Victorian England

Essay submitted by Mark Shuler

The Victorian era, from the coronation of Queen Victoria in 1837 until her death in

1901, was an era of several unsettling social developments that forced writers more

than ever before to take positions on the immediate issues animating the rest of

society. Thus, although romantic forms of expression in poetry and prose continued to

dominate English literature throughout much of the century, the attention of many

writers was directed, sometimes passionately, to such issues as the growth of English

democracy, the education of the masses, the progress of industrial enterprise and the

consequent rise of a materialistic philosophy, and the plight of the newly industrialized

worker. In addition, the unsettling of religious belief by new advances in science,

particularly the theory of evolution and the historical study of the Bible, drew other

writers away from the immemorial subjects of literature into considerations of problems

of faith and truth.

Nonfiction

The historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, in his History of England (5 volumes,

1848-1861) and even more in his Critical and Historical Essays (1843), expressed the

complacency of the English middle classes over their new prosperity and growing

political power. The clarity and balance of Macaulay's style, which reflects his practical

familiarity with parliamentary debate, stands in contrast to the sensitivity and beauty

of the prose of John Henry Newman. Newman's main effort, unlike Macaulay's, was to

draw people away from the materialism and skepticism of the age back to a purified

Christian faith. His most famous work, Apologia pro vita sua (Apology for His Life, 1864),

describes with psychological subtlety and charm the basis of his religious opinions and

the reasons for his change from the Anglican to the Roman Catholic church.

Similarly alienated by the materialism and commercialism of the period, Thomas Carlyle,

another of the great Victorians, advanced a heroic philosophy of work, courage, and

the cultivation of the godlike in human beings, by means of which life might recover its

true worth and nobility. This view, borrowed in part from German idealist philosophy,

Carlyle expressed in a vehement, idiosyncratic style in such works as Sartor resartus

(The Tailor Retailored, 1833-1834) and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in

History (1841). Other answers to social problems were presented by two fine Victorian

prose writers of a different stamp. The social criticism of the art critic John Ruskin

looked to the curing of the ills of industrial society and capitalism as the only path to

beauty and vitality in the national life. The escape from social problems into aesthetic

hedonism was the contribution of the Oxford scholar Walter Pater.

Poetry

The three notable poets of the Victorian age became similarly absorbed in social issues.

Beginning as a poet of pure romantic escapism, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, soon moved on

to problems of religious faith, social change, and political power, as in "Locksley Hall,"

the elegy In Memoriam (1850), and The Idylls of the King (1859). All the characteristic

moods of his poetry, from brooding splendor to lyrical sweetness, are expressed with

smooth technical mastery. His style, as well as his peculiarly English conservatism,

stands in some contrast to the intellectuality and bracing harshness of the poetry of

Robert Browning. Browning's most important short poems are collected in Dramatic

Romances and Lyrics (1841-1846) and Men and Women (1855). Matthew Arnold, the

third of these mid-Victorian poets, stands apart from them as a more subtle and

balanced thinker his literary criticism (Essays in Criticism, 1865, 1888) is the most

remarkable written in Victorian times. His poetry displays a sorrowful, disillusioned

pessimism over the human plight in rapidly changing times (for example, "Dover Beach,"

1867), a pessimism countered, however, by a strong sense of duty. Among a number of

lesser poets, Algernon Charles Swinburne showed an escapist aestheticism, somewhat

similar to Pater's, in sensuous verse rich in verbal music but somewhat diffuse and pallid

in its expression of emotion. The poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the poet, artist, and

socialist reformer William Morris were associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement, the

adherents of which hoped to inaugurate a new period of honest craft and spiritual truth

in property and painting. Despite the otherworldly or archaic character of their romantic

poetry, Morris, at least, found a social purpose in his designs for household objects,

which profoundly influenced contemporary taste.

The Victorian Novel

The novel gradually became the dominant form in literature during the Victorian age. A

fairly constant accompaniment of this development was the yielding of romanticism to

literary realism, the accurate observation of individual problems and social relationships.

The close observation of a restricted social milieu in the novels of Jane Austen early in

the century (Pride and Prejudice, 1813 Emma, 1816) had been a harbinger of what was

to come. The romantic historical novels of Sir Walter Scott, about the same time

(Ivanhoe, 1820), typified, however, the spirit against which the realists later were to

react. It was only in the Victorian novelists Charles Dickens and William Makepeace

Thackeray that the new spirit of realism came to the fore. Dickens's novels of

contemporary life (Oliver Twist, 1837-1839 David Copperfield, 1849-1850 Great

Expectations, 1861 Our Mutual Friend, 1865) exhibit an astonishing ability to create

living characters his graphic exposures of social evils and his powers of caricature and

humor have won him a vast readership. Thackeray, on the other hand, indulged less in

the sentimentality sometimes found in Dickens's works. He was also capable of greater

subtlety of characterization, as his Vanity Fair (1847-1848) shows. Nevertheless, the

restriction of concern in Thackeray's novels to middle- and upper-class life, and his

lesser creative power, render him second to Dickens in many readers' minds.

Other important figures in the mainstream of the Victorian novel were notable for a

variety of reasons. Anthony Trollope was distinguished for his gently ironic surveys of

English ecclesiastical and political circles Emily Bronte, for her penetrating study of

passionate character George Eliot, for her responsible idealism George Meredith, for a

sophisticated, detached, and ironical view of human nature and Thomas Hardy, for a

profoundly pessimistic sense of human subjection to fate and circumstance. A second

and younger group of novelists, many of whom continued their important work into the

20th century, displayed two new tendencies. Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling,

and Joseph Conrad tried in various ways to restore the spirit of romance to the novel,

in part by a choice of exotic locale, in part by articulating their themes through plots of

adventure and action. Kipling attained fame also for his verse and for his mastery of the

single, concentrated effect in the short story. Another tendency, in a sense an

intensification of realism, was common to Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, and H. G.

Wells. These novelists attempted to represent the life of their time with great accuracy

and in a critical, partly propagandistic spirit. Wells's novels, for example, often seem to

be sociological investigations of the ills of modern civilization rather than self-contained

stories.