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SOME IMPORTANT ISSUES:

Darwin and Victorian age:
Even as Mill was inveighing against intellectual cowardice and the decline of individual genius, a
country squire was putting the final touches on arguably the most daring and unsettling book of the
century. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection, or Preservation of Favoured
Races in the Struggle for Life (1859) has had an impact so far-ranging and many-faceted that it
confounds brief summary. Darwin’s theory did not constitute a radical break with prevailing science;
evolution had been “in the air” for decades, so much so that Tennyson’s In Memoriam (much
influenced by Chambers’s Vestiges of Creation) seemed to be arguing with Darwin a decade before the
Origin appeared. Indeed, Darwin was spurred to write up his long pondered theory (the main ideas
were in place as early as 1839) only after a fellow naturalist, A. R. Wallace, presented a paper
anticipating some of its central claims. Darwin’s theory also was far from the first to undermine the
idea of divine creation most influentially set forth in Genesis. The geologist Charles Lyell, on whom
Darwin drew heavily, during the 1830s had argued that natural forces acted uniformly over time,
constantly reshaping the face of the planet, and left an ongoing history of its power in “the evidence
of the rocks” – a record which included those fossils of extinct species that so haunted Tennyson.
But Darwin nonetheless provided the most intricate, persuasive, and lucid account to date not only
of extinction but also of the emergence of new species over time. The Newtonian world did not
change; Darwinian nature was inherently, emphatically historical. Darwin, then, tells a compelling
story, a narrative at once expansive and intricately detailed, which reached all of educated Britain,
and was appropriated to many, often conflicting ends. The idea of “struggle” between different
species and their environment seemed to some commentators readily transferable to the analysis of
society. Darwin’s theory resembles an extension to the animal and vegetable world of laissez-faire
economics, or the intellectual marketplace of Millian liberalism. Thus Herbert Spencer, most
influentially, coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” in order to describe social competition – with
the clear implication that class hierarchies were underwritten by nature itself. In The Principles of
Sociology (1876), Spenser (1820–1903) argued that societies are themselves organisms that evolve
from “primitive” to more complex forms. This view would have an enormous impact in emergent
sciences of anthropology and sociology, which typically formulated schemes of racial and cultural
development grounded on a similar logic. But Spencer, like many commentators since, smuggled
into his evolutionary scheme a sense of direction that Darwinian evolution does not provide.
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Spencer’s “social Darwinism” is closer to earlier Lamarckian schemes, whereby (for example)
giraffes develop long necks in order to reach more food. This suggestion that evolutionary changes
arise to meet a pre-existent need obscures one of the most disconcerting aspects of Darwin’s theory:
evolution offers no overarching direction, no governing telos. The present moment is not the
culmination of the past, but one moment in an endless process of change. An animal happened to
appear with a longer neck than its fellows, which in a particular milieu made it better adapted to
survival; the same variation in another environment might prove fatal. The new species is “better”
only in a strenuously relativist sense: the word that Darwin uses is not “progress” but “adaptation.”
As T. H. Huxley would insist in a famous 1893 essay, evolution provides no ethics. Clearly this
randomness was as much a blow to traditional faith as was the more obvious conflict with biblical
schemes of creation. Yet Darwin’s theory also provided a narrative model, as recent commentators
have pointed out, that had much in common with those engaging a more familiar storyteller, the
novelist. Not only does Darwinian theory incorporate history, it takes up familiar mythic themes of
transformation and metamorphosis; it foregrounds the idea of kinship; it puts great stress (unlike,
say, classical mechanics) on the particularity of the world, its sheer abundance and variety, as well as
its subtle gradations and modulations. Perhaps most suggestively, Darwinism discovers unifying
structure without teleology. Victorian novelists likewise began with the assumption that the world
they described was intelligible and coherent. But the efforts to embody that coherence in novelistic
form – most obviously through coincidence and other residues of the so-called “providential plot” –
were increasingly liable to seem either unrealistic, too obvious a simplification of the flux of
experience, or to seem a deadening abridgement of human agency, in which the power of choice was
thoroughly circumscribed by external forces.

Social Crisis and the Novel

Newman’s threatening affiliation with Catholicism led popular caricatures to link Tractarianism to
Chartism and the threat of working-class insurrection. Growing controversy over the substance of
the Tracts fueled a conspiratorial imagination already boiling in 1839, in the wake of the “Newport
Uprising” and other portents of working class revolt. Those anxieties were inflamed by yet another
literary work that polemically engaged recent social debate. Throughout the 1830s, “the factory
question” had been a locus of intense debate in literary journals and on the floor of Parliament,
which was debating the “Ten Hours Bill,” an act that (among other things) would ban the
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employment of children under 12 in factories and mines for more than 10 hours a day, six days a
week. These debates underscored both the novelty and the momentousness of industrial labour,
which would seem to make it an obvious subject for novelists. But though John Walker had
addressed factory labor in his 1832 melodrama, The Factory Lad throughout the thirties novelistic
interest was overwhelmed by polemical fervor. Harriet Martineau’s Principles of Political Economy in
1834 offered a fictional account of factory labour, “A Manchester Strike,” but the narrative was a
straightforward didactic tale enforcing the lessons of political economy by warning against the follies
of trades unions and strikes. Only in 1839 did Frances Trollope show how well Dickensian romance
could represent the child laborer as a victim of political economy. The hero of Trollope’s The Life
and Adventures of Michael Armstrong,The Factory Boy is a protagonist deported to the industrial north of
England. Trollope’s novel aroused even more antipathy from reviewers when it began appearing in
monthly parts in March of 1839. The Athenaeum accused her of “scattering firebrands among the
people” and implored her to remember “that the most probable immediate effect of her pennings
and her pencillings will be the burning of factories … [and] the plunder of property of all kinds”;
Such responses also reflect the increasing cultural authority of the novel. As Mary Mitford wrote to
Elizabeth Barrett, “What things these are – the Jack Sheppards, and Squeers, and Oliver Twists, and
Michael Armstrongs – All the worse because of their power to move men’s souls”. Novelists,
however, would not develop a more sustained engagement with industrialism and class division until
the mid-1840s. Some of this silence may represent a shrinking from the hostility Trollope aroused.
But it also seems to reflect the disorienting novelty of large-scale factory labour, which at this stage
remained a phenomenon of the north, above all of Yorkshire and Lancashire, where Manchester
was dubbed “the workshop of the world.” When Dickens visited Manchester in 1838 and 1839, he
vowed “to strike the heaviest blow in my power for these unfortunate creatures,” but it would be 15
years before he took up the topic more directly. In a passage in The Old Curiosity Shop, written soon
after his visit to Manchester, Nell and her grandfather on their journey approach an industrial
landscape whose smoke and glare seem nightmarish – but they tellingly skirt direct contact with it, as
would Dickens himself until 1854, when he set to work on Hard Times. Novelists like Dickens who
drew their subjects from London or rural settings – which in the late 1830s meant nearly all novelists
– were depicting a very different social order. There was ample precedent in eighteenth-century
fiction for the social dynamics of Dickens’s early fiction, but an industrial order, to adapt Carlyle’s
phrase, was “unexampled.” Then came Barnaby Rudge, a historical novel set in London in the 1780s,
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and centered on the anti-Catholic “Gordon riots.” Having envisioned the work in Scott’s traditional
three-volume format, however, Dickens soon was blocked; already the serial form was providing an
energizing sense of contact with an audience that seemed a necessary spur. Having stepped down
from editing Bentley’s Magazine, he undertook a new weekly series for Chapman and Hall entitled
Master Humphrey’s Clock, for which he produced The Old Curiosity Shop (1841). The Old Curiosity Shop
would turn out to be Dickens’s greatest success to date, owing partly to the weekly format, partly to
its relentless presentation of persecuted virtue – virtue not only enduring, but positively flowering
under neglect. Stories of crowds gathering on the docks in New York to await the latest installment
may be exaggerated, but they reflect the gripping appeal of the mysteriously ailing heroine, Little
Nell, who would outlive the book as a paragon of Victorian sentimentality. Even Ruskin’s disdainful
opinion more than 40 years later (in “Fiction Fair and Foul”), that Dickens had butchered Nell like a
lamb for the market, suggests the bitterness of a frustrated lover. Nell’s decline is set against a
London bleaker than in any of Dickens’s previous works, full of danger and foreboding mystery,
centered around the demonic figure of Quilp – the most volatile to date in Dickens’s gallery of
villains lusting for absolute domination, a well of energy on which he would draw throughout his
career. The elemental contraries of the book’s moral typology are at war with both plot and
character development.

