Literature in the Victorian age

The Victorian age is very known for the values that emerged in all classes and reached all
facets of Victorian living. The moral views were very austere and displayed zero tolerance
towards sexual promiscuity and breaches of the law. While there was a prudish connotation
to admit the existence of sex there were some educated Victorians that wrote a lot about
sex, including pornography, medical treatment and psychological studies emphasized in
sexual behaviours. There was a double standard in the society, women felt very proud to
not know about their own bodies but men wanted and needed sex, those characteristics did
not fit with the reality because under the surface featured prostitution, venereal disease, and
men and women who felt the same-sex desire.

This hypocritical vision of the world was also seen in the terrible and humiliate treatment
that poor people received; especially kids. Childhood in the Victorian age was a cruel
experience, many kids were force to work in factories and mines or as domestic servants
and chimneysweeps. Nowadays, thanks to the work of different authors in this age we have
manifestos about the reality of the Victorian era, these includes Charles Dickens, Oscar
Wilde, H.G Wells and so many others that brings an open window to an era that last an
entire century. In the next text I will analyses the work of these writers and what they said
about society.

One of the most prominent novelists of the period is Charles Dickens, he was an advocate
for social justice and fought for the rights of the poor and underprivileged, and his works
often reflect the need for social change and reform. One of his most important books is
Oliver Twist, the story of a poor boy named Oliver who born in a workhouse his mother
died during the birth, he is mistreated, beaten regularly and poorly fed, he is also force to
steal for a gang, get shot and kidnapped but at the end he finds happiness with a loving
family. This novel carries a social commentary, the inception of Chartism means that there
was a burning social issue in the middle and lower classes. Dickens explores many social
themes in this book, but three are predominant; the abuses of the new Poor Law system,
that ensure clothes and food for the poor to exchanges of long working hours, those places
were known as workhouse but people call it “Prisons for Poors” due to the terrible
conditions, the evils of the criminal word in London, pickpockets and murders were driven
by poverty, living in dirt, in a permanent state of fear and usually died in miserable places,
also there is the victimisation of children and women, Nancy is forced into prostitution by
poverty, hunger and life in a corrupt environment. Dickens succeeded in making Victorian
public opinion more aware of the conditions of the poor people, he was very interested in
child abuse because he lived it when he was a kid.
Another book is A Christmas Carol, is about an old rich greedy man who is hated by
everyone and in Christmas evening is visited by three ghosts that represent past, present
and future to show him how bad he is. Dickens often uses Scrooge as a mouthpiece to
express the more callous justifications and excuses that upper class used to defend the harsh
treatment of the poor. Asked whether he wishes to support a charity, Scrooge replies that he
does support charities--prisons and workhouses, which are all the charity the poor need.
Dickens exposed suggestively selfishness and greed as the dominant features of his
England. 
Greedy is also seen in Bleak House, is the story of the Jarndyce family, who wait in vain to
inherit money from a disputed fortune in the settlement of the extremely long-running
lawsuit, the main aspect that I want to highlight is the way the author describes the city,
there are grey and dark building, cold environment and a constant fog, that its very
symbolic, it stands for institutional oppression which penetrates into every segment of
Victorian society. Dickens sees London as a place of human misery, and the world he
perceives is governed by greed and money.
Another important writer was Oscar Wilde, he was a rich educated handsome man. His
most famous novel is the picture of Dorian Gray. The novel is centered on an innocent
young man, Dorian Gray, who is corrupted by hedonistic values and commits a series of
immoral and hypocritical actions. The focus of the novel is the distinction between
Dorian’s private and public lives using the painting of him that visibly changes as the
protagonist remains physically unaltered, mirroring the lives of both fictional and real
members of these upper class in the Victorian society’s including Wilde himself, he lived a
double live due to his homosexuality, that was a crime at the time, he married had kids but,
underneath, he had different lovers until was caught and put in prison, losing everything. Is
also a mirror of how wealthy people saw the poor ones, Dorian is “in love” of an actress,
Sybil Vane who is extremely poor, when she stops to be useful for his desires, Dorian
throw her away like something disposable and she kill herself.

H.G Wells stands out for his work too, he produced a wide variety of political writings -
pamphlets, political books, newspaper and magazine articles - as well as novels and stories.
Indeed, he was often criticised for confusing literature with political pamphlets. Wells was
unapologetic about writing novels in order to further his social and political ideals, and
these ideas form a vital context in which to understand his work. In The Time Machine
(1895), Wells’ protagonist travels into the distant future to discover that the human race has
evolved into two distinct species, the ‘Eloi’ who live on the surface and the ‘Morlocks’ who
live underground. The Time Traveller’s initial observations suggest a utopian society: his
first encounter is with the Eloi, who are beautiful but useless, living in plenty and liberated
entirely from work and the Morlocks live by eating the Eloi, catching their distant upper-
class cousins by night and cannibalising them.

This book is the product of an era of great anxiety about social class and economic
inequality. The industrial revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had
generated incredible wealth in Britain, but that wealth went almost entirely to the upper
classes instead of being equally distributed to the lower-class workers whose labor was
instrumental to industrial prosperity. This class anxiety of the late nineteenth century was
particularly pronounced in Britain because of the rigidity of the social hierarchy there—it
was very hard under any circumstances for a person to escape the conditions of the class
into which they were born, which H. G. Wells, having grown up poor, knew well.

By Ana María Rivero Benavides

 References

Charles Dickens as Social Commentator and Critic. (s. f.). Charles Dickens as Social

Commentator and Critic. https://victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/diniejko.html

The Time Machine Themes. (s. f.). LitCharts. https://www.litcharts.com/lit/the-time-

machine/themes