NINETEENTH CENTURY ENGLISH NOVEL

WEEK 3
 NINETEENTH CENTURY ENGLISH NOVEL

THE VICTORIAN NOVEL

•From the beginning, novel has tackled society for its theme: social
life and experience have always been the source from which it had
drawn its materials. In the Victorian period, there were three
important themes which shaped the novel.
•The depiction and analysis of society as a whole
•The adjustment of the individual to this society
•The Victorian society was formed and shaped by individuals. The
novel written in the Victorian period thus focused on the
“characters”, who would reflect the “Victorian values such as self-
help, self-dependency and success” on which society was based.
 NINETEENTH CENTURY ENGLISH NOVEL
• However, throughout the nineteenth century society
was in one way or another in a state of flux as every past
was invented and re-invented. As early as 1831, John
Stuart Mill, in The Spirit of the Age, was claiming: “the
first of the leading peculiarities of the present age is
that it is an age of transition. Mankind had outgrown
old institutions and doctrines, and have not yet
acquired new ones”. Barbara Denis also argues that with
the changes in institutions, the expansion of
professions, and the re-distribution of wealth, the
middle class grew and became more obviously
important.
 NINETEENTH CENTURY ENGLISH NOVEL

• The novel, which had always tended to reflect

society – itself in the hands of educated,
literate middle class – recorded this. The values
represented and endorsed in the novel are
those of the middle class, at least in the earlier
Victorian period. The ideal society to which the
characters aspire is bourgeois: success is
customarily seen in terms of money and the
status which accompanies it.
 NINETEENTH CENTURY ENGLISH NOVEL
Some characteristics of the Victorian novel
A- Structure
1. Most of the novel in the 19th century trace a progress: a
chronologically e.g. from the birth to death or marriage, a moral or
psychological progress from transgression/wrong choice to
redemption/reward/punishment, a progress from mystification to
enlightenment.
2. The time span of the 19th century novel is very long: for example, it
takes 10 years or 20 years with a definite beginning and ending,
stressing a sense of completeness. Thus, there was a linear progress
in the plot.
3. The present time is important through the technique of realism.
4. Conventional chapters are liked. Life is seen as a series of clearly
marked stages e.g birth, school time, marriage, job, and death.
 NINETEENTH CENTURY ENGLISH NOVEL
B- Characterization
1. The 19th-century Victorian novel represented a stable, flat and
sharply-differentiated character. The characters are well-defined,
determined and finished with certain tangible boundaries.

2. Therefore, there is a great interest in solidly detailed physical

description of what Virginia Woolf argues outward appearance,
clothes s/he wears, the salary s/he gets, the rent s/he pays and so
on, to construct a stable and well-known character.

3. There is a great deal of concern with moral development in line

with traditional conventions of society e.g religious observance,
good work as in Evangelicalism, obedience to norms of society and
so on.
 NINETEENTH CENTURY ENGLISH NOVEL
4. There is a sense of social determinism in which
characters are largely constructed by their society. The
ideology, culture, religion and other relevant manners of
society have a great impact on the way an individual
perceives life, reality and meaning.

5. The use of certain symbolism and imagery is also

important in the way characters are formed. Symbols and
imagery, attributed to characters, have their fixed meanings
e.g. Mr Ramsay is described by his son James Ramsay as a
kitchen table in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.
 NINETEENTH CENTURY ENGLISH NOVEL
C- Authorial Point-of-View

1. The Victorian writers use an authorial point of view or

omniscient narrator that makes meaning clear, understandable
and knowable by the reader. The narrator acts in accord with
the norm of the writer and explains and comments on
everything as much as possible as Wayne Booth write in his
book Rhetoric of Fiction.

2. The writer dos not distance himself/herself from the work,

from character and from events s/he represents. This narrative
technique does not make problematical life, meaning and
reality.
 NINETEENTH CENTURY ENGLISH NOVEL

D- Language
1. Words are reliable, transparent of depicting
reality as they are. The writers, like Balzac and
George Eliot used words in their realistic
meaning. Language guarantees meaning.

2. Metaphor, symbols and images are employed

to express certainty, rational and chronological
aspects of human nature and experience.
 NINETEENTH CENTURY ENGLISH NOVEL
E- Realism
•The Victorian age is also an age of photography or an age
of realism, in which art holds up mirror to reality as it is.
Realism is simply a careful description of reality and
meaning, suggesting clarity, precision and completeness, or
as George Levine reminds us that “realism is a mode that
depends heavily on our commonsense expectation that
there are direct connections between word and meaning” ,
or as Michael argues, “realism meant a type of minute
description or simply the dull opposite of the imaginative
in fiction”.
 NINETEENTH CENTURY ENGLISH NOVEL

