Appunti English literature and culture 1

The Victorian novel

Victorian and novel: Queen Victoria

The word Victorian comes from Victoria, coronation in 1837, her death was in 1901. We use conventional dates.

She was a woman, a female in a patriarchal society, and it wasn’t easy. She was young, she reigned so long, she was clever, she had strategy.

Elizabeth the First and Queen Victoria followed different strategies. Elizabeth married the country. Queen Victoria had aspects that remained conventional and others that were renovated.

Queen Victoria married Prince Albert, for love, not something very usual; they had a lot of children. She was identified with the idea of the Victorian woman. The prince died before her; she mourned his death until her own death. After his death she started to dress in black. After their death she wanted to have two statues looking at each other.

The word Novel was not born in the Victorian period; it was born before. The Victorian novel is distinguished by a distinctive fervour. It became the mirror of the Victorian period.

The English novel

The first English novel was called ‘The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, where in all the Men perished but himself. With an Account how he was at last as strangely delivered by Pirates’ and was published in 1719.

It was a very long title. It was used to invite people to read it. Be careful about titles, because it gives spoilers about the ending. It was written by him. It is the form of a journal, a personal writing, in the first person.

They wanted to believe that the novel was real, with documents. It describes reality as it is. It is a strategy repeated in this period.

The second English novel is ‘Travels into several remote nations of the world’; it was written by Lemuel Gulliver. He is first a sergeant. It is a realistic kind of text. We are in 1726.

The third English novel, ‘Pamela’, was written in 1740 and is called written by herself, a woman. There is a subtitle. These are letters, personal forms of writing, familiar letters that she writes to her family. She is a young maid, she keeps company to an old lady, she has a nephew, that decides to take advantage of the young girl. She resists the temptation and at the end she is rewarded with marriage.

It is an epistolary form, more immediate and dramatic. She describes how the nephew ambushed her. It is a cruel description. The nephew never succeeds. The author shows redemption.

The fourth English novel, ‘Shamela’, is the girl knew what she wanted. The epistolary novel was most successful between 1670 and 1780.

It became unnecessary with free indirect thought: feelings of a character, flexibility of a third-person narrator. There is another novel, ‘Sterne’, and it is experimental.

The Great Exhibition

1851 sees the Great Exhibition, a little before the Victorian period, the novel was firmly established as the literary form of the age. By 1870 that form had gained a hegemonic hold over the British reading public.

The main subject matter of the Victorian novel is the relation between self and society, a topic that can be explored in different ways.

It is a fiera, a palace made of glass. We start to see the products of a new industrial revolution. It was a place visited for entertainment, where people would eat something. It was conceived to celebrate the colonial empire. They started to import objects, to collect objects, tea itself.

It was a huge celebration, a rich period. The revolution impacts on the publishing industry. People interacted with the author in the Victorian period. Publishing became quicker using machines.

In the industrial revolution there were timetables, people had free time. They had money to spend, like something to read.

Cambridge Companion

Realism → the dominant mode of representation and the dominant reading practice of the Victorian era, supposes a privileged epistemological point of view from which both knowledge and judgment can be truthfully and precisely issued to establish consensus among narrator and reader.

Oliver Twist

Charles Dickens wrote Oliver Twist in 1838, and Poor Law in 1834.

Oliver Twist is a novel that harshly criticizes Victorian society, focusing on themes such as poverty, child crime, child labor, and social injustice. Dickens uses the story of the orphan Oliver to expose the harsh conditions in orphanages and “workhouses”, the exploitation of children, and the hypocrisy of the Victorian system. Other comments highlight the contrast between good and evil, the complex role of characters like Nancy, and Oliver's moral strength in resisting corruption.

Dickens aimed to shock his audience with the corrupt horror of the workhouse and the perverse allegiance of boy criminals to their monstrous surrogate father, Fagin. Oliver is immune to the polluted society.

We have a child as a protagonist; it was very careful to children, because he experienced these issues. He was born in a workhouse, to accommodate poor people. It is presented as a social idea, but nothing is good as it seems, the family were divided. The food wasn’t suitable for people and asking for more was rebellion, they were closed in a dark room. It was not a healthy environment, not clean places. There were personal interests. The children were sold to work.