In Memoriam
Events of 1850 dispelled such a worry, at least for the time being. On June 1, Moxon published a
volume-length poem entitled In Memoriam AHH Obit MDCCCXXXIII. Praise for the work was
immediate, widespread, fervent, and lasting, and it secured the unnamed author, Tennyson, not only
the Laureateship but also consensus that the Laureate was (for once) truly the major poet of his
time. When The Prelude was published a few months later, following Wordsworth’s death in April,
the edition of 2,000 required a year to sell; In Memoriam went through five editions and roughly
25,000 copies in a year and a half. After Prince Albert’s death from cholera in 1861, Queen Victoria
confided to Tennyson, “Next to the Bible, my comfort is In Memoriam.” Later admirers have been
more skeptical: in T. S. Eliot’s influential account, “Its faith is a poor thing, but its doubt is a very
intense experience” (Eliot 1932: 336). The power of Tennysonian doubt, however, may suggest why
Victorians found its faith so consoling, and why it has remained a central document of Victorian
culture. In Memoriam is often called one of the three great English elegies, joining Milton’s Lycidas
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and Shelley’s Adonais. Unlike those poems, however, it only rarely evokes pastoral convention, and
then principally to address an anxiety about both the design and the audience of the poem. In
section 21, for example, “I sing to him that rests below,” the trope of piping to his dead friend
conjures up a profound unease about audience, as each passing “traveler” derides the poet. One
complains that the poet “would make weakness weak,” effeminizing himself and his hearers; another
remarks, “He loves to make parade of pain,” affirming his own sensibility more than any respect for
the dead; yet another objects that “private sorrow’s barren song” has no place in a world of
momentous political struggle and scientific advance. The feebleness of the poet’s response – “I do
but sing because I must, / And pipe but as the linnets sing” – appeals to a Millian understanding of
absolute emotional integrity, suggesting how powerfully Tennyson feels these objections – which are
challenges, ultimately, to lyric poetry itself. Tennyson not merely risks but to a degree incites such
response through resolute commitment to the particulars of mourning. For most of the nearly 17
years of composition, Tennyson did not think of himself as writing a single poem. Not long before
publication, he was still referring to a “book of elegies,” a phrase that does justice not only to the
separate integrity of each section, but also to the difficulty of reconciling the ragged grief with some
larger design. The poem offers landmarks by which to chart a chronological progression, which
unfolds over roughly three years: sections 28, 78, and 104 are set at Christmas, and sections 72 and
98 mark the anniversary of the death. But the narrative structure is tenuous, inasmuch as the large
emotional arc – from numbing grief through moral questioning and rage through acquiescence into
something like celebration – is not clearly tethered to anything like a plot. The sonnet sequence
offers a formal precedent, and Shakespeare’s sonnets clearly were especially resonant for Tennyson
in their celebration of intense male friendship. Indeed, some early readers, including Hallam’s father,
were unsettled by this affiliation, which has been developed in recent criticism that elicits the
powerful homoeroticism in Tennyson’s grief. But structurally the poem more closely resembles a
private journal or diary. The diary typically is divided between ongoing chronology and fixation on
certain recurrent themes, and the entries may seem highly disjunctive, moving without explanation
to new attitudes or concerns. Much occurs in the interstices, as it were, whether through genuine
resolution of conflict or sheer exhaustion, which may be registered in highly oblique fashion,
through subtle shifts of attention or tone. A diary, moreover, raises questions of audience akin to
those that trouble Tennyson. At times poetry feels a wholly private exercise, whose value may be
anchored less in self-understanding than in sheer routine – “that sad mechanic exercise /Like dull
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narcotics, numbing pain” At the same time, however, the design of the poem works to give a larger
shape, and thus an emblematic force, to the central crisis. In this regard, it resembles the central
episodes of Sartor Resartus and Mill’s Autobiography. As in those works, the appeal is to something
more particular than the universality of suffering. Tennyson struggles to articulate through personal
grief a host of more topical anxieties, appealing to forms of awareness and perplexity that made his
suffering seem distinctly modern, because it could be gathered into a theme of progress, both
personal and collective. Unlike most autobiographies – but in keeping with Wordsworth’s example –
the body of the poem opens with its central crisis. The poet casts the rupture in his personal history
in terms that evoke a host of grand Victorian narratives. His language conjures up “loss and gain”
both personal and economic; one’s “rise” in the world, orm towards the more inclusive awareness
charted in Goethean Bildung and other nineteenth-century narratives of personal development;
“progress” conceived in collective terms, as “the march of mind”; even – in some ways the most
vivid figurative cluster of the poem – in terms of the development of humankind as a species
moving towards “higher things.” Might all of these other narratives turn out to reflect groundless
faiths, to be records more of rupture than continuity? Tennyson thus frames his dilemma in a
manner that unites emotional, formal, and intellectual challenges. The recuperation of his dead
friend Arthur Hallam – the sense that Hallam is not irrevocably lost, that his death was not senseless
– may restore a larger faith that all is “toil cooperant to an end,” both in the world at large and in the
structure of the poem. Tennyson’s doubt is most sweepingly phrased in wrestling with modern
science. Though Tennyson’s proto-evolutionary speculations notably antedate Darwin’s Origin of
Species, he had been deeply impressed by Charles Lyell’s writings on geology and especially by Robert
Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, which caused a sensation when it was published
anonymously in 1844. Haunted by the findings of modern geology, so starkly at odds with the
consoling image of “Mother Nature,” the poet contemplates in the fossils of extinct species an
image of history as recurrent catastrophe. What evidence of a beneficent Being could one find in this
record of continual, seemingly implacable destruction? And what of “Man, her last work” Tellingly,
the poem offers no solution to this most harrowing of doubts. “Peace; come away” the next section
opens, as if this perplexity never can be laid to rest. It is relegated to a realm of mystery eased by
more immediate forms of solace in the visible world, and in the growing, visceral sense that Hallam
is not wholly absent. Tennysonian doubt is so powerful in part because even his most sweeping
affirmations of faith give away so much to the worldview of modern science. The Prologue that
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introduces the poem with an address to “Strong Son of God, immortal Love,” already concedes that
religion is a world beyond “knowledge”: As throughout the poem, the drama of absence and doubt
is reinforced by the distinctive stanza form. The nested rhymes create a potent sense of enclosure
and containment that underscores the balance or tension of opposing forces: here, for instance, it
may seem that “let it grow” is resisted by “we cannot know.” It is in some ways a microcosm of the
latter half of the poem: the ebbing of grief is reflected in newly vivid responsiveness to the
landscape, whose evocative power in turn evokes an increasing assurance that Hallam remains
present to him, that like the evening star, “Sweet Hesper-Phosphor.”

