his wife,
Dearly devoted to his arns;
She loves lvith love lhal carnot tiie; 20
Aud rvhen, ah woe, she lo'res alone,
Through passionate duty love springs higher,
As grass gLorvs taller round a sto[e.
(bk 1, Canto 9, Prelude l; my ernphasis)
Home, here, is obviously a refuge from the chaos
of politics, business, public services or factory life
the man is involved in, and the woman, or rather
the wife, is the man's pleasurable, condoling, emo-
tional, patient, gentle, kind, pardoning, self-sacri-
ficing redeerner (see illustration on p.64). The
social function of woman as wife, mother, and do-
mestic manager precluded women from work out-
side of the home, altirough since by far r.rot all mid-
dle-class families used to harre servants, household
work often involved physical labour such as carry-
ing water, washing, ironir.rg, l.remming of bed-
linen, which turned out to be difficult enough in
women's dresses, when corsets made work or any
other physical activity an at least cumbersome un-
dertaking and often left little time for Victorian fe-
male pastimes such as embroidery and playing the
piano. Tl-re redeeming function of women was
seen even on the grander scale of social life when
many associations-the Sunday Scirools, for in-
stance-and institutions for the care of the sick or
for orphans were put on women's shoulders.
The normative understanding of what a suc-
"The Angel in the House"
cessful female 'career' was supposed to look like,
the ideal of woman's purity, the domestication and
tabooing of all levity, sexual impulses, and per-
sonal freedom in favour of chastity, duty, and ear-
nestness yielded a terrible, though self-evident,
downside. With the hindsight of all our presenr
Post-Freudian psychoar.ralytical knowledge, those
taboos can appear as hardly more than (hypocriti-
cal) flights from open secrets. Obviously, tl.re vir-
ensuing cult of virtue and earnestness could not
do away with adultery, seduction, and countless
illegitimate children bom by unmarried women.
Once 'fallen' (from the path of virtue), these
women led the lives of outcasts with little else to
turn to for support than prostitution. 50,000 pros-
titutes were recorded in England and Scotland in
1850, in London there were 8,000 prostitutes
alone. The French historian Hippolyte Taine indi-
British Litetary History
Victorian Family
Seene (lett)
"The New Woman*
Warh Day" (right)
cated that in the Haymarket and the Strand "every
l.rundred step one jostles twenty harlots" (qtd. in
Houghton 366).
Though it is conventional in its conclusion; Al-
fred Lord Tennyson's narrative poem "The Prin-
cess" centres on a princess, who founds a univer-
sity . for women where men are not allowed to
enter and articulates many of the iniustices suf-
fered by women. While the Prince's father un-
equivocally swears by the separate spheres men
and women are meant to inhabit-"Man with the
head and woman with the heart: / Man to com-
mand and woman to obey; / AII else confusion"-
Princess lda, by contrast, embodies the "New
Woman" who rebels against legal and social bond-
age, boredom in being locked up at home, and
wl.ro is passionate about equality in education and
professional careers:
Everylvhere
Two heads in council, two beside the heatth,
Trvo in the tangled business of the world,
Two in the liberal offices of life,
Two plummets dropt for one to sound the abyss
0f science and the secret of the mind;
Musician, painter, sculptor, critic, nore.
(Tennyson, "The Princess" lines 155-161)
Types of Victorian It cannot be concealed that it took feminism a long
femininity time, until the last quarter of the nineteenth cen-
tur% to gain true momentum in the Victorian age.
Carrying forward Mary Wollstonecraft's argument
in favour of the equality of the sexes in A Vindica-
tion of the Rights of Womon, John Stuart Mill, in his
essays On Liberty and The Subjection of Women,
opposed the rigid exclusion of women from public
activities and legal rights from his consistent utili-
tarian perspective. Thoroughly influenced by the
advent of such plays by Henrik Ibsen as A Doll's
House or Heddo Gabler, the type of 'New Woman'
provocatively revolted against the limits imposed
on women in the 1890s. They wore comfortable
clothes, rode on bicycles, smoked cigarettes in pub-
lic with ostentation (see illustration). Female suf-
frage was a political topic from 1832 onwards, tire
national movement of women's suffrage in the
United Kingdom began in 7872, and from the first
decades of the twentieth century (1903-1928) the
suffragette movement and their figureheads Em-
meline and Christabel Prankhurst fought for wom-
en's rigirt to vote-which only became law in
1918-with more and more radical means. Instead
of subordinating to the norm of female self-sacri-
fice, the New Woman of the late-nineteenth century
self-consciously and self-confidently believes in po-
litical as well as sexual equality, independence and
individual fulfilment. New Women are activists, re-
formers, and also artists and writers. Characteristi-
cally, this new female self-consciousness has often
been associated by those (men) anxious of or scan-
dalised by such behaviour with decadence, degen-
eration, perversion or even crime (see Shires; Ro-
botham; Dowling; Greenslade; Dijkstra; Ledger;
Bronfen), visible, for instance, in the deluded posi-
tion of positivist criminology brought forward by
Cesare Lombroso in notorious studies like The Fe-
mole Offender. Sucir pathologisation nade the fight
for women's equal rights all the harder.
These various types of Victorian femininity
(and such topical masculine counterparts as the
,Centleman' or the 'seducer') pervade Victorian
literatLlre, as only a
quick glance at Geolge Eliot's
worl< rnakes clear. Here, the reader encounters
living fernale saints sttch as the Methodist
lrrtaclrer Dinah Morris in Adam Bede or, in the
..,mc novel, the tragic fate of fallen women such
as Fletty Sorrel, who is sedttced, made pregnant,
iilted, and then abandons her child and is tried
for child murder. Dorothea Brooke in Eliot's Mld-
clLennrch and Gwendolen Harleth in Daniel
L)erondo, by contrast, are early prototypes of the
New Woman. The New Woman became a phe-
luoneuon many writers-male and female-have
turned to with utter fascination since 1870.
George Gissing's novels spring to mind, focussing
on tl.re fate of emancipated women in a male-dour-
inated society, or unforgettable characters like
Tliomas Hardy's Eustacia Vye in The Return of the
Native, Stre Bridehead in Jude the Obscure, in-
deed Henry James's Isabel Archer in The Portrait
of a Lady and the extraordlnary relationship be-
tween the two feminists Olive Chancellor and
Verena Tarrant in ?/re Bostonians respectively,
Grant Allen's Herminia Barton in The Womon
\,Vlto Did, Mona Caird's Hadria Fullerton in TIrc
Daughters of Danaus, and the character of Eliza-
betli Caldwell Maclure ('Beth') in Sarah Grand's
autobiographical novel The Beth Book.
