The Victorian Age

Literary background (262-)

The Victorian Age represents one of the most productive, rich, and controversial periods of English
literature: the main genre was the novel, which perfectly embodied the moral values, the religious
beliefs, and the many contradictions of the period. Victorian Age literary production was pervaded
by two main trends:
 the Victorian Compromise – in which the authors aimed to instruct and entertain their readers
without bitterly criticising the world they belonged to, and which was characterised by the
attempt to combine a realistic representation of the problems of the society with an
adventurous tone and a moral and didactic aim; writers do not question radically the contrast
and hypocrisies of the Victorian age (the respectability of the middle class is in sharp contrast
with the condition of children in workhouses, in particular Dickens describes their conditions,
but he teaches the readers to believe in progress: at the end the children will all have a better
position within the society); under an optimistic view of society (which derives from the success
of the middle class), they cover up the appalling conditions of women, children and the working
classes;
 the Anti-Victorian reaction – whose authors strongly criticised the values of their era and
exposed all of its contradictions, influenced both by the spread of Darwin’s evolutionary theory
movement, that gave importance to the realistic representation of the world without personal
judgements, and Positivism (a philosophy based on the idea that human knowledge can be
gained only through experience and that reality can be explained through the use of pure
mathematics): they tended to see life from a pessimistic point of view and aimed at
representing it in an objective and non-idealised way. They start to criticise and do not accept
the contradictions or happy endings, they concentrate on the appalling tragic experiences of
the poor, they’re guided by a pessimistic view: Dickens thinks that if you work hard you can
succeed – it comes from Puritanism –, but writers of this trend could not cope with this tradition
anymore.

The triumph of the novel (263)

Novel triumphed as a literary genre in the Victorian Age because the number of people who were
able to read increased; books, although they were still considered quite expensive, became both
affordable for more people and borrowable form ‘circulating libraries’ (private institutions that
allowed their members to borrow books), so they were easily portable objects and could be easily
read anywhere; novel satisfied the readers’ searching for entertaining, realistic, and complex plots;
and to reduce their cost, novels were often published in instalments in newspapers (they had to
comply to the requirements of serialisation).

Form a stylistically and thematically Victorian novels are characterised by common features such
as:
 Novels tend to satisfy the needs of their readers, who want to be entertained, instructed, and
confronted with complex, but not embarrassing issues (caused by the Victorian Compromise),
the reader’s attention must be maintained alive;
 Authors often see themselves as being entitled to make their readers reflect on the
incongruences and complexities of the world in which they live;
 Novels have a clear moral aim and writers need to be exemplars of virtue in the public life;
 Novels represent human conditions in a realistic way;
 Plots are complex, usually adventurous, rich in characters, unexpected events, surprises, and
have sub-plots;
 Stories are usually told by a 3rd person omniscient narrator, who is the spokesperson of the
author and acts like God by explicitly judging characters and guiding the readers’
understanding;
 Novels are usually structured in three volumes (thus called ‘triple-deckers’).

The moralistic and didactic aim of the Victorian novel was to be like ‘sermons’: the writer must
please by teaching, even though a sermon isn’t the most entertaining fact, the person who follows
it does it because there’s an aim. In the first part of the Victorian age authors is compared with a
clergyman, and has to give the best image of his society, even with its problems (not the
embarrassing ones).

Victorian literature includes the prose works of some of the leading figures of English prose-writing,
whose reading public is the middle class, which has gained more power within the society: these
authors, such as Charles Dickens, the Brontë Sisters, Thomas Hardy or Henry James, strongly
contributed to transforming the novel into an internationally known literary genre. Early Victorian
Novelists

The first phase of Victorian literature included the works of writers who used prose to make a
realistic portrait of the society in which they lived

Early Victorian Novelists (264-265)

Charles Dickens, the Tragicomic Novel – Charles Dickens began his writing career as a journalist
and then became a famous writer who produced a huge number of novels, which were published
initially as instalments in magazines and then as complete books. His masterpieces (such as
Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Hard Times, and Great Expectations) used a realistic narration to
depict the living conditions of the poor in Victorian England (and often followed the life and
adventures of a single character): he provided books that mirrored the lower middle class (which
was the reading public) and the incidents of their lives, so, they could see themselves as
protagonists, so they were empathically connected to the story. Well-off readers belonging to the
upper-classes were also interested in his novels because in their characters they felt taking care of
poor people, they were interested in their life and began to feel towards them a humanitarian
feeling (this is the most important goal that Dickens had): they were moved by this stories (poverty
was seen as a crime during the Victorian Age because the idea of a self-made man and working
hard to get a better life has always influenced the English population, the Puritan ethic – Dickens
embodies himself the self-made man, he climbed the social ladder); upper-classes enjoyed this
readings also because of the better ending, which soothed their conscience (it gave them the
idea that even though there were problems, people could find better lives). Dickens' novels are
mainly tragicomic: in them the author denounced the evils of the Victorian world using a comic tone
(which acquired the function of a strong demystifying instrument) by describing stereotyped
characters who had hilarious features.