An Age of Prose
Amid the great debates prompted by Catholic Emancipation and the prospect of a Reform Bill,
many commentators in 1830 noted that political commentary in journals and newspapers had
displaced nearly every other form of literary exchange. Even by 1828, John Stuart Mill (himself a
vigorous participant in the debates) expressed a widely echoed worry that the predominance of
periodicals was contributing to the “degradation” of literature generally (Mill 1963–91: 12–13).
Thought, it seemed, was being transformed into a commodity. This concern points to a momentous
logic in developing literary institutions. Over against a view of literature as one more product
generated by market demand, Mill and other critics would shape an ideal of literature – poetry in
particular – as a locus of value beyond exchange, a deeply personal form of expression and
responsiveness to the world that elicited intimate forms of understanding between author and
reader. This notion developed into an ideal of “culture,” a source of value nurtured primarily
through aesthetic experience, which could be set against utilitarianism and other schemes that would
reduce all forms of value to material interests. This development gave unusual prominence to
periodical writing and other literary forms that have survived their original context under the
awkward academic rubric, “non-fiction prose.” In the romantic era the prose essay (particularly in
the hands of Lamb, Hazlitt, and De Quincey) became an unusually supple vehicle for varieties of
introspection as well as social and literary comment. The dislocations of the early Victorian decades
created an audience eager for writing that addressed new social prospects and perplexities. These
worries were focused most pointedly in religious doubt, but in a world of greatly expanding literacy,
where, to adapt Marx’s phrase, all that is solid seemed to be melting into air, the craving for new
sources of value was unusually pervasive. This hunger is registered in the expanding popularity of
lectures and public readings, along with the remarkable tolerance among Victorian audiences for
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sometimes excoriating attacks on their character and values. As many commentators have noted,
Victorian social critics often seem rivals of the preacher or prophet, “elegant Jeremiahs,” to adopt a
tag bestowed on Matthew Arnold. Drawing on rhetorical traditions of sermon and prophecy as well
as earlier traditions of essayistic writing, authors such as Carlyle, Ruskin, and Arnold developed
highly distinctive styles, which endeavor not merely to convince but also, more fundamentally, to jolt
to attention readers lulled by fatigue, complacency, or a superabundance of print. Many readers in
pursuit of new social and intellectual possibility were bewildered by the new vistas, and were glad to
embrace writers as guides to the perplexed. Hence the increasing association of great literature with
the wisdom of a sage – a title first and most influentially attached to Carlyle, “the sage of Chelsea.”
Sartor Resartus (1831) was a harbinger of the extraordinary generic innovation associated with
Victorian prose. This well-nigh unclassifiable work clearly draws on traditional religious exhortation,
but combines it with elements of biography, German romance, prose satire, philosophy, and social
polemic, stirring up a heady concoction whose influence readers were still celebrating a half-century
later. For Carlyle, as for many Victorians, biography was a particularly satisfying form. Though its
popularity gave rise to many dreary monuments of familial piety (heavily redacted Lives and Letters
became an object of scorn later in the century), biography figured centrally as a model of moral
struggle, of figures who triumphed over – or, occasionally, were paralyzed by – the distinctive social
and spiritual challenges of the age. Life writing was an especially resonant vehicle for probing
relations between individuals and the social order; Samuel Smiles’s best-selling Self-Help (1859),
which helped to inaugurate a genre still popular today, is in essence a series of brief lives. In
Victorian religious debate, lives of the saints, or of renowned dissenters, or of Jesus himself (as in
Strauss’s scandalous Das Leben Jesu, translated by George Eliot) frequently were enlisted as crucial
exhibits. Autobiography and memoir had a similar power, but it was a somewhat more unsettling
genre, bound up as it was with what struck many Victorian as overweening self-regard and erosion
of privacy. Yet the genre became increasingly central to cultural debate in the latter half of the
century. Works such as Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Mill’s Autobiography, and Froude’s Life of
Carlyle captured not only the shapes of particular lives but also the formation of distinctive modes of
belief. Carlyle’s entire career was an extended engagement with biography, pivoting as it did on the
idea of heroism, from his early accounts of German literature, in which Goethe was the central
exemplar, through the parodic biographical dimensions of Sartor Resartus, his lectures on Heroes and
Hero-Worship, and his increasingly eccentric preoccupation with multi-volume chronicles of
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Cromwell and Frederick the Great. The biographical impulse also found its way into the novel, with
the rise of the Bildungsroman or “novel of development,” from Jane Eyre to Great Expectations. It also
was an important force in poetry, not merely in the lyric, but in long poems such as Tennyson’s In
Memoriam and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh. More subtly, biography informed the rise
of the dramatic monologue, in which distinctive historical epochs or intellectual movements were
frequently condensed in the evocation of a single and singular speaker. In focusing on
“representative men,” in Emerson’s phrase, biography was bound up with the newly acute
awareness of history reflected in the notion of a “spirit of the age.” Over the course of the century,
this perception would develop into a thoroughgoing historicism, which presumed that forms of
belief and value could be fully understood only in terms of the historical context that shaped them –
a point of view that would prove particularly unsettling to traditional religious beliefs. In the early
part of the period, however, history frequently was invoked to rationalize present courses of action.
Macaulay’s History of England (1849–59) became the prime exemplar of a “Whig view of history” as a
chronicle of unending progress driven by political and economic liberalism, while religious
conservatives, most influentially the Tractarians, looked to history to recover forms of contact and
continuity with the early Christian epoch. Newman would develop an unusually sophisticated theory
of religious development that allowed for historical continuity amid doctrinal change, while more
skeptical scholars such as W. E. H Lecky and H. T. Buckle found in history a fitful but triumphal
advance of reason over superstition. Over the course of the century, however, writers became
increasingly engaged by the sheer strangeness of the past. The sense of the past as “a foreign
country,” as the twentieth century novelist L. P. Hartley put it, recognizes an aestheticizing power in
historical distance, and a capacity to unsettle or disarm moral preconceptions. This effect is
registered in literary forms as varied as the historical novel, the dramatic monologue, and a wide
range of late-Victorian criticism. At the same time, the past could be felt at work in the present as a
means of explaining otherwise baffling forms of thought – as in the pioneering anthropologist E. B.
Tylor’s theory of cultural “survivals.” Preoccupation with history created an environment well-
equipped to grasp the momentous significance of Darwin, whose work was in turn nurtured by it. T.
H. Huxley in “Science and Culture” pointed out a striking congruence between the two realms of
thought. “When a biologist meets with an anomaly, he instinctively turns to the study of
development to clear it up. The rationale of contradictory opinions may with equal confidence be
sought in history”. “Development” gathered in speculations across a wide range of science, from
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geology to embryology to natural history to astrophysical speculations on the origins of the cosmos,
and from these realms it also spread into emergent discourses of anthropology and sociology. The
great divide that we have come to call “the two cultures” of science and the humanities only began
to make itself felt in the latter half of the period. Well into the 1870s, science generally – and natural
science in particular – engaged the attention of a broadly literate public, whose interests are reflected
in the enormous popularity of both natural history and authors such as Tennyson, whose In
Memoriam ponders the impact of proto-evolutionary speculation a decade before The Origin of Species
was published. Stunning advances in a wide range of technology offered an especially fitting theme
for triumphalist history, crowning the Baconian dream of mastery over the natural world. Samuel
Smiles’s The Lives of the Engineers found in its subjects the stuff of romantic heroism. Biology and
engineering joined hands in a host of Victorian reformist impulses, such as public health campaigns
addressing epidemic disease and the lack of adequate sanitation and housing. Those campaigns in
turn generated a literature of their own, from parliamentary “blue books” to the “social problem”
novel to polemical social criticism to a broad array of journalism. As it opened up new avenues of
transport and communication – most notably, railways from the early 1830s and, soon after, the
telegraph – technological innovation also opened new literary frontiers. Foreign travel, in particular,
which had been a bastion of privilege epitomized in the continental “Grand Tour,” became
accessible to an increasingly broad public, which in turn formed a market for a burgeoning literature
describing distant lands. The reach of the British Empire added special allure to Asia, Africa, South
America, and the Middle East, while North America offered particularly resonant comparisons to
Britain and its institutions. Readier access to France, Italy, and Greece made possible a newly vivid
and extensive acquaintance with the history of Western art and architecture – a development
reinforced at home by the expansion of public collections (the National Gallery was funded in 1824)
and increased access to the treasures of great estates. The new prominence of the visual arts in
English life called out new forms of critical writing, in which aesthetic concerns were increasingly
linked to social diagnoses, most notably in the hugely influential writing of John Ruskin. With the
large-scale rebuilding and expansion of urban England, architecture became an especially fierce
arena of debate. As the choice of style came to seem an index of national character (typically fought
out in relation to a similarly moralized account of architectural traditions) once again an outwardly
minor literary form took on great social resonance.
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The Situation of Poetry

