BLOQUE 3 - VICTORIAN ERA

1. VICTORIAN NOVEL
MAIN LITERARY TRENDS
● Realism: finished with the exploitation of imagination of the romanticism
● Didacticism: poetry as a criticism of life.
● Aestheticism: “Art for art’s sake” (decadence)

The main publishers were concerned with maintaining morality, they only published what
they considered moral, what they could read in family, reunions, parties, meetings… what
they could read outloud. Aim to maintain didacticism.
There was a kind of connection between authors, readers, and publishers, in which the
figure of the publisher was key. The market was very important, and publishers decided what
to introduce into the public sphere.
Formal features
- narrator: most were omniscient
- plots: used to be complex, because many of the novels were serialised. They had to
make long narratives to publish them by parts, normally 3 volumes. This type of
publication permitted the writer to modify the stories based on the reaction of the
public.
- characters: variety depending on the writer, but in the second half of the period we
observe an increase in complexity and psychology on the characters.
The novel variety
● The “Condition of England Question” (social problems)
○ Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens.
● The satirists
○ William Thackeray – Vanity Fair.
● Romanticism revisited.
○ Emily Brontë – Wuthering Heights
○ Charlotte Brontë – Jane Eyre
● The intellectual / psychological novel.
○ George Eliot – Silas Marner, Middlemarch.
● Tragic vision and the regional novel.
○ Thomas Hardy – Tess of the d'Urbervilles.
● Lewis Carroll – Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
● Decadence and horror
○ Robert Louis Stevenson – The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
○ Oscar Wilde – The Portrait of Dorian Gray.
○ Bram Stoker – Dracula
 BLOQUE 3 - VICTORIAN ERA

CHARLES DICKENS
Dickens gave great relevance to his biographical background throughout his novels. The
recurrent themes presented were: prisons (both literally and symbolically), attacks on the
injustice of social institutions, and the inequalities between the rich and the poor.

MAIN WORKS
● First novels ("light-hearted phase": comedy and melodrama).
○ The Pickwick Papers (1836-1837)
○ Oliver Twist (1837-8)
○ Nicholas Nickleby (1838-9)
○ The Old Curiosity Shop; Barnaby Rudge (1840-1841)
● Middle phase: comedy and melodrama deepen into a new intensity
○ Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-1844).
○ Christmas Books: A Christmas Carol (1843)
○ The Cricket on the Hearth (1846)
● Mature works
○ Dombey and Son (1846-1848)
○ David Copperfield (1849-1850)
○ Bleak House (1852-1853)
○ Hard Times (1854)
○ Little Dorrit (1855-1857)
○ A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
○ Great Expectations (1860-1861)
○ Our Mutual Friend (1864-1865)

➢ HARD TIMES FOR THESE TIMES (1854)

The publication was weekly serialised from 1 April to 12 August, 1854 in Household
Words (Dickens's own magazine). Dickens took as model Mrs Gaskell's Ruth (1853).
Setting:
- Coketown, Preston (Lancashire)
Main characters:
- Thomas Gradgrind – utilitarianism-positivism
- Josiah Bounderby – social mobility
- Louisa Gradgrind + Tom Gradgrind + Cecilia Jupe – childhood and education
- Stephen Blackpool – honesty and integrity
- Rachael – moral purity and the image of “Victorian angel”
- Bitzer – perfect product of the utilitarian-positivistic system
Structure:
- 3 volumes: Sowing + Reaping + Garnering
- Opposition between clock (mechanical time), and the progress of the seasons
(natural time).
 BLOQUE 3 - VICTORIAN ERA

Themes:
- Rationalistic system of education that produces machines rather than human
beings.
- Utilitarianism applied to education.
- the failures of this system were Louisa, Tom and Sissy.
- The Industrial revolution: social inequalities, towns, factories, working
conditions, trade unions.
- The mechanisation of human beings by industrialisation
- Opposition fact vs fancy: Coketown and the circus
- Importance for the development of the human being.
- Importance of artistic endeavour: role of fiction. o
- The Woman Question:
- The status of women.
- Compassion, moral purity, and emotional sensitivity as ways of
counteracting the mechanising effects of industrialisation.
- Unhappy marriages & divorce (autobiographical element)