English 211: Fiction
Lecture 3: The Victorian Novel
The Victorians
The "Victorian" Age was named after Queen Victoria, whose reign lasted from 1837 until 1901 (she inherited the throne at age 18). The Victorians, unlike the people of any other time, had a sense of their time as an era of transition: they saw themselves as coming out of the "medieval" tradition and moving into the "modern" tradition. The medieval tradition was one in which the civil and religious were inseparable; the King was the head of the Church; the Church and the government demanded adherence to a single doctrine; there was a rigid and fixed social and economic system.
Movement away from that system had, of course, begun years before, but the Victorians had a sense of destiny, even of mission about it. Of course, change doesn't make everyone comfortable; with change comes a lot of upheaval. William Thackeray wrote,
It was only yesterday, but what a gulf between now and then! Then was the old world. Stage-coaches, more or less swift, riding-horses, pack-horses, highway-men, knights in armour, Norman invaders, Roman legions, Druids, Ancient Britons painted blue, and so forth--all these belong to the old period. I will concede a halt in the midst of it, and allow that gunpowder and printing tended to modernise the world. But your railroad starts the new era, and we of a certain age belong to the new time and the old one. We are of the time of chivalry as well as the...age of steam.
The "railroad" Thackeray mentions is the symbol of the Industrial Revolution, which by 1830 was well underway in England. The Industrial Revolution changed everything about life in Europe and changed it fast. Swept away was the old agricultural and feudal way of life, in which a man could farm a small plot of land that his family had farmed for generations, go to church on Sundays and see all of his neighbors week after week, pay his rents to the same landlord each year for his entire life (and know that it would be the same landlord or his son that his children would pay after he died and they inherited his tenancy), and never go more than 20 miles from his home. Replacing that way of life was a new, urban life in which factories, mechanization, and constant change were predominant. As the old farms were mechanized, their farmers were displaced from the land and fled to the cities looking for work. They were employed in the new factories. As railroads crisscrossed England (and the Continent), people and products were no longer bound to the places where they had been born. Change and progress became more important--and pervasive--than stability and tradition. For some, this was good; for others, it was disastrous. Edward Bulwer Lytton wrote in 1833, "...old opinions, feelings--ancestral customs and institutions are crumbling away, and both the spiritual and temporal worlds are darkened by change...The age then is one of destruction!...Miserable would be our lot were it not also an age of preparation for reconstructing."
(For more information on the details of the Industrial Revolution, click on the Links page.)
Writers of that time sound remarkably like the writers of our time in their complaints. W. R. Greg, writing in 1875, said in an essay called "Life at High Pressure, "...the most salient characteristic of life in this latter portion of the 19th century is its SPEED." People felt, Greg says, as if they were living "without leisure and without pause--a life of haste--above all a life of excitement, such as haste inevitably involves--a life filled so full...that we have no time to reflect where we have been and whither we intend to go...still less what is the value, and the purpose, and the price of what we have seen, and done, and visited." Victorian novelist George Eliot complained that "even idleness is eager now..." And Frances Cobbe, writing in 1864, writes of "That constant sense of being driven--not precisely like 'dumb' cattle, but cattle who must read, write, and talk more in twenty-four hours than twenty-four hours will permit..."
Victorian philosophy was undergoing the same upheaval as Victorian social and economic life. Theories about life, ethics, religion, and philosophy itself changed from day to day. The Victorians, however, were generally certain that the Truth existed and could be discovered. They believed in the power of reason and, despite their failure to arrive at any lasting or universal conclusions themselves, were certain that it could be done, and that they were paving the way for such a discovery.
Some reacted to this fluidity with optimism and flexibilty; other with pessimism and rigidity. These are the same attitudes we see today: some see the future as a field of endless, mostly good possibilities; others see it as a minefield through which we cannot pass without disaster. In the Victorian era, some saw all of the change as growth and progress, and predicted the outcome would be Utopia; others saw it as a disintegration of the social and moral order, and predicted that the outcome would be destruction.
Among the Victorian middle classes, the latter feeling often was predominant--ironically, since the middle classes were those driving the changes of the Industrial Revolution. Their fears helped to create rigid social and moral attitudes that remained strong until around 1870. The Victorians are famous for their complacent certainty that their way of life was the best--and not just the best, but the most morally sound. Economic success was often equated, illogically and incorrectly, with goodness. The use of force against "ignorant natives" in other countries they wished to conquer was considered completely justified, since they felt they were bringing "civilisation" to the "savages." Even at home in England, many Victorians felt that it was their duty to monitor the behavior of their neighbors, friends, and relatives and their right to pass judgment and make "helpful" comments on that behavior.
The essence of Victorian morality can be summed up in the term "respectability." A person who was respectable was sober, thrifty, clean, tidy, well-mannered, respectful of the law, honest in personal and business affairs, and above all, chaste. A respectable person was often "earnest"--that is, opposed to vanity and frivolity, and dutifully zealous in pursuing worthwhile personal and social goals.
The Victorians exalted the family. The home was considered the source of virtue and peace, and the woman's role was to maintain it in that function. Women were idealized as the protectors of spirituality. Men had to go out into a laissez-faire business world, in which honesty and morality were not just a luxury but a weakness; every day, their labors led them further from virtue. Their sole refuge was their home, where their wives would gently help them back onto the path of goodness and integrity, and their children would allow them to feel the "softer" emotions of love and generosity.