For many commentators in 1830, poetry seemed in a desperate state, despite its cultural cachet. The
extraordinary popularity of their immediate predecessors – Byron and Scott, above all, although
pirated editions of Shelley were popular among working-class readers – indicated that poetry
retained its long-standing centrality in English culture. Throughout the early decades of the era,
many readers still composed verse to commemorate public or private events of special moment,
suggesting that poetry retained a distinctly elevating and solemnizing force. In the 1830s and 1840s,
critics frequently measured aspiring poets against a demand not only for emotional engagement but
also for moral vision, and slapped down pretenders with a correspondingly fierce condescension.
The combativeness, typically captured in archly gendered terms, reflected the eminence of the office
– which admitted women and working-class men only on special suffrage. The most enduringly
popular volume of the latter half of the 1820s was John Keble’s The Christian Year (1827), which
owed much of its prominence to its immersion in Anglican worship and belief. At the same time,
the achievement of the great Romantics – a daunting act to follow under any circumstances – was
countered by a new impatience associated with the rise of utilitarianism and the “march of mind,”
which increasingly relegated poetry to the realm of the trivial or childish. Bentham famously averred
that when it came to giving pleasure, poetry amounted to no more than pushpin. Even Macaulay in
his essay on Milton declared that poetry was an achievement that civilization simply would outgrow.
Macaulay loved poetry – his Lays of Ancient Rome (1842) would be one of the best-selling poetry
volumes of the age – but he loved his progress more. More immediately disabling for aspiring poets,
however, was the financial crisis of 1825, which left publishers feeling that poetry from unfamiliar
writers was too risky a speculation. As a rule, unknown poets could be published in volume form
only if they underwrote the costs, which naturally narrowed the social spectrum of potential authors.
Some of the slack was taken up by the literary annuals, expensive and elaborately illustrated volumes
akin to ladies’ keepsake albums, designed principally as holiday gifts, in which poems typically were
paired with finely wrought steel engravings. From the founding of Forget Me Not in 1823, annuals
quickly came to dominate the poetry market over the next decade. The major annuals – Forget Me
Not was joined by The Literary Souvenir and The Keepsake – cost 12 shillings apiece versus five for a
typical volume of poetry, but they sold in the thousands (as compared to the typical edition of 200
for a new volume of poetry), through an adroit marketing that in turn allowed editors to pay
exorbitant fees to well-known contributors. Male poets in particular disparaged the genre – “There is
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no other reading. They haunt me. I die of Albophobia,” Charles Lamb wrote in 1827 – but nearly all
succumbed to the fees on offer. The form allowed unusual prominence to women poets, most
notably Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon (or L. E. L.), who in 1830 were two of the most
prominent voices in English poetry. Unsurprisingly, the affiliation of poetry with the feminized
world of the annuals further exasperated critical frustration at the dearth of new poetry generally.
“The reign of poesy is over, at least for half a century,”
declared the hero of Disraeli’s Vivian Grey (1827). That verdict proved premature, but poets –
particularly male poets – would be increasingly fearful that cultural authority had passed to other
literary forms. “Poetry having ceased to be read, or published, or written,” Carlyle remarked in 1832,
“how can it continue to be reviewed?” In fact, however, poetry reviews capture some of the epoch’s
most provocative and far-reaching reflection on the cultural contexts and moral burdens of art
generally. The reception of Tennyson’s Poems of 1830 encapsulates a host of conflicting demands
that would confront the poet through much of the century: a cult of intimate expression clashed
with demands for a poetry of public life and wisdom; the seeming tension between fidelity to beauty
and moral obligation; the place of religious faith in a poetry attentive to the particulars of daily
experience. These concerns recur throughout major critical debates of the age – the challenge of the
novel as an epic of modern life; the rise of aestheticism and the “fleshly” school; the poetry of
decadence – and they invigorate the major formal innovations of the era, the dramatic monologue
and the so-called “novel-in-verse.” But even after Swinburne’s outrages on popular taste in the
1860s, the cultural situation of poetry remained precarious, responsive to a dilemma articulated in
the earliest Victorian criticism. Does poetry have a function beyond that of emotional anodyne, of
therapy for jangled nerves and intellectual confusion? Is the poet destined to become, as William
Morris put it, “the idle singer of an empty day”?

Victorian Theater
While the institutions of poetry were under pressure in 1830, the decline of the drama had become a
cliché. “Everywhere throughout Europe,” Bulwer wrote in England and the English (1833), “the glory
of the theater is beginning to grow dim,” its former blaze certain to “die off in silence and darkness,
like an extinct volcano” (Bulwer 1833: 135). There was similar consensus about the cause of the
decline, in Britain at least: lack of financial reward even for successful playwrights, and the theater-
going public’s pleasure in elaborate spectacle. Before the 1860s, playwrights were paid at a flat rate,
13

which was unaffected by the length of a run. One of the great successes of the 1860s, Our American
Cousin, netted the manager of the Haymarket Theatre the fabulous sum of 20,000 pounds (the
annual income of Britain’s wealthiest nobility); its author, Tom Taylor, received 150 pounds. In the
1830s the standard fee for a first-run drama at minor theaters was between 50 and 70 pounds –
which put great pressure on dramatists to be prolific (and to borrow heavily from foreign sources)
but made it almost impossible for them to live comfortably through playwriting alone. Meanwhile,
playwrights confronted an audience accustomed to increasingly spectacular staging, a development
nourished by the peculiar history of the British stage. In a backhanded tribute to the political power
of the theater, the Licensing Act of 1737 had granted a monopoly on “legitimate” drama to only two
London theaters, Covent Garden
and Drury Lane. “At present the English, instead of finding politics on the stage, find their stage in
politics,” quipped Bulwer (Bulwer 1833: 237). Unlicensed theaters were barred from staging
productions with speaking parts; hence they resorted to forms of mime, dumbshow, and musical
accompaniment, along with increasingly elaborate stage technology, nurturing a taste for spectacle
that spread in turn to the legitimate theaters. As R. H. Horne put it, in his New Spirit of the Age
(1844), the stature of playwrights has declined “because the public taste has been perverted, and
cannot improve of itself, and because managers, without a single exception, persist in pandering to
that perversion, viz., addressing gaudy and expensive shows to the external senses.” Even after the
Theatre Regulation Act of 1843 abolished the patent theater privileges, these trends persisted,
creating the enduring image of the Victorian playhouse as an immense space in which performers
were dwarfed by their surroundings, and the primary mode of engagement was visual, with actors
warring against their backdrops by means of elaborately stylized movement and speech delivered in
hectoring, stentorian register. The conditions nurtured a particular conception of the actor as
virtuoso – even if it also tended to coarsen the spectacle into histrionics accessible to thousands of
spectators. Only gradually did actresses come more into the foreground, and begin to slip free of the
taint that associated their profession with prostitution. Indeed, not until the 1890s, with the “new
drama” of Ibsen and Shaw – or so the traditional history runs – did the stage became a central locus
of cultural innovation and debate. But these verdicts say as much about an elitist hierarchy of
dramatic forms as they do of the power of drama. Drama has always been an arena for battles over
the puritanism of British culture. In 1830, when many dissenters and evangelicals shuddered at the
idea of setting foot in a playhouse (a thrilling transgression memorably recorded in the best-selling
14

John Halifax, Gentleman [1856]) a visitor to London might have been struck more than anything by
the sheer variety of theatrical forms on exhibit: farce, pantomime, burlesque, melodrama, opera,
drawing-room comedy, Shakespeare. This is the age, moreover, in which “private theatricals” took a
central place in affluent domestic life. In the major theaters, tragedy gradually turned into “drama,”
an amalgam of intrigue, sensation, idealism, and domestic sentiment that would endure throughout
the remainder of the century, and on into the next in different media, notably cinema and television
(Booth 1991). The dominant form was melodrama, which was mainly popular and proletarian in
theme and sentiment, frequently preoccupied with the exploitation of the poor by aristocratic or
wealthy villains (many of the theaters devoted to melodrama were in working-class neighborhoods).
More generally, its representation of stark moral conflict and highly wrought emotion also made it a
compelling vehicle for dramatizing contemporary social problems, which remained largely absent in
other literary forms. By the end of the century, comic melodrama had fused with burlesque in the
world of the music hall, which became the central cultural arena for testing the emergent boundaries
of “high” and “low”, mass and elite cultural distinctions.