The Triumph of Time
lllir";mph sf man over time. In 1866, the British
poet Charles Algernon Swinburne publishes the
poem "The Triumph of Time," wl.rich must be
considered one of the most important catch-
phr'ases summarising the unresolved tensions
and the gradual change of the Victorian spirit,
oscillating between optimism, enthusiasm and
auxious pessimism. On the one hand, in the Vic-
tot'ian era, the 'triumph of time' is tantamount to
a veritable triumph of man ouer time because, in
a socio-cultural and -historical sense, no other
epoch in human history has seen a similar stan-
clardisation of time. The beginning of the nine-
teenth century still featured a vast array of differ-
ent local tlmes and time cultures. Every place or
at least every region set their ciocks commensu-
rate with their estimation of the culmination
point of the sun. A hundred years later, this pleth-
ora of times had taken the level, order, but also
the pace of a coordinated World Time. The stan-
ciardisation of clock-time posed a challenge, ab-
sot'bing governments, rulers, and engineers alike,
The Vietnrian Age
and was detachable or.rly aftel the invention and
introduction of transmittir.rg electric impulses
over vast distances yia telegraph. Since the eigh-
teenth centllry, nautical standards amongst sea-
rnan had already come to an agreement as re-
gards a 'normal time' based on tire longitude of
the prime meridian at tl're Royal Observatory in
Greenwich. By 1855, 99o/o of. public clocks in
Britain were set according to Greenwich Mean
Time (GMT), which became official in 1880. Fi-
nally, in 1884, an international conference in
Washington agreed upon a Standard Time by
subdividing the globe in twenty-four consistent
time zones comprising of fifteen degrees of longi-
tude each, made necessary by the temporal coor-
dination needed for reliable and efficier.rt railway
travel. The idea of standard time was proposed by
the Scottish-bom Canadian engineel Sandford
Fleming, who may well be called "one of the
most influential globalisers of the nineteenth cen-
tury" (Osterirammel 90). These developments The rlemi:cratisation
were possible only in those societies used to mea- of timo
suring time by the clock. Victorian times wit-
nessed a pervasive 'chronometerisation,' that is,
in effect, the democratisation of time as the in-
dustrial mass production of clocks and watches
set in. The city of Geneva, for example, exported
54,000 pocket watches in 7790; by 1818, the
number of clocks produced in the whole canton
of NeuchAtel amounted to almost a million. Close
to another hundred years later, by 1908, the Ger-
man watch and clock manufacturer Junghans
was the biggest of its kind in the world producing
3,000,000 clocks and watches in a year (Wendorff
387-429). The fact that in the 1890s the Ameri-
can manufacturer Ingersoll lowered the price of a
pocket watch to one doilar was almost symbolic
of the fact that the social difference between peo-
ple with or without watches was outweighed
once and for all.
Triumph nf time over man, On tire other hand,
however, the 'triumph of time' and tl-re distribution
and omnipresence of clocks and watches did not
only have positive implications. Surely, it accounted
for the quantification and perpetuation of work-
ing processes, which back in pre-industrial cir-
cumstances had proceeded in irregular and erratic
rhythms. However, as the division of labour and
the organisation of production were increasing
and the general rhytl'rm of everyday life was accel-
erated and had to be more coordinated (in adjust-
ing to railway time-tables, for instance), workers
had to face a much stricter time regiment forced
British literary Hist0ry
uporl then both by theil employers and by the re-
quirements of the narket itself. Longer and more
efficient working hours represented useful effects,
but at the same time the subordination under a
concept of abstract tirne er.rtailed time pressure
and, thus, a psychologically precarious drifting
apart of private ('subjective time'), sociai and pub-
lic rhythms ['social time'), the c]ash of which
turned out to be a matter of social discipline as
well as of cultural and psychic alienation (see
Middeke 60-78 and also Foucault 171-293 for the
aspect of temporal disciplining). Seen frorn this
angle, the 'triumph of time' shapes up as a tri-
umph of time ouer man, and this impressior.r of
time felt as oppressive and overwhelming is borne
out in an even more general way by the relation
between Victorian consciousness, individual rnan
and the cosmic long-term perspective of life and na-
ture embodied, for instance, by Darwin's theory.
Losing an ultimate meaning and a metaphysical sta-
bility in reality and social life quite congruously
entailed for the individual that the temporal di-
mension of life came to the fore. In Swinburne's
poem, "the loves and hours of the life of a man" are
"swift and sad, being born of the sea. " We "rejoice"
and "regret" only "for a span," we are "born with a
man's breath," and we are unable to "save" any-
thing "on the sands of life, in the straits of time"
["The Triumph of Time," lines 72-82). Swinburne's
poem, though originaliy depicting the lyrical I's
mourning for a lost love, is indicative of time felt as
being the opponent of mankind in a situation where
the Victorian consciousness has lost bearing upon
the hitherto safe metaphysical laws of existence. Re-
vealing a l.reartfelt grieving for the loss of such
metaphysical security and fixed moral and ethical
standards of conduct, the conflict witl.r time was
both the symptom and the cause of a widespread
feeling of insignificance and transitoriness amongst
the Victorians. The deep melancholy inherent in
'Th ree-deeker-novel,' the loss of time is a central motif in Victorian life
here: f harles Dicl<ens's and literature. Such a mid- and late-Victorian view
Aliver Twist (tBzB) that looks upon time as a force disrupting individ-
ual self and social consensus is clearly
opposed to the much more optimistic
stance of Thomas Babington Macau-
lay, who was, besides Thomas Car-
lyle, the most eminent Victorian his-
torian. Macauiay's The History of
England can be considered one of the
intellectual mouthpieces of a mid-
dle-class, common sense point of
view that is derived from a confident
belief in progress and the continuity of past tradi-
tions, personalities, and democracy into an open
and rather sanguine future.
2.5.3 lThe Novel
lncreasing literary market. The process of a broad-
ening reading pubiic, which was begun in the
eighteenth century, was continued and intensified
in the Victorian Age. Readership numbers in-
creased rapidlV, both among the lower middle-class
as well as among industrial workers, and were
brought forward by social reform and various en-
suing socio-cultural developments (see Abrams
and Greenblatt 2:1043-65). While the history of
public libraries went back into the fifteenth cen-
tury, circulating libraries first appeared in the
eighteenth century and further flourished in Victo-
rian times, the most commercially successful one
being founded by Charles Edward Mudie in 1840
in London, which developed into a chain and
quickly acquired branches in other British cities.
In 1848, WH. Smith opened the first railway sta-
tion bookshop where inexpensive books could be
bought or borrowed. As newspapers were still
quite expensive until 1855 when the tax on news-
papers ('Stamp Duty') was abolisl.red, members of
the lower classes could turn to broadsides (tabloid
types of street literature) and chapbooks for infor-
mation and entertainment. Hundreds of maga-
zines covering all the fields of contemporary life
ranging from politics, science, and medicine, to
culture, art, and literature sprang up like mush-
rooms. These developments certainly made for
one central thing besides an increased accessibility
of literary products: Whereas the Romantic era
clearly had its aesthetic highlights in the form of
poetry, Victorian literature witnessed the trium-
phal procession of the novel, which-though still
disdained at the beginning of the century-be-
came the most representative.and productive liter-
ary genre in the nineteenth century.
Tire economic demands of commercial circulat-
ing libraries like Mudie's made it a typically nine-
teenth-century publishing practice that novels orig-
inally appeared as so-called'three-decker-novels'
(see iilustration), the first volume virtually whet-
ting the readership's appetite for the next two.