This concept of gender roles was extended to sex, as well: women, as chaste spiritual beings--angels, almost--were not expected to enjoy sex. Men were physical creatures whose needs had to be fulfilled, and it was merely one of a wife's more distasteful jobs. One marriage manual of the time advised that the woman should try to make the fulfillment of her "conjugal duty" more bearable by thinking of the Queen. Men were advised to think of sex as a physical function--and to think of it as little as possible. Talking about sex was considered in the worst of taste. Thus, in houses bursting with children, sex was never discussed. (The fact that this created unrealistic expectations of both men and women is reflected in several statistics of the time: in 1851, 42,000 illegitimate children were born in England; by 1850, there were at least 50,000 prostitutes known to the police in England and Scotland, 8,000 of them in London alone.)
The Victorians expected their art to reflect their social values. They considered that a novel written without a clear moral, in which the good were rewarded and the bad were punished, set a dangerous example and had the power to corrupt the fragile moral order.
As you can imagine, the Victorians disliked the Romantics; they felt that the Romantic poets had carried the idea of "subjectivism" to an unhealthy extreme. The idea that any individual's perceptions carried more weight than the social order seemed dangerous to them. In fact, although the commercial spirit of the age led many people to question the value of art, literature was considered by many Victorians to be a powerful tool in fighting the decline of moral and social standards. Matthew Arnold wrote, "Poetry is the criticism of life." He meant that art is the model of what life should ideally be; its function is to set an example for proper conduct in private and public life. Generally, speaking, the Victorian audience did not appreciate subtlety; they wanted a lesson and they wanted it spelled out clearly.
This is not to say that all Victorian novelists blindly accepted Victorian values or standards. In fact, novelists such as Charles Dickens were ruthless in exposing and satirizing the excesses and hypocrisies of Victorian England. But while they might despise the extremes to which the Victorian culture had gone ("earnest" can easily become "self-righteous," for example), few of the Victorian writers argued with their society's basic assumptions about class and virtue.
The Victorian Novel
First and foremost, let me apologize for leaving Jane Austen off the reading list for this class. I thought long and hard about this. Austen's work is an important part of English literature, and her novels are wonderful. If the class had lasted another two weeks, I certainly would have included her. In terms of the history of the novel, she is not as important as some other writers, but her work deserves mention: she wrote during the Romantic era, but her novels prefigure the Victorian novels that would come later, in that she presents a realistic picture of society and then exposes its weaknesses. Austen drew her characters from the world she knew--the world of the country gentry--and limited herself to their social and family lives. The drama of these books takes place on a small stage: "two inches of ivory," as Austen put it. But they are anything but simple. Austen ruthlessly satirizes not only the sentimental romances which were popular in her time, but the self-importance and pride of her own class. As Dorothy Van Ghent points out, that "two inches of ivory...is in substance an elephant's tusk; it is a savagely probing instrument as well as a masterpiece of refinement."
The Victorian novel proper is another animal altogether, and one of its chief characteristics is that it is long. Henry James called Victorian novels "loose baggy monsters," but most of them were tightly and carefully constructed. Victorian novelists were most often concerned with the role of human beings in society and their relationship to manners, morals, and money. They mostly preferred to use contemporary, rather than historical, settings and characters.
From the 1830s on, middle-class readership grew: better technology allowed books to be printed more inexpensively; lending libraries became more widespread; and literacy rates rose. Thus, increasingly, the Victorian novel dealt with the middle class. But the novel was still a controversial form. It was regarded by many as dangerous, because it portrayed the lives of thieves, prostitutes, and immoral men, and might be a negative influence on readers--who should, many felt, be spending their time on religious reading. Thus, novels were banned altogether in some homes and libraries as late as the 1890s.
Neverthless, novels grew more and more popular. Often, they were serialized--i.e., printed chapter by chapter in weekly or monthly magazines. This boosted the circulation of the magazines in which they were printed; after the serial ended, the novel (if it had been popular) would be published in three-volume form. Most of Dickens' novels were published in this way.
Charles Dickens
When reading any of Dickens's novels, especially David Copperfield, which is the most autobiographical, it is helpful to know something about his life. For a biographical sketch of Dickens, see Dickens: A Brief Biography, by David Cody. If you have time for a bit more reading (quite a bit!), the best full-length biography of Dickens is still Edgar Johnson's Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph.
Dickens was raised in comfortable circumstances and had a happy childhood. He loved school and read enthusiastically. But when he was 12, his father, John, was imprisoned for debt. The rest of the family went to live in Marshalsea Prison with him, but Charles was sent to work in a blacking factory to work off his father's debts. He worked 10-hour days under cruel conditions for nearly a year. The boy who showed him how to do his job was named Bob Fagin, and Dickens borrowed his name years later when he wrote Oliver Twist.
Eventually, an aunt died and bequeathed John Dickens the money to pay his debts. But Dickens' mother did not remove him from the factory for several months longer. Charles bitterly resented this. His father finally arranged for him to go to the Wellington House Academy, whose sadistic headmaster and dispirited teachers inspired Mr. Creakle's Establishment in David Copperfield.
Dickens' childhood experiences inspired his writing; Oliver Twist is an indictment of the Poor Laws, and David Copperfield is his most autobiographical novel.
If you'd like more information on any of the topics covered in this lecture, go to the Links page. Enjoy!
Some of the information in this lecture derives from:
1. The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in English, eds. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar
2. The Victorian Frame of Mind, Walter E. Houghton
3. Victorian People and Ideas, Richard D. Altick
4. The Oxford Anthology of English Literature: Victorian Prose and Poetry, eds. Lionel Trilling and Harold Bloom
5. "On Pride and Prejudice," Dorothy Van Ghent, in the Norton Critical Edition of Pride and Prejudice
6. The English Novel: A Panorama, Lionel Stevenson
7. An Introduction to the English Novel, Arnold Kettle
8. Dickens the Novelist, Sylvere Monod
9. Dickens the Novelist, F.R. and Q.D. Leavis