CHARTISM
A mass working-class oppositional movement principally of the late 1830s and early 1840s. It arose
as a response to the 1832 Reform Act [see above], which, while extending the franchise to some
degree, nevertheless retained the property qualification to vote and thus continued to disenfranchise
the vast majority of people. Chartism’s cause was popularly advanced by Fergus O’Connor’s
newspaper, the Northern Star (founded in 1837 in Leeds), but it takes its name from the publication
in 1838 of ‘The People’s Charter’, which listed six demands for political reform: universal manhood
suffrage; vote by ballot; payment of MPs; equal electoral districts; the abolition of the property
qualification for MPs; and annual parliaments. In 1839, the Chartist National Convention opened,
and the first Chartist Petition, with around one-and-a-quarter-million signatures was presented to
Parliament. It was rejected, and serious rioting commenced. In 1841, during a period of deep trade
depression, acute industrial crisis and economic distress, Chartism revived, and a second Petition
was rejected by Parliament. Rioting broke out once more, especially in the cotton areas of
Lancashire and in Staffordshire. The last major upsurge of Chartist activity occurred in 1848 with
the presentation of a massive third Petition to Parliament, which again failed; Habeas Corpus was
suspended, but on this occasion, a mass demonstration in London dispersed peacefully, and
15

thereafter Chartism as an active movement went into decline. At its most successful, Chartism
mobilised the working class in a way which indicated its potential political strength, and offered its
class-base self-confident social, educational and cultural experience (for example, much Chartist
poetry was written and published in papers like the Northern Star). But it was a regionally and
politically diverse movement (despite all the radical language of political reform and the
identification of the enemy as ‘Old Corruption’, in 1845 the Chartists adopted Fergus O’Connor’s
scheme for land settlement as the economic solution to the plight of the masses); and it drew on
many different traditions and solidarities, witnessed most sharply perhaps in the division between
‘moral force’ Chartism (which advocated peaceful radical-democratic action) and ‘physical force’
Chartism (which was steeped in a more insurrectionary tradition of popular protest). Paradoxically,
despite its short life and sudden demise, all the aims articulated in the original ‘People’s Charter’ –
except the last one – were later achieved.

(THE) FIN DE SIÈCLE

The French term (literally ‘the end of the century’) used specifically to designate the period at the
end of the 19th Century in Britain and France especially, and as an adjective, to characterize certain
attitudes and styles associated with it, especially ‘Aestheticism’ and ‘Decadence’ in the arts.
However, although chronologically more or less coterminous with the 1890s, ‘fin de siècle’ is seldom
used to describe the artistic production of the period as a whole. Rather, it tends to imply the
prominence of works which promote the cult of the morbidly over-sensitive, socially alienated
‘Artist’ (‘poète maudit’, in Verlaine’s phrase), and the pursuit of ‘art for art’s sake’ without social,
moral or political purpose or reference. The characteristic attitude of refined abstraction is well
represented by Arthur O’Shaughnessy’s ‘Ode’:
We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams,
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams …
A life-style pose of debauched bohemianism intensified the sense of ‘decadence’ and helped to
associate the poets and artists with ‘degeneration’, a late 19th-Century obsession which found many
16

contemporary symptoms of the degeneration of the human race. In the British literary context,
therefore, the term is principally associated with Oscar Wilde (‘all art is quite useless’; and hence the
significance of his trial and conviction for homosexuality in 1895); the Rhymers Club (W. B. Yeasts’
‘companions of the Cheshire Cheese’ [the pub where they met]: Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson,
Arthur Symons, John Davidson); Yeasts’ own conception of ‘The Celtic Twilight’ (essay of 1893)
and his early poems; Aubrey Beardsley and the Yellow Book

Fabian Society
A large society of socialistic intellectuals, closely bound up with the British Labour Party. It was
founded in 1884 and named after the Roman general Fabius Cunctator – ‘Fabius the Delayer’ -
who in the 3rd century BC saved Rome from the Carthaginian army under Hannibal, by using a
policy of attrition instead of open battle, i.e. he destroyed the army by small attacks on isolated
sections of it, instead of risking total defeat by confronting Hannibal with the entire Roman army.
The Fabian Society similarly advocates socialism by piecemeal action through parliamentary
reform instead of risking disaster by total revolution; this policy has been summarized in the
phrase ‘the inevitability of gradualness’. The Fabians were among the principal influences leading
to the foundation of the Labour Party in 1900. The years between 1884 and 1900 were those of
its greatest distinction; they were led by George Bernard Shaw and Sidney and Beatrice Webb,
and made their impact through die Fabian Essays on social and economic problems. They always
advocated substantial thinking on solid evidence, in contrast to the more idealistic and ‘utopian’
socialism of such writers as William Morris.

Malthus, Thomas Robert (1766-1834)

Economist; particularly famous for his Essay on Population (1798), which he reissued in an expanded
and altered form in 1803. Its original tide was: An Essay on the Principle of Population as it affects the Future
Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr Godwin, M. Condorcet, and other Writers. The
essence of his view was that social progress tends to be limited by the fact that population
increases more rapidly than means of subsistence, and always reaches the limits of subsistence, so
that a substantial part of society is doomed to live beyond the margin of poverty. The ‘natural
checks’ which prevent population increase from exceeding the means of subsistence are war, famine,
and pestilence, to which he added human misery and vice. In the second edition he added a further
17

possible check by ‘moral restraint’, i.e. late marriages and sexual continence. These arguments
made a strong impression on public opinion; an important practical consequence of them was the
replacement of the existing haphazard methods of poor relief by the harsh but reasoned and
systematic Poor Law system of 1834. Malthus’s relentless and pitiless reasoning led to political
economy becoming known as the ‘dismal science’. His conclusions were contested by
humanitarians, and later seemed belied by factors he did not foresee, such as cheap imports of
food from newly exploited colonies like Canada. Since 1918 Malthusian theories of the dangers of
over-population have revived.

M arius the Epicurean (1885)

A philosophical novel by Walter Pater tracing the spiritual journey of a young Roman of the second
century AD who moves from Epicureanism (the doctrine of the philosopher Epicurus, 342-270 BC,
who is best known for his principle that pleasure is the beginning and end of life - although for him
pleasure meant the acquisition of a mind at peace), through Stoicism (a philosophy founded in 4th-
century-BC Greece which underlined the significance of the soul and advocated indifference to
bodily suffering) and finally to the aesthetic pleasure of Christianity. However Marius remains
faithful to his Epicurean philosophy to the end. The novel was enormously influential on Pater’s
contemporaries, as well as on later writers such as W.B; Yeats (1865-1939) as an analysis of aesthetic
religiosity.

Naturalism

In literature, a school of thought especially associated with the novelist Emile Zola. It was a
development of realism. The naturalists believed that imaginative literature (especially the novel)
should be based on scientific knowledge, and that imaginative writers should be scientifically
objective and exploratory in their approach to their work. This means that environment should be
exactly treated, and that character should be related to physiological heredity. Influential in France
and Germany, the movement counts for little in Britain; the novelists George Gissing and Arnold
Bennett (1867-1931) show traces of its influence in the treatment of environment in relation to
character, as does Thomas Hardy.

Oxford M ovement (Tractarian M ovement)

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A religious movement within the Church of England; it had its origin and main centre in Oxford
and ran from 1833, when it began with a sermon by the Anglican priest, theologian and poet
Keble, until 1845 when its most eloquent leader, John Newman, entered the Roman Catholic
Church. Some of the leaders of the Church of England realized (especially after the Act of
Catholic Emancipation, 1829) that the Church was by its constitution largely at the mercy of the
state, and was in danger of becoming in essentials a department of the state. The Oxford
Movement preached that the Church had an independent, spiritual status, was in direct descent
from the medieval Catholic Church, and represented a ‘middle way’ between post-Reformation
Catholicism and Protestantism. The movement's propaganda was conducted through O tracts,
many of them by John Newman, and culminated in Tract XC which asserted that the Thirty-Nine
Articles, on which Anglican doctrine is based, are compatible with Roman Catholic doctrine. The
tracts divided Anglican opinion severely, and Newman’s secession to the Church of Rome,
followed by the secession of other High Anglican clergy, brought the movement into discredit with
the majority of Anglican opinion. Edward Pusey, Professor of Hebrew at Oxford, was the leader
of the Oxford Movement, which was in consequence often called Puseyite. An indirect result of
the movement was to focus attention on the medieval background of the Church, and to
encourage that reification of the Middle Ages which emerged in much Victorian literature, in the
artistic movement known as Pre-Raphaelitism and in Victorian neo-Gothic architecture.