The price of each volume was half a guinea (10s
6d), which equals about I20 today, and made buy-
ing the volumes unattainable even for many mid-
cl6.-class readers. Cheaper one-volume editions of
sr.Lccessful novels for 6s were indeed published,
lrLrt rvith nuch delay (see Seeber 273-75). Hence,
the powel and influence of people the likes of
Mudie were considerable, as they were ttot only
able to buy large quautities of a first edition of a
novel, but'"vere also able to promote and channel
tlre caleer of a writer (Niinning 2I-22). Writers
flom Dickens to Hardy also chose to have their
povels published in the fonn of instalments in
magazines such as Household Words, The Sotur-
day Reuiew, or The CornhUL Magazine. For writers,
tl're thlee-decket'-novel ot publishing in magazines
neant financial success but also accornmodating
to literary conventions, most prominently tl.re
happy ending or poetic justice as well as tl.re strict
.rvoidance of reference to all rnatters sexual. What
is striking to observe acloss the entire Victorian
era is the change that takes place with regard to
wl.rich parts of the readership were (meant to be)
reached by the novel. Novels by Dickens and po-
erns by Tennyson were read by alnost all ages and
all social classes. However, since the last decades
of the Victorian age, a mucl.r more liberal treat-
ment of moral issues and literary conventions il.r
connection with much more complex aesthetic
structures in novels by Walter Pater, Henry James,
or Joseph Conrad, for instance, have procured an
enduring split in the readership, disconnecting
the aesthetics of tl.re novel from the taste and un-
derstanding of the masses, which is prevalent until
today.
Continuing traditions. The Victoriar.r novel con-
tinued the traditions started in the eighteenth-cen-
tury novel and in Romanticism (cf. entries I.2.3
and L2.4). The models of the Bildungsroman and
tlie sentimental novel (in the wake of Fielding's
'Ibm Jones or Richardson's Pamela) or, more gen-
erally, novels focussing their plotlines or.r the de-
velopment or education of their (female) protago-
nists were as constructive as the continuation of
the historical novel after Walter Scott and tite
Gothic novel strand of Romanticism. Likewise, in
epoch-making and until today widely read novels
suclr as Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice,
or Emmo Jane Austen combined aspects of moral
education with a meticulous portrayal of family
issues, class, manners, love, marriage, and court-
ship. Such topics were as productive as Austen's
early stream-of-consciousness technique, which
combines direct discourse with narratoriai com-
ment focussing on individual, subjective perspec-
tives in the narrative. Not only did both Austen's
The Victorian Age
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, Mary Barton (r8+8)
Emily Bront€, Wuthering Heights (t8471
Charlotte BronlE,Jane Eyre (847)
William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (18a7-r8a8)
Charles Dickens; 8/eak House (r852-r853)
George Eliot, Middlemarch (t874)
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (t88r)
Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean (t885)
Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (895)
Joseph Conrad, Lord lim (tgoo)
subject matter and form betray, her keen concem
with individr.rality, subjectivity and human emo-
tior.r, the plotlines of hel novels also present a
character's future as ernphatically open. Today, es-
pecially Austen's use of free indirect speech seems
much ahead of her time as the rigoror.rs use of this
technique leads way towards the late-nineteenth
century novei and, indeed, literary modernism.
Oiversification. Beyor.rd that, the Victorian novel
witnessed an immense diversification of these tra-
ditions, evolving sub-genres like 'silver-fork' nov-
els or novels of fasirion (based on upper-class life-
styles), political novels, social novels, religious
novels, regional novels, novels depicting fernale
developments and education, panoramic views of
society, sensational r.rovels (the pledecessor of
crime fiction), fantasy fictior.r, or utopian and dys-
topian novels ffor cor.rcise overviews see, for in-
stance, David; Wheeler, EngLi.slt Fiction; Niinning;
Pordzik) generating an unprecedented plurality of
texts, bringing forward a sheer abundance of new
writers, and creating whole scores of different it.r-
tentions for different readers ranging in quality
from highest aesthetic claims to broadest mass en-
tertainment.
Two modes: realism and romanee. The aesthet-
ics of the Victorian novel and all its sub-genres
follow two fundamental ideal types: The modes or'
varieties of realism and of romance. Obviously,
all ideal types are hypothetical constructions in
the abstract. Hence, considering these two modes
and their characteristics must firstly acknowledge
that individual variants und understandings of're-
alism,' for example, may be quite different by com-
parison of individual texts and writers, and sec-
ondly, that the opposition suggested here ir.r fact
denotes another tension, an oscillation movefilenI
between the two poles. Botll the modes of realism
and romance entail a particular way of looking at

British Litorary History
Realism and Romance
. -& Realism is characterised by verisimilitude, the likeliness of a rep-
resentation to reality, and the very probability of an action (for an
extended definition see section 1.3.3.t). Things, persons, actions,
places, events, and situations must be recognisable and identifiable
to a wide majority of readers beyond a particular author's perspec-
tive and consciousness; what happens must be credible to be likely
to have happened the way it is described. Realism implies linear
chronology and continuity, causal interconnectedness ofthe events
described in chronological order; and, after all, everyday subject
matter a nd a heterod iegetic, heteroreferentia l, om n iscient na rrator
and point of view (cf. entry ll.9). ln the words of the postmodernist
British novelist John Fowles, the (Victorian) realist "novelist stands
next to Cod. He may not know all, yet he tries to pretend that he
does," pulling "the right strings and his puppets will behave in a life-
like manner" (The French Lieutenant's Woman, ch.3).
. The ** romanee, by contrast-originating in medieval heroic verse
and prose narratives-is centred on adventures, quests, and love.
Other than the realist novel, the romance contains the generic ele-
ments of the supernatural, the marvellous, and the uncommon that
shine through its incidents, which render the romance a much more
heightened and idealised genre.
tl-re world, and analysing both modes in the Victo-
rian novel makes clear that their shares in the aes-
thetics of a particular novel may be weighed differ-
ently, often they even overlap in a co-existence of
various elements taken from each mode and pro-
duce complex genre-hybrids.
Realism, then, must most of all be looked upon
as a mode of fictional writing that intends and al-
lows for generalisations to be made. Realism is
based upon and at tire same sets out to produce
consensus, that is, a common horizon, an equality
of viewpoints grounded in the shared conviction
of the existence and achievability of identity and
trutlr: "the oneftess or the invariant structure by
which we recognize a thing, by which we judge it
under varying circumstances to be the same"
(Ermarth 5]. Realist nal'ratives are characterised by
past-tense narrators whose overall intention is to
generate a collective experience, "a recollection of
all points of view and of all private times under the
aegis of a single point of view and in a common
time" (Ermarth 54). In sucl.r a view, the mode of
fictional representation suggests, to repeat Mat-
thew Arnold's words, that things can indeed be
perceived "as they are" (for a vast number of peo-
ple sharing that view) and, hence, these 'things as
they are'would not change even if the perspective
on them varied. Beyond such epistemological pre-
requisites of realism, the common sense realist
world-view is strengthened by structural conven-
tions such as, for instance, the causal coherence
of the plotline and the happy ending, that is, clo-
sure in the sense of poetic justice.