The Brontë Sisters – The three Brontë sisters didn’t fall easily into any of the traditional
classification of Victorian literature; Emily and Charlotte were considered the most talented of the
three sisters and published two of the most famous English novels of all time, respectively:
 Wuthering Heights – Emily wrote an extraordinary narrative experiment whose plot centred
around the love between Heathcliff, a Byronic hero, and Catherine, a woman who was torn
between passion and social conventions (it explored universal themes such as love, death,
immortality, and passion);
 Jane Eyre – Charlotte wrote a novel which evolved around a strong and passionate female
character, Jane, who fell in love with a mysterious man called Rochester. After a series of
complex events, Jane managed to find happiness and to marry Rochester (introducing the
theme of the exploration of womanhood).
These two novels represented an alternative to the triumph of mainstream Victorian novels: rather
than focusing on social issues, the works of the Brontë sisters explored the world of passion and
feelings.
 Late Victorian Novelists (265-267)
In the second phase of Victorian literature, criticism became stronger and realism more evident.
The writers belonging to this phase did not accept the Victorian Compromise any longer but used
prose to denounce the evils of society without any reticence: in this phase the dark side of the
Victorian Age was made visible by novels that centred around the idea of the “divided self” and of
the duality of human nature. Other problematic themes tackled by late Victorian novelists were
the meaning of life in a world dominated by blind faith in progress (positivism), the role of moral
values in life and the meaning of colonization: what late Victorian writers rejected about early
Victorian literature was mainly its optimistic view of man and progress, which they contrasted
through the adoption of a pessimistic point of view or through aestheticism.

Lewis Carroll and Children's novels – One of the favourite themes of Victorian literature was
childhood, shown not just by the fact that Victorian novels often focused on children and their
lives, but also by the fact that some authors of this period wrote their novels for children: this is the
case of Lewis Carrol, whose Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is still considered one of the
classics of world children's literature. His novel is difficult to classify, mainly due to the fact that it
can be read in many different ways: as a children's story, a piece of pure nonsense for adults, or
simply as a masterpiece for all ages and all readers.

Robert Louis Stevenson and the 'double' – The literary production of the second half of the 19th
century was characterised by a growing sense of dissatisfaction, anxiety, and fear. One of the
authors who best reflected this trend in Victorian literature was the Scottish author Robert Louis
Stevenson, whose masterpiece was The strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a short novel that
explored the theme of the double (the idea that every human being has a double nature – it
embodies the Victorian Compromise), revolving around the actions of the respectable Dr Jekyll,
who finds the way to transform himself into his other self, Mr Hyde, a creature pervaded by the
instincts that Victorian moralism tried to repress.

Oscar Wilde and Aestheticism – The same theme was explored by another key figure of late
Victorian literature, Oscar Wilde, whose The Picture of Dorian Gray was perceived as immoral
and scandalous immediately after its publication; it deals with the story of a rich, beautiful young
man, Dorian, who sacrifices his soul to maintain his youth and beauty: only a secret portrait of
him will bear all the signs of time. Dorian leads a life of pleasure, sin, crime, and corruption, but his
scandalous lifestyle is hidden by the fact that he remains young and beautiful, while the image in
the portrait becomes old and ugly. The story ends with Dorian stabbing the portrait, which
provokes his own death. Wilde’s novel has become a classic of all time and is considered a
meditation not only on the relationship between art and life, but also on the link between the
good and the bad in man's soul; it’s considered the manifesto of English aestheticism, an
artistic and literary movement which developed in late Victorian England and was based on the
principle that art needs no kind of external or moral justification (“art for art's sake” was Wilde’s
motto, believing in the cult of beauty inspired by Pre-Raphaelites).

Thomas Hardy and pessimism – Another critical voice in the panorama of late Victorian literature
was Thomas Hardy, whose novels were set in an imaginary rural world pervaded by a deep
sense of pessimism and tragic fatalism, evident in Tess of The D'Urbervilles, a novel that
followed the life of its eponymous heroine, Tess, whose tragic life seemed to be dominated by an
indifferent and dark fate (Hardy's world of values represented the exact opposite of optimism).
The colonial novel – The Victorian Age was also the time when British colonial expansionism
reached its climax in terms of power, extension and organisation: its issues and consequences
started to be explored in literature, especially at the end of the Victorian Age: the theme of
colonialism was tackled by an author who played the role of “outsider” within the panorama of late-
Victorian literature: Rudyard Kipling, whose works explored the encounter and the complex
relationship between the English and the Indians in colonial India. Kipling's novels, such as Kim,
showed a clear belief in the idea that the British had the right and the duty to use their own
system of values to civilize the Indians. Another of his masterpieces is the Jungle Book, a two-
volume book of short stories for children in which the world of childhood is mixed with magic and
the luxuriant setting of the jungle.

Other prose genres – The novel was not the only prose genre developed by the Victorians:
literary criticism was one of the most interesting examples of prose writing of the Victorian Age
and greatly contributed to shaping the literary taste of the era (the most famous literary critics were
Matthew Arnold and John Stuart Mill); scientific writing is another genre of Victorian prose, its
most significant example was Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which explained his
theory of natural selection (also known as evolution) and proposed a brand-new reading of the
history of mankind.

The American Renaissance (267)

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The 19 century saw the emergence of the literary tradition of the United States, whose authors
became increasingly independent of their European counterparts in terms of style, themes, and
narrative techniques: it’s a period of particular creativity and productivity also known as the
American Renaissance. The novel that inaugurated this new trend in American literature was The
Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, a novel set in America's Puritan past, examining concepts
of sin, guilt, and the redeeming power of love: it offered a universal and timeless analysis of the
individual conscience, the pressure applied by a strict moral code (such as the Puritan one), the
cultural and ideological roots of America and its values.
Another masterpiece of American literature was Moby Dick, by Herman Melville, a unique novel
offering an astonishing variety of styles, bringing the reader a story, a philosophical allegory of
life and death, a discussion of fate, economic expansion, moral values, struggle between man.
It is also worth mentioning Mark Twain, whose novels are masterpieces of humourism and focus
on the process of growing up of young male characters who are torn between respect of social
conventions and freedom: Tom Sawyer, for instance, is a novel representing rebellious youth and
celebrating its untameable freedom.
Unlike Twain, whose works were deeply rooted in the tradition of American life, Henry James
wrote The Portrait of a Lady, a subtle analysis of the encounter between two worlds, Europe, and
America, exploring the deepest recesses of human psychology.