Pallister Novel:
A sequence of novels by Anthony Trollope which is composed of Can You Forgive Her?, Phineas Finn,
The Eustace Diamonds, Phineas Redux, The Prime Minister and The Duke’s Children. Trollope described
them as “a series of semi-political tales.”

(TH E) PRE-RAPH AELITE(S)

As noun or adjective, the term coined by Dante Gabriel Rossetti to describe a group of anti-
establishment British painters founded in 1848: ‘The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’ (‘PRB’). The
central members of the PRB were Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, but
Ford Madox Brown was a kindred spirit and Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris, Arthur Hughes
and Henry Wallis were also closely associated with the movement, as was the poet, Christina
Rossetti – the term being just as appropriately used for the poetry of both Rossettis and the early
Morris (a literary magazine, The Germ, was edited by William Michael Rossetti for four issues in 1850,
19

and Morris and Burne-Jones set up The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine in 1856 which published
poems by Rossetti and Morris). The visual artists sought to return to the spirit and manner of
painting before the time of the Italian High Renaissance painter, Raphael (1483–1520), advocating
and practicing an adherence to natural forms and effects, a precise concern with minute detail, a
preference for outdoor settings, the use of bright colour, and subjects commonly of a religious or
medieval-literary kind. The high point of the movement was the five years or so after 1848, but its
influence can be felt in much later 19th-Century British painting, in Morris’s founding of his Arts
and Crafts business, and in the poetry, for example, of Algernon Charles Swinburne. John Ruskin
defended the group’s ideas in the pamphlet, ‘Pre-Raphaelitism’ (1851), but Robert Buchanan (as
‘Thomas Maitland’) fiercely attacked their poetry (and especially D. G. Rossetti’s) in an essay in the
Contemporary Review, ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’ (1871); Rossetti replied with ‘The Stealthy School
of Criticism’.

Picture of Dorian Grey

A novel by Oscar Wilde which updates Goethe’s Faust legend. Tempted by the selfish sybarite
Henry Wotton, Dorian trades his soul for eternal youth and beauty while his portrait, painted by
Basil Hallward, who appeals to the better side of his nature, bears the ravages of time and Dorian’s
decadent living. It was meant as an examination of the consequences of regarding sensual indulgence
and moral indifference as aesthetic ends in themselves.

Realism
A term, first used in France, for literary and visual forms which aims for the accurate
reproduction of the world as it is. There is a long tradition of philosophical realism concerning the
relationship of individual phenomena to abstract categories, and the relationship of ideas to the real
world. Literary realism emerged in the late 18th and I9th centuries concomitantly with the rise of
the novel and coterminous with industrial capitalism. In general, it means the use of the
imagination to represent things as common sense supposes them to be. It does not only apply to
19th-century literature; Daniel Defoe is commonly called a realist because of his factual description
and narration. 19th-century realism in literature arose, however, from a reaction against 19th-
20

century Romanticism, and is related to Naturalism; George Eliot’s Middlemarch, with its carefully
observed representation of the forces winch structure society, is a notable example of English
19th-century realism. Many realist novelists chose to depict the lives and sufferings of the lower
classes in texts that combine fiction with documentary. Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) is a
good example of this. 19th-century novels are often described, from a 20th-century perspective, as
classic realist texts, a term devised by the film critic Colin McCabe in 1974 to describe Middlemarch.
Classic realism, according to McCabe, who reverses the terms of Lukacs’ socialist realist attack on
modernism, works by a sleight of hand, to hide the constructedness of the world; the world of the
novel is presented to the reader as if it were a direct mirroring or reflection of the real world,
rather than an ideologically saturated interpretation of the real. The term most often used to
describe the strategy of the realist text is transparency. The illusion of transparency created by
realism is contrasted with modernist writing which supposedly foregrounds its textuality.
Naturalism is a late 19th-century form of realism, associated with the French novelist Emile Zola.
It emerged out of an attempt to marry literary and scientific discourses and demanded a scientific
and empirical objectivity from writers, whose novels were supposed to be laboratory experiments to
show how character is determined by environment. In practice, naturalism remained focused on the
world as external material appearance, and imposed a rigid set of normalizing causal narratives.
Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895), George Gissing’s New Grub
Street (1891) and George Moore’s Esther Waters (1894) are all influenced by naturalism. It is important
to distinguish between different forms of realism - for example, classic realism, naturalism, socialist
realism - and to recognize that they pre-suppose different kinds of relationship between the literary
text and the world. Dominant 20th-century critiques of realism regard it as a naturalization of
ideological positions, presenting them as if they were commonsense perceptions or views. Latterly it
has been argued that the polarization of realism and modernism, and the rejection of realism, has
been too absolute. More work is being done on the many varieties of realism, and work on reading
and fantasy suggests that earlier views of how the classic realist text operated assumed too simplistic
a model of reading practices and modes of reception.

Regional Novel
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A novel set in a real locality, accurately described. Regional novels became popular in Britain during
the 19th century and many women writers used the form. George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell and the
Bronte sisters are notable examples.

Romanticism: Influence on Victorian literature

The abstract noun ‘Romanticism’ did not enter the language until the mid 19th century, by which
time all but Wordsworth were dead. By this time readers began to see these poets as forming a
single ‘movement’ and their work was simplified according to this categorization. Romanticism
came to stand for an emotional reaction against the rational classicism of 18th-century Augustanism.
Romanticism championed individual feeling over reason and social convention, and was
characterized by a pervading fascination with dreams and the unconscious, an elevation of the power
of the imagination and a new attitude towards the role of mankind in nature. The early deaths of
Keats, Shelley and Byron, coupled with the decline of Wordsworth and Coleridge, created a natural
hiatus in the development of the styles, forms and critical standards of Romanticism. At the same
time, however, Wordsworth’s influence continued throughout the early years of Victoria’s reign and
he succeeded Robert Southey as Poet Laureate in 1843. Charles Darwin and John Stuart Mill were
great admirers of Wordsworth’s verse as was Thomas Hardy who, in 1868, cited Wordsworth’s
‘Resolution and Independence’ as a ‘Cure for Despair’. The philosophies and political theories of
Coleridge influenced both Mill and Disraeli although Thomas Carlyle rejected them for their
philosophical aloofness and metaphysics, claiming that art should be realistic and possess a sense of
sociological purpose. Carlyle and Mill both ejected Byron, who was greatly enjoyed by Tennyson
and Ruskin. By 1850 Byron was being criticized for his subjectivity, his rhetoric and more
importantly, a perceived scorn of ‘struggling humanity’. Keats found little favour with the major
Victorian writers although the Aesthetic Movement of the 188os revived these ideas in direct
opposition to high Victorian optimism and didacticism. Tennyson swiftly moved from his early
enthusiasm for Keats to embrace a sense of doubt and despair found most eloquently in the work
of Matthew Arnold. Shelley’s idealism and impracticality were criticized by Tennyson, Kingsley and,
of course, Carlyle but Robert Browning was converted to Radical politics and vegetarianism by
reading Shelley’s work and adapted Shelley’s confessional style to his own dramatic monologues. It
was the birth and development of Benthamism and Utilitarian thought that led to the questioning
of Romanticism and its literature. At the same time there was a movement towards the
22

democratization of literature which became the province of the middle rather than the aristocratic
classes. Growing awareness of what came to be known as ‘the Condition of England’, coupled with
the social unrest of the Hungry Forties, led to a call for art to be centred on social and political
issues. Art was seen to have a capacity to make people aware of social problems and a duty to
change things for the better. The artist’s first duty was to communicate, and his or her message
should be one of social significance. Keats, the aesthete and escapist was toppled by Carlyle, the
prophet and seer. Interestingly, both were born in the same year. Carlyle objected strongly to the
notion of the artist as a divinely inspired being whose talent displayed itself in eccentricity and
contempt for established social conventions. However, the worst excesses of Romanticism were
assiduously cultivated by the ‘Spasmodic’ poets who specialized in agitated, highly-strung and
emotional verse. The Spasmodics also continued the tradition of the book-length poem which even
the original Romantic poets found hard to sustain. Melodrama, insane passion and sensation - all
characteristics of the Gothic novel - surfaced in the Sensation writing of
the 186os, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites clung to the exuberance and lyric
emotion favoured by Keats and Shelley. Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights retains traces of the
Romantic theory of the imagination developed by Coleridge and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's early
work is characterized by a strong sense of the poet’s mission and the holiness of the subjective
impulse. Tennyson’s Maud displays traces of the morbidity and subjectivity of the Romantic
movement and it has been seen as a dramatization of the conflict within Tennyson and his fellow
writers between the inclinations of Romanticism and the demands of Victorianism. Tennyson’s
work is characterized by a pervading struggle between a belief in ‘art for art’s sake’ and a more
pervading sociological aesthetic.