The Development of the Victorian Novel
Surveying tl.re development of the Victorian novei
from the 1830s to the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury, it can be ascertained that, quite proportional
to the loss of social and political consensus out-
lined above, the epistemological, cultural, and
philosophical preconditions for realism stibside
more and more and, thus, the aesthetics of the
novel change. Famous examples of the Victorian
Bildungsroman like Dickens's Oliuer ?lulst (1838)
and David Copperfield (1849-50) present their
young protagonists at odds with, yet desperately
searcl.ring for, their identity, their place in society,
ar.rd ir.r tl.re universe. Oliver, quite symbolically, is a
foundling ar.rd a waif; David suffers from his cruel
stepfather, who almost beats him to death; both
are afflicted by circumstances entirely indifferent
to their fates. In both cases, though, Dickens in the
end devises a place, a career, and a future for them
in an at ieast potentially ordered society where all
the characters get what they deserve. Even though
the Victorian novei did not break through to the
radical formal and narratological experiments car-
ried out later by Modernist writers like James
Joyce and Virginia Woolf, by the end of the cen-
tury, the world nevertheless no longer seemed an
'objective' entity or fact, but rather a subjective
projection, a form of consciousness. In a morai or
ethical sense even, hitherto unquestioned Victo-
rian key values like duty, honour, valour, or ear-
nestness in late Victorian novels like Joseph Con-
rad's Lord Jim or Henry James's Wlut Maisie
Knew and The Ambassadors only exist anymore
because (some) characters believe in them. As
these novels by James and Conrad prove, recognis-
ing the world has become a matter of individual
interpretation, which, in turn, calls for new forms
of narrative beyond the realist consensus tirat has
gone stale by this time.
The social problem novel. Before innovation in
iiterature iras an impact on aesthetic structure and
form, it affects new subject matter'. In the ear-
ly-Victorian period, the most innovative sub-genre
was the social problem novel that made new sub-
ject areas accessible as it portrayed industrial life
Authors like Ben-
in hitherto unprecedented ways'
r.lrrin Disraeli, Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell or
r l,arles Kingsley commented on developments
aLrcl nrovenents
(in particular, Chartism or strikes
pi'oletarian antidote to exploitation) and set
as one
to confrot.tt especially their middle-class read-
or-rt
ership with the wrong side of the transformation
Drocess inherent in the Industrial Revolution. In a
iealist and poignant fashion, they pointed out to
tliese privileged classes the hardships of working
class living conditions in the big cities: unemploy-
ment, bitter poverty, hunger' or unacceptable stan-
ciarcls of hygiene. Disraeli's Sybil, or the Two Na'
tlons tackled the issue of an irnpending split
between the misery of the wolking class and the
luxury of the upper class. Gaskell turned this dif-
ference geographical in that she juxtaposed the
rural south and the industrialised north of England
ir.r North and South. Gaskell's Mary Barton is a re-
alistic depiction of the proletarian squalor in the
slums of Manchester. Kingsley's Yeast provides in-
sight into agricultural labour, while in Alton Locke
I(ingsley makes his tailor/poet-protagonist mov-
ingly narrate his own fate and, unconventionally,
denies a happy ending to him. In most other cases
of the social problem novel, the happy ending
seems all too artificially precipitated, as it often
cierives from an exerted ensnarement of social re-
alisrn on the one hand and a romance love-plot on
the other. While this incongruent mix deflected the
actual solution to the social problem into the realm
of er.notional compassion, Disraeli's Coningsby, or
tlrc New Generation devised a marriage between
the aristocracy and the middle-class industrial
nagnates and, mucl.r more politically, called for
eminent and responsible leaders to get on top of
the social maladies.
Thomas (arlyle: hcro-werrship. This demand for
leaders echoes the philosophy of one of the great-
est Victorian thinkers: Thomas Carlyle. In 184i,
Carlyle's lristoliographical study On Heroes, Hero
Worship, and the Herolc sees the salvation of soci-
ely in emulating'super'-leaders ("Capitains")
sitch as Dante, Shakespeare, Luther or Napoleon.
Carlyle's earlier biographies on Friedrich Schiller,
Frederick II of Prussia, essays such as "Biogra-
plry," "Boswe\|s Life of Johnson" and the auto-
biographical novel Sartor Resartus testify to Car-
lyle's belief that the life of an excellent pelsonality
and the hero-worship involved in its recounting
can be foundation stones of inspiration in an
otherwise completely unheroic world. In the tradi-
tior.r of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, the protagonist
The Victorian Age
of Sartor Resorfus, tire German professol Diogenes
Teufelsdlcikli, transforms the nihilistic impression
of an "everlasting No" into an "everlasting Yea"
when he comes to the conclusion that the central
act of knowledge is accepting a will of God beyond
the world's fate. The world is perceived as a gigan-
tic steam engine, r'elief fron.r wllich can again only
be procured by quasi-feudal leaders. In an earlier,
yet programmatic essay on the "Signs of the
Times" Cai'lyle poiDts out that "were we required
to characterise this age of ours by a simple epithet,
we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical,
Devotiorral, Philosopirical, or Moral Age, but,
above all others, the Mechanical Age." Carlyle
ironically lays bare that the optimisrn derived from
progress and industrialisation is an illusion, the
price for which is a likewise mechanical utilitarian
thinking producing callous, de-individualised
monster-human beings.
eharleE Fiekens. No other Victorian writer has
given that much iife to the big industrial city, its
dirt, its bad smells, its labyrinthine streets as
Charles Dickens. Dickens's novels, short stories,
and tales (i.e. Sketches by Boz, Tlrc Pickwick Pa-
pers) are unique hybrids including elements from
the social problem novel and the sensational
novel, and also incorporate picaresque and farci-
cal elements of humour. In no other Victorian
writer is the pure energy and bustle of industrial
city life captured that well and reflected in such a
rich kaleidoscope of unforgettable and eccentric
characters and such haunting images as, for in-
stance, the fog tirat is indicative of a nebulous le-
gal system in Bleok House. At times, Dickens's
tone may perhaps be hard to digest, as it often all
too suddenly and superficially blends the social
criticism with sentimental melodrama. However,
what Dickens most of all sets against the alienat- The triurnph of
ing forces of the times is a veritable triumph of the imagination
the imagination, the choice of names for his char-
acters alone, though these are often openly moral-
ising and telling names, displays Dickens's playful
relish in
language: Wopsle (the parish clerk in
Great Expectations), Luke Honeythunder (The
Mystery of Edwin Drood), Paul Sweedlepipe (the
barber in Mortin Chuzzlewi.t), Mr Fezziwig (A
Christmas Corol), Anne Chickenstalker (Tlrc
Chimes), Serjeant Bv.zftrz (Tlrc Pickwick Papers) or
Polly Toodle (the nurse in Dombey and Son), be-
yond all satire, betray Dickens's insight into the
pure materiality of signifiers, which has rendered
l.ris work open even to deconstructive readings (cf.