• Thus, the writer depicts everyday things as

they are actually and historically when the
narrator acts like a camera between the
objects and meaning. The realist novel, like
fabliaux in the Middle Ages, the emergence of
a prosperous urban middle class, the
complexities of their lives in the real world.
 NINETEENTH CENTURY ENGLISH NOVEL
F- Middle Class Value
•The 19th-century novel was the product of middle
class. In the Victorian period, a large number of novels
were produced on account of two reasons:
•a) the population of Britain grew enormously in the
19th century, particularly in the big cities
•b) the Industrial Revolution expanded and
strengthened the position of middle class, who made
up the majority of the novel-reading public.
 NINETEENTH CENTURY ENGLISH NOVEL
• Since the writer wrote for money, the novel often represented
middle class, “the values, prejudices and assumptions” of the
middle class life (Michael Wheeler, English Fiction of the
Victorian Period (London and New York: Longman, 1994), p. 5.
In this respect, there was a common ground between a writer
and his readers in the sense that the writer wrote in line with
the wishes, expectations, tendencies and hope of the readers:
simply, the writer satisfied his/her readers. In relation to this
common ground, moreover, the readers expected to find
answer to their problems and conflicts, along with satisfaction
in their lives as in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and George
Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss.
 NINETEENTH CENTURY ENGLISH NOVEL

G- Entertainment and Education

•As Kenneth Graham points out, therefore, the
novel becomes primarily a mean for
“entertainment” for the Victorian Middle class
readers, particularly for women, who wanted to
spend their spare time by reading the novels
which would satisfy them. The second function
of the novel is used as “a vehicle for moral
teaching” in line with the norms of the
Evangelical movement.
 NINETEENTH CENTURY ENGLISH NOVEL
• “Moralism in Victorian fiction is conveyed largely
through the commentary of authorial narrators and
through judgements enacted in the plot, particularly in
the endings of the novel” as in the case of Richardson’s
Pamela and Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, in which Pamela
protects her morality, chastity and virtue by marrying her
boss, Mr. B, although he attempts several time to seduce
her, while Maggie Tulliver obeys her brother Tom in her
relationship with Philip Wakem and breaks off her
sentimental relationship with him, since Tom considers
her relationship immoral and unacceptable by his family
with the idea that it will defame the honour of their
family.
 NINETEENTH CENTURY ENGLISH NOVEL
H- The Social problem novel or social documentation novel
•As mentioned above, the Victorian period is full of crisis, so that the
social problem novel represented “conflicts between the classes,
between master and man, or between male seducer and female
victim” as well as the impact of the Industrial Revolution and reforms
in society. In addition, the Victorian novel documents “personal
relationships, courtship, marriage and family life” as in Dickens’
novels.
 NINETEENTH CENTURY ENGLISH NOVEL
• On the other hand, the Victorian novel also represents
the theme of “imprisonment” as in many novels such
as Emily’s Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and Eliot’s The
Mill on the Floss, in which both female writers
represent their female characters as making radical
attempts to free from “a confining and… vindictively
judgemental religious [and moral] scheme”, since “the
physical confinement of the heroine often reflects her
sense of spiritual imprisonment in a hostile
environment which is shaped and controlled by men”
 NINETEETH CENTURY ENGLISH NOVEL

REFERENCES
•Abrams, M. H. and Others, eds., The Norton Anthology of
English Literature, vol. 2 (New York: W. W. Norton and
Company, 1979).

• Baker, William, ed., Critics on George on Eliot: Reading Literary

Criticism (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1973).

•Blake, Andrew, Reading Victorian Fiction: The Cultural Context

and Ideological Context of the Nineteenth-Century Novel
(London: Macmillan, 1989).
 NINETEETH CENTURY ENGLISH NOVEL

• Bloom, Harold, ed., Bloom’s Guides: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane

Eyre (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2007).
• ----------------------, Bloom’s Guides Charles Dickens’s A Tale of
Two Cities (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2007).
• ----------------------, Bloom’s Guides: Jane Austen’s Pride and
Prejudice (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 2004).
• Brantlinger, Patrick and William B. Thesing, A Companion to
the Victorian Novel (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002).
• David, Deirdre, The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian
Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
 NINETEETH CENTURY ENGLISH NOVEL

• Dennis, Barbara, The Victorian Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2000).
• Ford, Boris, ed., The Pelican Guide to English Literature from
Dickens to Hardy, vol. 6 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982).
• Michie, Elsie B., ed., Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre: A Casebook
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
• Rosenberg, Brian, ‘Character and Contradiction in Dickens’,
Nineteenth Century Literature, 47 (1992-93), 145-163.
• Watt, Ian, ed., The Victorian Novel: Modern Essays in criticism
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971).
• Wheeler, Michael, English Fiction of the Victorian Period
(London: Longman, 1994).
NINETEETH CENTURY ENGLISH NOVEL

THANK YOU