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

Verses by Omar Khayyam, a Persian scholar and poet who died in 1123. He was an outstanding
mathematician and astronomer, but is still more famous for his verse epigrams written in ‘rubai’, ie
four lines, the first, second and fourth of which have the same rhyme while the third is usually
rhymeless. The rubai had been invented for the epitomizing of subtle thoughts on Islamic belief,
but Omar used them to satirize religious bigotry with a free-thinking irony. This has caused him to
be referred to as ‘the Voltaire of the East’. The English poet Edward FitzGerald published a
translation of the Rubaiyat in 1859 (75 verses); he enlarged this to 110 verses in a new edition in
23

1868, and issued other versions (101 verses) in 1872 and 1879. FitzGerald emphasizes the pleasure-
loving aspect of the Persian poet, and the poem was extremely popular in Victorian England both
for its musicality and for its expression of a liberated way of life which contrasted with the narrow
and bigoted codes of mid-Victorian respectability. The poet Robert Graves also published a
translation of the Rubaiyat.

Sartor R esa rtus: The Life and Opinions of H err Teufelsdrockh

A disguised spiritual autobiography by Thomas Carlyle. It was serialized (1833-4) in Fraser’s
Magazine and published in book form in Boston, USA, in 1836 and in Britain in 1838. Carlyle was
under the influence of the German Romantics, eg. Jean Paul Richter. The title is Latin for ‘the
tailor re-patched’. Carlyle offers the fable that human beliefs and institutions are like clothes and
need renewing. Against the poet Byron’s attitude of doubt, isolation and suffering, Carlyle calls for
the affirmativeness of the German poet Goethe; heroic qualities such as sacrifice and devotion to
duty must redeem the inner man and, through men, the directionless age in which Carlyle felt
himself to be living - the age of flux and the decay of unquestioning religious faith. Besides the
drive of German influence, Carlyle felt the force of the old-fashioned Scottish Calvinism such as
had animated his father. The three crucial chapters are ‘The Everlasting No’, ‘Centre of
Indifference’ and ‘The Everlasting Yea’. Despite the difficulty he had in getting the book
published in Britain, it marks the beginning of his exposition of the creed of heroism, which
made Carlyle an inspiring figure in commerce-dominated mid-19th-century Britain.

Novel of Sensation
A genre that emerged in Britain from about 1860, influenced by Gothic literature and characterized
by extravagant, passionate and sometimes horrific events. It is often considered the precursor of
the modern thriller. Sensation novels were extremely popular with the reading public and formed a
large part of the stock of circulating libraries. Examples of the genre include Mary Braddon’s Lady
Audley’s Secret (1862); Mrs. Henry Wood’s East Lynne (1861) and Rhoda Broughton’s Cometh Up as a
Flower (1867). In A Literature of Their Own (1977), Elaine Showalter argues that sensation novels form a
significant part of the tradition of 19th-century women’s writing. Novelists such as Mary Braddon
subverted the stereotype of the ‘blonde angel’; others brought a wide range of suppressed female
emotions to the surface of their texts and constructed powerful fantasies of escape and protest.
24

Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850)

A sequence of forty-four sonnets by O Elizabeth Barrett Browning, written during her courtship
with Robert Browning in 1845-6. In the course of the Sonnets, Barrett Browning writes about love
from a series of different perspectives, at times positioning her lover as a muse, at other times
expressing her willingness to be his inspirational figure. She disrupts the conventions of amatory
poetry in her treatment of the lovers’ relationship, substituting a fluid and shifting relation for the
gendered fixture characteristic of courtly love-poetry. The Sonnets were not originally intended for
publication, and it was only on Robert Browning’s insistence that they were included in Barrett
Browning’s Poems of 1850. Although they attracted little critical attention during the 19th century,
they are now considered a major achievement.

‘Spasmodic’ school of poetry

The ‘Spasmodic’ poets espoused a crude Romanticism which revered the poet as a divinely inspired
being whose eccentricities should be humoured and encouraged, especially in the realm of accepted
social conventions, and whose observations were projected through the lens of a melancholy
solipsism. It was their bursts of ranting emotion, often ill-disguised as spontaneous feeling that
earned them their sobriquet. Pioneered by Philip James Bailey in his dramatic poem Festus (1839)
and indulged by Alexander Smith (1830-67) in A Life Drama (1853), the style reached its height in
Sydney Dobell's Balder (1854), the excesses of which led the literary critic and satirist William Aytoun
to coin the term ‘Spasmodic’ in his brilliant parody Firmillian, or The Student of Badajoz: A Spasmodic
Tragedy by T. Percy Jones (1854). It is possible to detect the influence of the ‘Spasmodics’ on Emily
Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Tennyson. After Firmillian the ‘Spasmodic’ tragedy
disappeared from serious verse and much of its energy may have been channelled into the
sensation novels of the i86os.

Sprung Rhythm
A term used by the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins to denote the method by which his verse is to
be scanned. In his time most English verse was written in running rhythm, i.e. metres with regular
stresses in the line:
Tonight the winds begin to rise
25

And roar from yonder dropping day (Tennyson - In Memoriam)

Hopkins wished to free English verse from this rhythm, so as to bring verse into closer accord
with common speech, to emancipate rhythm from the linear unit, and to achieve a freer range of
emphasis. His theory of Sprung Rhythm (contained in the Preface to his Poems) is complicated,
perhaps because he felt he had to justify himself to rather academic metricists like his friend
Robert Bridges. In fact he was reviving the rhythm of Old English alliterative verse (he cites
Langland's 14th-century narrative poem Piers Plowman as being in sprung rhythm) and folk poetry,
including many ballads and nursery rhymes. In sprung rhythm the number of stresses in each line
is regular, but they do not occur at regular intervals, nor do the lines have a uniform number of
syllables. The rhythm also drives through the stanza, and is not basically linear. The following is an
example:
Summer ends now: now, barbarous
in beauty,
the stooks rise
Around: up above, what wind-walks! what
lovely behavior

Unitarianism
A religious group that rejects the usual Christian doctrine of the Trinity, or three Persons in one
God (the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost), in favour of a belief in the single being of God
the Father. It originated in Britain in the i8th century and was in accord with the rationalistic
approach to religion of that century. The first Unitarian church opened in London in 1774. The
Unitarian Christianity preached by Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), a scientist and dissenting minister,
was based on a number of convictions including the notion of Jesus as man with unique and
miraculous powers; the all-powerful and all-knowing nature of God; the primacy of reason and
morals; scientific determinism, materialism and political reform. Around 1840, the theologian and
philosopher James Martineau (1805-1900) challenged Priestley's rationalism with a plea for deeper
feeling and a more intuitive faith. The Unitarians flourished at the end of the 19th and the beginning
of the 20th centuries, building a large number of new churches to house their increasingly large
congregations. They were also renowned for their social idealism, and their concept of humanism
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emphasizes the human condition and scientific progress. Victorian Unitarians include Elizabeth
Gaskell and her husband William, who was a Unitarian minister.