entry II.4). The ultimately benign optimism that
British Literary History
lnterpretation "{oketown" in eharles lSiekens's l"!$rd Times
It !vas a town of red brick, 0r 0f brick that would have been red
iI the srnoke and ashes had allowed it; but, as matters st00d
was a town oI wtnalura| red and black like tlte painted. face of a
savage. lI was a [orvn of machinery and tall chimneys, out of
which intermiuable serpents of smoke trailed themselves lor
ever and ever, and never g0t uncoiled. There was a canal in it,
tlnt
and d riuer ran purple rulr/r ill-snrelling die, and vast piles of
building full of windows where there was rattling and a tren-
bling all day long, and where tlrc ptston of tlle steam.engtne
wlrked m0n0t0n0us[y up and doun ltke tlrc head of an elephant
in a state of nelanclnty madness. It contained several large
streets all very like lne onltlter, and many small streets still
shines through Dickens's eally work later makes
way for a resounding pessimism. Rewriting the
negative first ending, which Dickens had originally
designed for Pip in Great Expectations, meanl
nothing but a rnajor concession to Victorian liter-
ary conventions, while mature novels like Bleak
House or Our MutuaL Friend are indicative of the
fact that Dickens must have felt the consensus be-
tween social role and private self iastingly dis-
rupted, so that determining tl.re balar.rce of what
society expects and what individuals must do to
remain true to themselves became increasingly im-
possible. Striking leitmotifs like the river (of time
and eventual renewal), money, and the waste heap
in Our MutuaL Friend, thus, advance as fictional
models of the world.
The historieal novel. The role-model Sir Walter
Scott set for the historical novel-a fictitious hero
is placed in historical surroundings and his adven-
tures confront him (and the reader) with historical
figures and incidents-is only rather fitfully con-
tinued. Many popular writers trivialise the histori-
cal setting and make use of it for purely entertain-
ing reasons. Even for writers like Dickens (e.g.
BarnrLby Rudge) or George Eliot (Romola) the his-
torical fi'amework is really not much more than a
decorum illustrating contemporary ideas. The
most convincing example of the Victorian histori-
cal novel after Scott is William Makepeace Thack-
eray's Henry Esmond, wiricl.r constitutes a devel-
opment of Scott's model because not only does it
involve a psychological transformation process of
the protagonist, it also turns out disenchar.rted
about Scott's view of historl' as heroic events.
Thackeray's masterpiece Vanity Fair and Anthony
Trollope's novels constitute meticulously crafted,
parioramic profiles of Victorian sociely. Vanity
more like one anltltet, inhabited by people eqLrally like one an.
other, who all lvent in and out at the some hoLus, lvith the same'
it sound upon the same paventents, to do the some lvork, and to
whont every day rvas the sarrrc as yesterday and tonrorrol, and
evely year the counterpart 0l the last and the next. fDickens,
HardTimes ch.5, rny ernphases)
The unimaginable fatigue of the monotonous
routine of the mechanical workflow in the indus-
trial cities, its mindless repetition, and its terrify-
ing, hostile impact on tnan is portrayed in this
nightmarish sketch of Coketown, which Dickens
dedicated to Carlyle.
Fair, as its subtitle makes clear, is "a novel without
a hero" and, thus, satilically and often parodisti-
cally debunks Victorian stereotypes and narrative
conventions. Both writers share the contempt of
romance-like coincidences ar.rd black-and-white
moralising, as the portrayal of Amelia Sedley and
Rebecca Sharp in Vanity Fair makes irrevocably
clear: Amelia is virtuous and passive, yet cowardly
and naive; Becky is ruthless and sly, but active and
determined at the same time. Thackeray's alto-
gether pessirnist vision is obviously fascinated by
this ambivalence, his characters are, tl.rus, beyond
good and evil and entirely entangled in that fair of
the vanities wirich surrounds them. Likewise, but
less satirically so, the characters of Trollope's nov-
els inhabit a God-less, entirely human world of
inter-subjective relations. Both writers testify to a
weakening of tl.re omniscient, authorial narrator.
Thackeray's last sentence in Vonity Folr still in-
vites the reader to "shut up the box and the pup-
pets, for our play is played out" (ch. 67), but it has
been a 'play' devoid of a clear moral judgment
hinting at the beginning breakdown of an authori-
tative system of ethical norms. Still, what looks
like a discontinuous array of specific cases and
multiple viewpoints is given a (realist) form
through the distance of a nartator-consciousness.
Female novelists. Out of a vast number of novels
written by female novelists ir.r the Victorian Age,
which deal with social issues, manners, (female)
education and development, religious matters or ex-
plicitly witir the 'woman question' (for overview
see, for instance, Thompson; Mergenthal, Autoitl-
nenJ, the novels of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne
Bront€ and Mary Ann Evans-best known under
her pen-name George Eliot-clearly stand out in
the way they challenge traditional gender-stereo-
t'.,'s ,1itd have uurtsual aesthetic strtlcttlres evolved
;i,,t;r . decicledly psychological interest in their
the difficulties for women to
,11-r,r..,.rt. Altestin8 to
.,rtrlistr and pttrsue an intellectual career, the
(Currer, Ellis, Acton
it,,rntits also r'tsed pser'rdonyms
to make sure that thei| works were
Bell) in orcler
seriottsly in an era when female authors were
taken
usualll, associated with rornantic novels' The
Brontds grew l-lp in the seclusion of their remote
but to
Yorksl.rile home and, hence, had little choice
concentrate on depicting the inner life of their pro-
r.lp,onists. Charlotte Broutd's Jane Eyre follows tire
stirrctLrre of the educatiottal Itovel and tlre Bildungs-
roiltarr, but also borrows from Gothic fiction. When
Jane and Rochester finally unite, Brontd seems to
envisiot.t them as having becorne true equals'
The uncanuy character of Bertha Mason, how-
ever, the angry 'madwoman in the attic' whom
Rochester married in the Caribbean and who ir.t
rage, yet quite symbolically, sets the estate ou fire,
can be seen as the repressed colonial 'other,'but
also appears as the uncanr.ry double of the ireful
anci passiouate'otlter' side ofJane's psyche herself
(see Gilbert and Gubar'), wirich leaves the psycl.to-
logical problem of conscious and unconscious hu-
man behaviour in the open. More radically even,
Enrly Brorrtd's Wutlrcring Heights incorporates el-
el)rents from the sensational novel such as pas-
sion, ir.rsanity, hallucinations, and dreams into her
novel. She portrays the central, destructive, and
unliappy relationship between Heathcliff and
Catherine, who love each other but cannot be to-
gethel othel than in death, as an uncontrollable
foice of uature. This psychological point of depar-
ture is further enhanced by the narrative structure
of lhe novei: Refusing ultimate authorial control to
hel narrative, Brontd masterfully chooses two un-
rc'li..rble narrators (cf. entry II.9) to present the
events, leaving the reader behind witl.r "unquiet
slutnbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth"
(WLLthering Heights ch. 34). George ElioI's Middle-
ntcrch provides a panoramic, multi-perspective
oveLview of a provincial town. Her psychological
realism combines Eliot's interest in the inner mo-
tivations of actions (conscience or psycl.ric disposi-
tions) with an almost scientific analysis of social
strLlcture. As a formal reflection of a complex
tvot'ld, the authorial narrative skilfully weaves the
threads of the plotline, albeit no longer claiming
absolute validity for its jucigements but indicating
an insight ir.r the fact that "signs are small measur-
able things, but interpretations are illimitable"
(Midrilemorch cl-r. 3). Accordingly, her earlier
The Victorian Age
novel The MilI ott the Floss is one of the first Victo- The BrontHr
rian novels to end tragically. and Ceorge f;liot
The negative Eil*lungsroman. The decisive ac-
knowledgrnent of incommensurable forces and
drives working the human consciousness and psy-
che coupled with the sense of episten.rological attd
ontological crisis permeating the Victorian society
since the 1BB0s made the plotlines of the late Vic-
torian novei change substantially (see illustration).
