The Victorian Realist Novel

Despite the merits of Victorian poetry and its committed and visionary non-fictional
prose, it is usually the Victorian novel which is identified with the age, and whose
authors are considered as the spokespeople of Victorian culture. In the decade between
1810 and 1820 a galaxy of talented novelists were born: 1811: William Thackeray; 1812:
Charles Dickens; 1815: Anthony Trollope; 1816: Charlotte Bronte; 1818: Emily Bronte
and 1819: George Eliot.
These figures were certainly not as radical as their European contemporaries
(Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Turgenev), and, basically, despite the social
criticism implicit or explicit in their novels, and their acute consciousness of the
contradictions and problems of their times, society is accepted without deep questioning.
It must be remembered that the Victorian novel, at least before the very end of the
period, was produced and distributed very differently from modern works of literature.
‘Three-decker’ or three-volume novels still proved extremely expensive, and tended to
be borrowed by the middle classes from lending libraries such as Mudie’s. Cheaper
serial publication of novels, typically with twenty monthly parts, was popularised by
Dickens, and the intense relationship and fever of anticipation which this generated with
the reader (somewhat like the television soap-opera causes in its devotees) was
succinctly summarised by Willkie Collins in his advice to authors: ‘Make them laugh,
make them cry, make them wait.’ It was only much later in the century that cheap
‘railway’ reprints of novels became available for a few shillings each.
Another great difference was the way in which these books were read: they were
often read aloud to the whole family in the parlour, as a form of entertainment; thus there
is a very acute sense of the speaking voice, of dramatic dialogue and motifs and
techniques from oral story-telling.
 Early in the Victorian Age there was a vogue for the so-called ‘social problem’ novel,
which dealt more or less directly with the turmoil of the 1830s and 1840s. The
‘Manchester’ novels by Mrs Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865), Charlotte Bronte’s friend and
biographer, are remarkable for their harsh portrait of industrial life. In a different fashion
Benjamin Disraeli, later to be Prime Minister, produced the ‘Young England’ trilogy,
including the celebrated image of two Britains: the rich and the poor. However, these
early social-problem novels tend to be a little didactic in their overall effect and it was
only with the advent of Dickens that a truly satisfying blend of social criticism, humour
and compassion appeared.
Another important early novelist was William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863),
whose masterpiece is Vanity Fair (1848), the tale of Becky Sharp and her adventures, a
brilliant satire on fashionable society.
Charles Dickens (1812-1870) stands out for his sheer energy and the comic breadth
of his creations, as well as for his humanity and social conscience (he might perhaps be
considered the conscience of Victorian Britain). Although some of his novels are a little
patchy, his achievement remains a towering one. Critics have had extreme difficulty in
putting their finger on the secret of his greatness, since his work seems to defy any
rational analysis, but the continuing popularity of his novels among people from all walks
of life testifies to his universal appeal.
The Bronte sisters (Charlotte, Emily and Anne) are a remarkable phenomenon.
Isolated from the literary life of the capital, brought up in a wild region of Yorkshire, they
evolved a uniquely expressive blend of Gothic and psychological insight in their novels.
Occasionally they strain the emotional limits of the novel and become simply
melodramatic, but their passionate sincerity is a rare quality in the Victorian Age.
 George Eliot (1819-1880), whose real name was Mary Ann Evans, followed on in the
great tradition of woman novelists (Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, the Bronte sisters).
Her outstanding feature was her skill in close observation; she lovingly reproduces rustic
mannerisms and displays a deep insight into life in the country or in the small-town
England, portraying its values and social system.
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) had a long career which embraced both poetry and the
novel. He has a rather fatalist point of view, outside the mainstream of Victorian
intellectual life.
Minor figures include George Meredith, who attempted to give the novel more
philosophical subtlety, although his style is perhaps a little mannered, his most important
work is The Egoist. (1879)
Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) wrote a comic sequence of novels (known as the
‘Barsetshire novels’) which are remarkable for their keen observation and humour. One
should mention the inspired nonsense of Lewis Carroll, whose Alice in Wonderland
(1871) has become enduring classics, loved by children and adults alike.
The fin de siècle mood of withdrawal from everyday reality and the pursuit of a higher
world of myth and art and imagination led to a taste for fictional romances, evident, for
example, in the short stories of Wilde. Robert Louis Stevenson considered fictional
romance as superior to the realistic novel, since it is impossible to capture ‘life itself’:
‘Life is monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt, and poignant; a work of art, in comparison, is
neat, finite, self-contained, rational and flowing.’ Stevenson’s idea of fiction as art was
quite opposed to that of aesthetes or decadents; he found it best expressed in adventure
stories, where human beings escape from the trivialities of social life and are caught up
in primitive and archetypal forms of action.
 Other instances of the darkening vision of late Victorian fiction are provided by the
evocation of fog-bound and Bohemian London in the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), and the sensational Gothic of Bram Stoker’s Dracula
(1897).

Realistic Fiction in Dickens and the Bronte Sisters

→ realism = an important trend in fiction

→ chronological and typological development of Victorian realistic fiction from the more
conventional picaresque species, in Dickens’s first novel, The Posthumous Papers of
the Pickwick Club, to the increasingly original coherence granted to the novels precisely
by their imaginative or poetical construction. This will prove the point made in the
philosophical/theory of literature piece by J.S.Mill, Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties,
about how true poetry transforms into inward/emotional truths the directly observable
outward circumstances and the matter-of-fact aspects of human experience – existence,
circumstance and whole environment(s), that make up the so-called theme of the
novels.
 → difference between the naked subject-matter of realism and the more complex,
indirect, poetic literary realism.
Literary realism employs straight narrative as a medium for conveying the organic
relationship between characters and their stories amalgamated by the imagination which
creates solid plot-threads.
Each fictional universe, which consists of the characters’ cast and the setting as
parts of the plot and of the voice that constitute narratological components of the whole,
recasts each theme anew when taking it up. For example, Dickens’s imagination
transformed the usual theme of the picaresque novel, when dealing with the
“perambulations, perils, travels, adventures, and sporting transactions of the
corresponding members” of the Pickwick Club. The four gentlemen who deambulate
from their safe London headquarters and embark upon an adventurous trip to discover
the jungle outside the heart of the Victorian good life give the writer the occasion to
communicate through a sentimental rather than simply satirical, and also humorous,
plot. Also, by comparison to the traditional picaresque, Dickens characterizes not a
single picaro, as was the convention of this literary species, but a foursome (a group of
four) protagonists; thus he created a species of “every man in his humour” realism, with
four times more psychology and more varied in its chance for adventure that the original
picaresque permitted.
Dickens ≈ just like a critical historian or philosopher, who criticises the injustices of
capitalist society as a whole and the hidden, scandalous life of the social underdogs.
→ the increase in sobriety and coherence.
 Dickens became the educator of Victorian fellow men through his combination of
every-day life themes.
→ a mature/full-fledged realistic novel, which has developed beyond the episodic
interest of the picaresque literary species, because it is devoted to themes that tend to
embrace universal facets of societies and human experience/existence
→ a realistic character attempts to transform outward circumstances into inward
stages of awareness and progress.