Victorian Novel - Characteristics of the novel of 19th century

Growth of the Middle Class

During the Victorian Age, there was a growth of the middle classes. Its members were avid consumers of literature. They borrowed books from circulating libraries and read the abundant variety of periodicals. Moreover, Victorian writers belonged to the middle class.
A great deal of Victorian literature was first published in a serial form. This maintained the writer in constant contact with his public. He was obliged to maintain the interest of his story gripping because one boring instalment would cause the public not to buy that periodical any longer. Also, author could always alter the story, according to its success or failure. The Victorians showed a great interest in prose, in particular in the novel, that became the most popular form of literature and the main source of entertainment.

Evolution of the Novel in the 18th Century

During the 18th century, novels generally narrate of the adventures either of a social outcast or a more virtuous hero, but the structure of novel remained the same. The idea of a thematic unity was brought in by Jane Austen with the theme of a girl’s choice of a husband, and by the Gothic writers who set their novels in a remote past. Novelists wanted to reflect the social changes that had been in progress for a long time. The novelists of the first part of the Victorian period described society as they saw it, with the exception of those sentiments which offended current morals. However, their criticism was much less radical than that of contemporary European writers, like Balzac, Flaubert and Dostoyevsky, because the historical conditions of Britain were different from those of France or Russia.

Omniscient Narrator and Urban Setting

The voice of the omniscient narrator erected a rigid barrier between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ behaviours. Retribution and punishment were to be found in the final chapter of the novel, where the series of events, adventures and incidents had to be explained and justified. The setting chosen by most Victorian novelists was the city, which was the main symbol of the industrial civilisation. Victorian writers concentrated on the creation of realistic characters the public could easily identify with, in terms of comedy, Dickens’s characters, or dramatic passion, the Brontë sisters’ heroines.

Types of Victorian Novels

The Victorian Novel contain different type of novel:

• The comedy of manners: it dealt with economic and social problems and described a particular class or situation.

• The humanitarian novel: Charles Dickens’s novels are mostly admired for their tone, combining humour with a sentimental request for reform for the less fortunate. Could be divided into novels of a ‘realistic’, ‘fantastic’ or ‘moral’.

• The novel of formation: became very popular after the publication of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. These novels dealt with one character’s development from early youth to some sort of maturity.

• Literary nonsense: the most famous nonsense novel was Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. She created a nonsensical universe where the social rules and conventions are disintegrated, and the cause-effect relationship does not exist.

Role of Women in Literature

A great number of novels published during the mid-Victorian period were written by women such as Charlotte and Emily Brontë and George Eliot. The majority of readers were women. Infact, middle-class women had more time to spend at home and devote part of the day to reading. However, it was not easy to get published, and some women used a male pseudonym.