Traditionally, the happy ending brought objectives
to a successful conclusion, both in the sense of
private and ptLblic happiness. For the characters,
these objectives not only er.rded in failure now,
sometimes it also seerned hald to take the neces-
sary steps of actualisation or even to define the
objectives ir.r the first place, and the Blldutzgs-
roman therefore transformed into a negative Bil-
dungsroman (Broich) . Formerly causally stluc-
tured plotiines developed into what Gillian Beer
called "Darwin's plots" accentuating ternporal
contingency, unpredictability, fatality, and the tran-
sitoliness of human action and existence.
Influenced by evolution theory and the German
philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who saw the
human psyche and our coping with reality gov-
erned by "w111/Wille" (i.e. desire, striving, nature)
and "ideas/Vorstellung" (i.e. the subjective images
of how we perceive aud frame the external world),
especially Thomas Hardy's later novels (i.e. The
Return of the Native;Tbss of the d'Urbervilles) por-
tray individuals struggling with a meaningless, ab-
surd world. Jude the Obscure is the epitome of a
negative Bildungsroman. Jude's failure is a four- Peitential Plot Develop-
fold one: society, 1-ris genes, his individual psychic ment in the Novel
disposition, and nature itself, which is entirely in- (adaptecl from
different to his personal fate, lead to his tragic end- Bremond 6r)
success
(objective reached)
process of
actualization
(steps taken)
potentiality Jailure
(objective missed)
(obj ective
defi ned)
n on-a ctua I izati on
(no steps taken)
British Literary History
ing. A similar plot developrnent is visible in Sam-
uel Butler's masterpiece The Way of all Flesh, in
which Butler portrays his [anti-)hero Ernest Pon-
tifex inconclusively struggling against his biologi-
cal and iristorical/cultural heritage.
Major strands Three major strands in the history of European
in nineteenth-eentury nineteenth-centruy aesthetics have enhanced such
European aesthetics pessimistic yet innovative views:
. Firstly, naturalism as a pan-European move-
ment meant a radicalisation of realist poetics (cf.
section 1.3.3.4). Naturalist representations of real-
ity (in the novels of Hardy, Gissing and George
Moore, for instance) went beyond any realist ideal-
ising or didactic intentions in favour of an accurate
portrayal of social rnilieu and all negative and
harsh aspects of human life which were often de-
scribed in shockingly grotesque imagery.
. Secondly, aestheticism was the flight to the
realm of the beautifr.rl and, thus, represented a
counter-discourse to the alienating side effects of
the Industrial Revolution and its positivist scien-
tific ideals. Taking their cue from French symbol-
ism, aestheticists such as Walter Pater were striv-
ing for a concept of the novel that focused on the
refuge of the fleeting moment in what otherwise
seemed a remorseless flow of time. Pater's Marius
the Epi,curean is clearly opposed to the idea of an
omnipotent rationality of man, hence it makes the
attaining of knowledge and insight no longer a
matter of reasoning but of isolated moments of vi-
sion which clearly prefigure the aesthetics of
'epiphanic' visions in James Joyce and Virginia
Woolf (cf. entry I.2.6). Oscar Wilde's The Ptcture
of Dori,an Gray is a much more transitional novel:
its aestheticist preface claims that "there is no
such thing as a moral or an immoral book" and
that "all art is quite useless," yet the practice
which Dorian's life puts this theory into turns out
to be both asocial and highly immoral.
. Thirdly, impressionism heavily influenced the
Iate Victorian novel focussing on movement, time,
multiple perspectives, and individual experience
and consciousness. The elusive 'reality' in Henry
James's novels is entirely filtered through individual
streams of consciousness, making extensive use of
free indirect discourse. The protagonist in Joseph
Conrad's Lord Jim does not even have a say in the
novei, and Jim's character and the moral dilemma
which his fate implies are a-chronologically depicted
in umpteen contradictory versions. The "sovereign
power enthroned in a fixed standard of conduct"
(ch. 5) seems dead and buried. In the preface to ?/ze
Nigger of the Narclssus Conrad emphasises that
the aim of art, rvhich, Iike life itself, is inspiring, diflicult-0b-
scured by mists; it is not in the clear logic of a triumphant.conclu-
sion; it is not in the unveiling ol one of those heartless secrets
tvhich are called the Lalvs ol NatLrLe. It is not less great, but only
nore difficult.
In the preface to the New York edition Io The
Tlagic Muse, Henry James farnously asks in almost
the same way, "what do sucl-r large, loose, baggy
monsters, with their queer elements of the acci-
dental and the arbitrary, artistically mean?" The
question expresses his disdain with the aesthetics
of the Russian realists or writers like Trollope,
against the authorial narrative of which James set
a single "center of consciousness" ir.r novels like
The Golden Bowl or Tlrc Ambassadors. Obviously,
by the turn of the century in writers such as James
and Conrad, the novel is formally drawing near to
modernist aesthetics.
SenEational novel and scientifie romance. The
trends in children's literature, fantasy fiction, and,
especially, the late-nineteenth-century sensa-
tional novel corroborate this diagnosis in terms of
subject-matter and form: The episodic structure of
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson's (a.k.a. Lewis Car-
roll) famous Ali.ce's Adventures in Wonderland
and its sequel Through the Looking Glass, and
Wlnt Alice Found There reveals his interest in
dreams, fairy tales, and playful nonsense, which
heaviiy influenced writers and movements such
as James Joyce and surrealism. Drawing on earlier
novels such as Wilkie Collins's The Woman in
Whi"te or Sheridan LeFanr.r's Carmilla, Bram Stok-
er's DracuLa or Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr Jekyll
ond Mr Hyde allowed new glimpses into the un-
known of tl.re subconscious. The scientific ro-
mance at the turn of the century designed dysto-
pian visions of the future (e.9. H.G. Wells's The
Time Mochine, The lsLand of Dr Moreau) which
are clearly set apart from earlier utopian outlooks
on society such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton's The
Coming Roce or Edward Bellamy's Looki.ng Back-
ward and rather prefigured .the modern dystopia
in George Orweli and Aldous Huxley. Even Brit-
ain's imperial mission had gone stale by the turn
of the century. While writers like Rudyard Kipiing
believed in the 'noble' enterprise of British impe-
rialism ("The White Man's Burden"), the charac-
ter of Kurtz in Conrad's Heart ofDarkness, by con-
trast, starts out his business in the Congo in the
best tradition of that 'white mair's burden,' be-
comes corrupted though, and finally ends "hollow
at the core."