Unto This Last (1860-2)

Four essays on political economy by John Ruskin. They were intended to be part of a larger
treatise, but their publication in the Cornhill Magazine aroused so much hostility that the editor
(William Thackeray) discontinued them. The reason for the anger was that Ruskin (an art critic)
was, as it seemed to the public, stepping out of his professional function in order to attack the
predominant economic theory of trading relationships, which he was considered by the middle-
class public unqualified to do. The middle classes were inclined to believe that the subject had been
reduced to the clear elements of a science by the political economists and Utilitarian thinkers of the
first half of the I9th century - men such as Jeremy Bentham, David Ricardo, (1772-1823), Malthus,
James Mill (1773-1836) and John Stuart Mill. Ruskin pointed out that what was called ‘political
economy’ was really ‘commercial economy’ and that it was untrue since it omitted facts of human
nature, unjust since it unduly favoured the employing middle class and uncivilized since it omitted
the cultural values that ought to underlie wealth. He found space to praise Charles Dickens’s novel
Hard Times, itself an attack on Utilitarianism. In spite of the hostility and scorn of Ruskin’s
contemporaries, much of his thinking in these essays has been accepted by later sociologists and
economists.

Utilitarianism
A 19th-century political, economic and social doctrine which based all values on utility, i.e. the
usefulness of anything, measured by the extent to which it promotes the material happiness of the
greatest number of people. It is especially associated with Jeremy Bentham, at first a jurist
concerned with legal reform and later a social philosopher. Followers of the movement are thus
often called ‘Benthamites’ but Bentham’s disciple John Stuart Mill used the term ‘Utilitarians’.
Owing to their habit of criticizing social concepts and institutions on strictly rational tests, the
leaders of the movement were also known as Philosophical Radicals. Utilitarianism dominated 19th-
century social thinking, but it had all its roots in various forms of 18th-century rationalism. In
moral philosophy David Hume (1711-76) had a strong influence on Bentham by his assumption
that the supreme human virtue is benevolence, i.e. the disposition to increase the happiness of
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others. Psychologically, Bentham’s principle that humans are governed by the impulses to seek
pleasure and avoid pain derives from the associationism of David Hartley (1705-57). But Bentham
and his associates believed that the virtue of benevolence, and human impulses towards pleasure,
operate within social and economic laws which are scientifically demonstrable. Bentham accepted
Adam Smith’s reasoning in The Wealth of Nations (1776) that material prosperity is governed by
economic laws of supply and demand, the beneficial operation of which is only hindered by
governmental interference. Malthus, in his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), maintained that it
is mathematically demonstrable that population always tends to increase beyond the means of
subsistence, and David Ricardo (1772-1823), a friend of Bentham’s, applied Malthus’s principle to
wages, arguing that as the population increases wages will necessarily get lower, since the increase
is more rapid than that of the wealth available to support the workers. Smith, Malthus and Ricardo
were masters of what was called the science of political economy, and the inhuman fatalism with
which they endowed it caused to be known as the dismal science. However, it was not dismal for
the industrial middle class of employers, whose interests it suited; they were already ‘utilitarians’ by
self-interest and thus willing converts to the theory. Thus the operation of Utilitarianism in the
19th century was paradoxical. It liberated society from laws which were inefficient survivals from
the past (the Elizabethan Poor Laws) but it replaced them by laws that often operated with cold
inhumanity (eg. the O Poor Law of 1834). It reduced senseless government interference with
society but its concern with efficiency encouraged a bureaucratic civil service. It liberated the
employers but it was often unsympathetic to the interests of the employees. Its principle was
benevolence but its faith in reason often made it indifferent to individual suffering. The
inhumanity of the creed, and its indifference to cultural values unless they could be shown to be
materially useful, caused it to be vigorously attacked by leading writers between 1830 and 1870,
including Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, John Ruskin and Matthew Arnold. But perhaps its
sanest and most lucid critic was John Stuart Mill; though himself a Utilitarian to the end of life, he
saw the philosophical limitations of the movement and exposed them in his essays in 1838 on
Bentham and on Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) whom he admired as the father of the
opposing tendency of thought. Mill’s essay Utilitarianism (1863) emphasized that some kinds of
pleasure are better than others - a distinction Bentham failed to make - and that the highest virtue
in humanity is ‘the desire to be in unity with our fellow creatures’. Mill was aware, as Bentham had
not been, of the importance of the artistic imagination, in particular of poetry, in a civilization.
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Utopian literature
Sir Thomas More’s political and philosophical treatise Utopia (1516) introduced into the English
language the word ‘utopian’ (imaginary and ideal), and was the inspiration for a succession of
‘Utopias’ in English literature. The idea of inventing an imaginary country to be used as a ‘model’
by which to judge earthly societies originated, however, with More’s master, the Greek philosopher
Plato, who did the same in his dialogues Timaeus and the Republic. William Morris’s News From Nowhere
(1890) is a noteworthy socialist Utopia in which he describes a non-industrial society which has
much in common with his own beloved medieval ideal. It lacks a central government, legal,
monetary and class systems. Much Utopian literature from the i8th century onwards is satirical and
intended to give a warning of vicious tendencies in society rather than to exemplify ideals. Such is
the case with Samuel Butler’s anti-utopias: the satirical novel Erewhon (1872) and its sequel Erewhon
Revisited (1901) which characterizes many aspects of Victorian society, including its hypocrisy and
parental despotism. In the late I9th and early 2Oth centuries women writers produced a number of
Utopias in which the vision of an ideal world is set against the particular oppression of women.
Examples include Catherine Spence’s posthumously published Handfasted (written, 1879, published
1984) and the US writer Elizabeth Corbett’s New Amazonia: A Foretaste of the Future (1899). British
feminist Utopias of the period were concerned with furthering the cause of women’s suffrage.
‘Dystopia’ was first used by John Stuart Mill to suggest an imagined state which was undesirable.
However, every writer’s Utopian vision is subjective and the desirability of the ideal societies
imagined is often open to question, as in Edward Bellamy’s version of a socialist Utopia, Looking
Backward: 2000-1887 (1888), in which every individual is forced to join an ‘industrial army’. Morris’s
News from Nowhere was written in response to this version of an earthly paradise. Walter Besant’s
novel The Revolt of Man (1882) is an anti-feminist dystopia prompted by the debate surrounding the
‘New Woman’.

Wessex
The kingdom of the West Saxons from 6th century till the reign of Alfred at the end of the 9th century,
after which it developed into the kingdom of England. The capital was the town of Winchester in
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Hampshire and the area also included Dorset, Somerset, Wiltshire and Berkshire. The name of Wessex
was revived by the novelist and poet Thomas Hardy for his novels.

Wuthering Heights (1847)

A novel by Emily Bronte first published under the pseudonym Ellis Bell. The story is narrated by
two characters, Lockwood and Nelly Dean, who recount the tale of Heathcliff and his
involvement with the Earnshaw and Linton families. The arrival of the foundling Heathcliff
disrupts the lives of Catherine Earnshaw and her brother, Hindley. Catherine and Heathcliff
develop an intense bond, but Heathcliff overhears her saying to Nelly Dean that marrying him
would degrade her. He then leaves Wuthering Heights, returning three years later, by which time
Catherine has married Edgar Linton. In revenge, Heathcliff marries Edgar's sister, Isabella,
mistreating and brutalizing Hindley and his son, Hareton. Catherine dies shortly after giving birth
to a daughter, Cathy. After Edgar’s death, Cathy is lured to the Heights and subjected to
Heathcliff’s terrible will. At the end of the novel, Heathcliff dies and Cathy and Hareton are
united. Wuthering Heights has generated an enormous body of criticism, and has always been
recognized as a novel of great power and originality. Recent interpretations have focused on the
complex narrative structure, the novel’s treatment of temporarility, its transgression of
conventional sexual and moral codes, and its intense examination of the nature of desire.

Yellow Book

An illustrated quarterly review, 1894-7. It was a main organ of the arts during the period, and
although it was especially the voice of the Aesthetic Movement, it also published writers who did
not belong to this movement, eg. O Henry James.