2"5"e I PoetrY
path of the Ro-
vjcloilan poetry continued on the
rnantic tradition. Poets like Wordsworth, Shelley,
and l(eats were still seen as exemplary, even
rhoLrgh the radical expression of the self, which
clistiriguished Romantic subjectivity and set it
ro.r't frotn the Neoclassicism, was largely avoided'
Vlctorian lroetly was characterised by a rich vari-
ety of forms, the nost productive of which were
dramatic nronologues, monodramas, ballads, son-
nets, pastoral poetry, and, especially, elegies. Fur-
thermore, all major writers still attempted to write
epic or longer narrative poetry. Very different frorn
the novel, Victorian poetry eschews addressing
colltemporary subject matter or problems overtly.
Both the contemporary world and the self of the
poet are turned to only indirectly in encoded or
embellished forn as most of the poetry by the ma-
jor writers is deflected into the realms of the iris-
torical and the mythical. Nevertheless, similar to
the novel, melancl.roly was one significant mental
state emanating from the poetry, both in the sense
of private loss and death as well as in a more gen-
eral Lrnderstanding of ]osing stability, orientation,
and meaning. The elegiac tone of many poems and
tlie retreat into mythical times and dreams can be
regarded as one appropriate way of facing and, at
the sarne time, transcending the pains Senerated
b), separation and uncertainty, Far fewer others,
like Tennyson's "Ulysses," sought to face the strife
of life with affirmative heroism (see Seeber 311). If
'uve' acknowledge a little irony on Tennyson's part,
irowever, Ulysses's concluding affirmative purpose
"lvlade weak by time and fate, but strong in will /
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield" may be
taken with a pinch of salt.
Alfred Lord Tennyson is a contradictory figure,
whose personality aptly reflects the tensions prev-
alent in Victorian times. He was Poet Laureate for
more than forty years, ennobled by Queen Victoria
and both embodied and pronounced Victorian val-
ues thorougl.rly. But then he also cultivated private
sphetes of exotic sentiment that appeared sceptical
about the modern comforts of progress and sought
for a retreat from the alienating forces within soci-
ety. l{owever, these private spaces of his imagina-
tion uo longer had the power to challenge the util-
itarian spirit of the times politically. The view of
reality remains an indirect one, as the example of
Terlnyson's famous ballad "The Lady of Shalott"
(1833/42), who cannot view reality other rhan in a
mirror and through a window pane, but dies when
The Victr:rian Age
she beholds the world directly, makes clear. The
immensely associative poetn comments on Tenny-
son's own outsider status estranged from society,
it also makes a poetologicai reference to the posi-
tion of a poet faced with the (impossible) task of
replesenting reality, and, of course, hints at the
marginalised position of women in Victorian
times. Tennysons's clramatic monologues sttch as
"Lotos-Eaters" (1832) and "Uiysses" (1842'), lon-
ger poems like In Memoriarn (1850) or his mono-
drarna Moud (1855) present his iutense examina-
tion of death as their essential subject matter.
Tennysorr's epic poem The Idylls of tlte King
(1859-85) takes up the myth of King Arthur.
By comparison, Robert Browning's work exhib- Tennyson ancl Frowning
its a more optirnistic fascination with vitality and were the major poets
heroic potential in the face of all difficulties and nf the Victorian Age.
troublesomeness. His shorter poems, dramatic
monologues, and narrative poetry centre on the ex-
perience of love, on loneliness, on the incommensu-
rable relationship between life and art ("My Last
Duchess," lB42; "Fra Lippo Lippi," 1855), on tire
conflict between guilt and innocence (The Ring and
the Book, 1868/69), and they often contemplate the
secular in conflict with the religious ("Fra Lippo
Lippi") which makes a divine truth discernible
among otherwise fragmented perspectives. His wife
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was an ardent admirer
of Mary Wollstonecraft's ideas, and her blank verse
epic poem Aurora Leigh (1856), though styiistically
flawed, is of political interest in the context of wom-
en's rights as are other political poems dealing with,
for instance, her argument against slavery. Her son-
net cycle Sonnets from the Portuguese (18501 juxta-
poses a consciousness of transitoriness and decay
with an eventual regeneration found in love.
The poetry of Matthew Arnold is governed by
the impression of the transitoriness of human exis-
tence and tire diagnosis of a time devoid of beliefs
and of a meaningless universe. This is coupled
with rnelanciroly memories of a better past. Thus,
weariness of life and ennui dominate poems like
"The Scholar Gypsy."
Victorian poetry was given fresh and innovative
impulses by the work of Charles Algernon Swin-
burne and Gerald Manley Hopkins. As argued
above, Swinburne was obsessively concerned with
time and temporality and, more strongly than in
Arnold or Tennyson, his work is characterised by
an almost morbid fascination with death. Death is
seen as ultimate loss, but also as the moment
when human life at last finds rest from the burden
of life:
British Literary History
Then star nor sun shall waken,
NoL any change of light;
Nor sound of lvaters shaken,
NoL any sound or sight;
Nor lvintLy leaves nor vernal,
Nor days nor things diurnal;
0nly the sleep eternal
In an eteLnal night.
(Swinburne, "Tlie CaLden of Proserpine" lines 89-96)
Swinburne challenged Victorian (religious) morals
as he ostensibly tumed to provocative topics such
lnterpretation Matthew Arnnld, "Dsver Beaeh"
Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" (1867) is one
of the key-texts documenting the alienation felt
by the Victorian age in the face of an industrial,
urban world when former certainties melt down.
The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Glearns and is gone; the clif{s of England stand;
Glimrnering and vast, out in the tranquil bay,
Come to the windol, sweet is the night-air!
0nly, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you heaL the grating roar
0f pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At theii return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the ,{gaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and Ilow
0f human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, to0, at the full, and round earth's
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrarving roar,
Retreating, to the breath
0f the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
as honoerotic love, sadomasochism, and liberal
sexual attitudes. Moreover, he radicalised the
'tamer' poetic language of the older generations of
Victorian poets by incorporatit.rg international in-
fluence [Baudelaire ar.rd Ricirard Wagner) and in-
troducing new elements of prosody and r.netre.
Gerald Manley Hopkins also brought linguistic in-
novation to Victorian poetry; poems like "The
Wreck of the Deutschland" and "Tire Loss of tl.re
Eurydice" both centred on historical shipwrecks
and featured a veritable fireworks of alliterations,
sprung rhythms, assonances, regular/run-over
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the lvorld, tvhich seems
To Iie before us like a land of dreanrs,
So various, so beautiful, so nelv,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with conlused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant arnies clash by night.
5 Unlike the Romantics, the speaker can no longer
find imaginative refuge in nature. What at first
sight seems an idyllic night scene at sea in Ar-
nold's poem-"The sea is calm tonight," "The tide
is full," "the tranquil bay" (lines 1-4)-is appar-
10 ently threatened by "the grating roar" (9) of cob-
ble stones rnoved by the sea in a repetitive rhythm
which produces an "eternal note of sadness" (14).
The speaker likens himself to the Greek tragedian
Sophocies, and transfers the nature image onto
the,realm of philosophy. Like the sea in the pres-
l5 ent moment of contemplation, "The Sea of Faith"
[21) was once "at the full" (22], but has now with-
drawn and has only left a "melancholg long [...]
roar" carried away by the wind (25). In the face of
this loss the speaker resorts to iove and clings to
20 his partner, 'Ah, love, let us be true / To one an-
other" (29-30); although the lovers find them-
selves exposed to "naked shingles of the world"
shore [28) and surrounded by chaos, disorientation, and
utter helplessness on a strange, amorphous battle
field "where ignorant armies clash by night" (37).
25 This bleak vision of a world in which there is "nei-
ther joy, nor love, nor light/ Nor certitude, nor
peace, nor help for pain" (33-34) is structurally
echoed by the three truncated stanzas that barely
recall the first one which is loosely reminiscent'of
the sonnet structure.
ptlns, wordplay and Iteol-
rlrvrrl('s, .rrrd, especially,
playful use of
oil;r,,r, whicll bespeak Hopkins's
lartguage'
cloud thotoLtgh England
A beelling baldbright
not mirtgle? And
Rrding: theLe did stores
and gLind their
t{ailropes hustle
wolfsn0w, rvorlds of it, wind therel
Heavengravell
("The Loss oI the EuLydice" lines 25-28)
During his studies at Oxfold, Swinburne came into
contact with the Pre-Raphaelites (or: Pre-Raphael-
ite Brotl.rerhood), a group of English painters, po-
ets, and critics wl.rich was fouuded in 1848 by Wil-
liam Flolnan Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Dante
30 Gabriel Rossetti. Rossetti's paintiugs as well as iris
poetry 31s characterised by a meticulous study of
cletail focussing on a dream-like cult of beauty, me-
clieval cultule and myth, which er.rtailed a strange
anci exotic historical dislodgement. The Pre-Rapl.ra-
35 elites considered themselves aestiretic reformers,
arrd tlie exquisiteness of their irnagery can certainly
be legarded as a counter-discourse to and a subtle
flight {rom the oppressive everyday experience of
the Victorian age. The poetry of Rossetti's sister,
Cl.rlistina Georgiana Rossetti, is characterised by a
lich and complex psychology, wl.rich combines the
melancholic cor.rsciousness of anxiety and unhappy
love with eroticism and a deeply felt need for fe-
male self-assertion, spirituality and religiousness.
'|he cult of exquisite and beautiful experience
w.,rs continued and intensified in the poetry of the
Fin cle Sidcle in writers such as Oscar Wilde, Ernest
Christopher Dowson, Arthur William Symons and
Lionel Johnson. This group, who were associated
during their lifetirne witl.r "decadence," took their
cue' Ilom Walter Pater. In Studles tn the History of
tlte Renoissance (1873), Pater has famously and
controversially argued in favour of tl.re aestl.retic
monent and the triumph of form over content,
which l.re tliought could only perfectly coalesce in
nusic. Pater looked upon life as an inexorable and
irresistible flux-each moment was separated from
another by inevitable temporal difference. Thus,
what was left for the artist or the poet, or any other
matt, amidst this process of constant change was to
never tire iu capturing as many of these unique
tlicl<t'ring impressions as possible. "While all rnelts
ttnder our feet," Pater wrote in the "Conclusion" to
The Renalsscn ce, "we may well catch at any exqui-
site passion, or any contribution to knowledge that
seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a
moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes,
The Victorian Age
strange colours, and curious odours,
or work of the artist's hands, or the
face of one's friend. " This was ntisr.rn-
delstood by rnany contenrporalies as
equalling a licentious hedor.rism and
amorality. Further influer.rced by tire
French syrnbolists (Charles Baude-
laire, St6phane Mallalm6, Paul Ver-
laine), the poets of the Nineties
turned to the exquisite beauty of the
moment as a means of a definitive
protest against the utilitarian spirit of
the age. Named after the notorious
"yellow book" (apparently Joris-Karl
Huysnrans's A rebours, 1BB4), which
Dorian is given and misled by in Wil-
de's The Picture of Dorian Gray
(1891), the leading illustrated maga-
zine of the 1890s in England was The
YeLIow Book. Aubrey Beardsley,
In France and in England, 'yellow'was the colour "The ToileL rrf Salome,
associated with the often erotic and lascivious sub-
fnr Salerrne," first version
ject matter of the texts and, augmented by Aubrey (r8s+)
Beardsley's famous illustrations (see illustration),
the whole decade is often called 'yellow Nineties.'
Notable contributors to the journal besides Dowson
and Symons were Henry James, H. G. Wells, and tl.re
young William Butjer Yeats, who was later to be-
come the most important Anglophone poet in the
first lralf of the twentieth century (cf. section 1.2.6.4).
He was one of the founding fatllers of the Irish Re-
vival, fought for Irish freedom and independence,
which he thor-rght should be based upon the self-con-
scious recourse to the Irish tradition of legends and
folk tales. His early poetry, The Wanderings of Oisin
(1889), Crossways (lB89J, The Rose (1893), The
Wind omong the Reeds (1899), reveals various influ-
ences ranging frorn Irish mythology, occultism, the
rnysticism of William Blake and French symbolism.
These sources became means to a radical, often her-
metic and dream-like articulation of a personal ex-
perience in a search for a hidden, subjective truth in
the wor'ld of phenomena.
2.5.5 | Drama
Innovation in drama only took place within the last
two decades of the Victorian era. In early Victorian
times, only three theatres-Covent Garden, Drury
Lane, and the Haymarket-were licensed to stage
plays, while others saw the performance of musical
 British literary History
The rise of popular drama
pieces such as brief comical opera ('burlettas'). By
1851, these restrictions fell away, and by the end of
the century more than sixty theatres were putting
on stage plays in London. The result was a spectac-
ular increase of popular theatre dedicated merely to
people's entertainment, which very appropriately
could be compared to the cultural importance of the
cinema nowadays, which saw its beginnings in late
Victorian times as well. Directed at a mass audi-
ence, these plays had to be hits at the box-office, the
domineering genres, therefore, were farce and
melodrama. Melodrama was an essentially mid-
dle-class genre focussing on moral struSSles and
hazarding the consequences of a black and white
moralising in which there was a clear-cut distinc-
tion made between good and evil, or love and hate.
Its dramaturgy was determined by flat ciraracters or
types (i.e. 'the villain'), the main intention of its
aesthetics was to create thrilling suspense by incor-
porating violence, crime, pathos or even horror ele-
ments. The significant representative of the popular
drama of the time was Dion Boucicault, whose
provocative f.arce London Assurance, much in the
fashion of seventeenth-century Restoration Comedy
(cf. section L2.2.5), held a mirror up to society's
hypocrisy and also had an important impact on Os-
car Wiide's later drawing-room comedies, though it
was at the same time fairly grounded in Victorian
values. Obviously, this popular drama was the per-
fect opposite to the 'elitarian' verse drama or closet
drama by authors like Tennyson, Browning, Ar-
nold, or Swinburne.
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