Oliver was sent to another taker; he escaped because he was bullied. He goes to London, it falls into criminal underworld (pickpockets), they stole any kind of thing.

Oliver is immune by this society; in the end he is saved. Because it is discovered that it doesn’t belong to the lower classes. Oliver finds his grandfather.

Illegitimate children had no rights to inherit, if the father wanted to welcome the child couldn’t. The children had to be born and conceived after the marriage. The father must be held accountable.

Dickens wasn’t a revolutionary author. The force of Dickens’s personality and of his pictorial imagination determined the success of his illustrations as much as the talent of his artists. Although he was flattered at first by the opportunity to collaborate with George Cruikshank and Robert Seymour, the two most famous illustrators of the 1830’s, Dickens soon found the traditional subordination of author to artist intolerable and managed to reverse the roles in his own works. Dickens has a Victorian vision.

Bleak House (1852-53)

Charles Dickens's Bleak House is one of most ambitious and technically virtuosic works, known for its complex plot centered on the eternal legal case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. The novel is admired for its rich characterization and powerful social criticism, especially of the corruption and inefficiency of the legal system. Readers' reactions tend to focus on his mastery, his memorable characters (such as Tulkinghorn, Skimpole, and Krook), and his unique narrative structure, which uses dual narration (one omniscient third-person narrator and one first-person narrator by Esther Summerson).

It was written as an attack on the 19th-century Court of Chancery and how the legal system evolved into a maze of purposeless procedures that lead only to debt and suffering.

The use of two narrators (one in the first person, Esther, and one omniscient in the third person) is widely considered a strength. This approach not only adds richness but also depth, especially since Esther is a potentially unreliable storyteller.

It deals with themes of social decadence, poverty, mystery, disease and morality. Despite its dark and cynical tone, the story is also imbued with themes of love, friendship, and individual integrity.

It is important because at the center of this there is a legal suite, across decades. It is part of common discussions nowadays. Dickens describes what we see outside the court of justice. It describes the fog. We have the first detective. An inspector that goes to the streets of London, he has a wife that helps him.

Hard Times (1854)

Alerted middle class readers to wretched living and working conditions in the industrial cities.

Generally, comments on hard times focus on how difficult experiences can build character, strength, and appreciation for life, while also acknowledging the pain they cause. The novel uses satire to critique a society focused solely on facts and figures, showing characters who have their “roses” (joys) taken and are left only with “thorns” (suffering).

A new kind of working started in the factories.

Chapter 5: It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.

Little Dorrit (1857): the novel of the prison

“Little Dorrit” is a novel by Charles Dickens that criticizes 19th-century English society, particularly poverty, bureaucracy, and the prison system. The story follows Amy Dorrit, born and raised in the Marshalsea debtors' prison where her father is incarcerated, and her complicated life between “Poverty” and “Wealth”. The novel is considered one of Dickens's most autobiographical, as it reflects his incarcerated father's experience and the trauma this caused to young Charles.

There are different types of prisons. The inmates could bring their own families. They had some kind of house inside the prison. The father of Dickens was in prison for debts.

The prison is at the center of the novel; it is like a city. The structure of the novel is complicated; it is like a labyrinth.

Ackroyd, aire of Dickens

Artists who have recreated all the variety, the energy and the spectacle which London expects and demands of its inhabitants. They have expressed horror too, for this also has been one of the dark places of the earth.

A city where the extremes of the human condition meet, where comedy and tragedy are to be seen side by side. East hand is the place of criminals, who killed prostitutes.

Popular culture and industrial revolution

Technological turn: Changing the image of society and man’s image of himself within that society.

• Thomas Carlyle, Signs of the Times (1829)
• Samuel Coleridge, Constitution of Church and State (1837)
• Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869)

Elitist conception of culture vs negative effects of civilization (effects of the industrial revolution).

Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold is known for his commentary that “poetry is the criticism of life” and his belief that poetry's purpose is to “interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us” as religious and scientific certainty declines. He also commented on the importance of culture and self-discovery, famously stating: “Resolve to be thyself; and know, that he who finds himself, loses his misery”. His work also includes famous quotes like “Life is not a having and a getting, but a being and a becoming”.

Empowering notion of culture. Sweetness and light (moral poise and intellectual flexibility). Culture transcends class and is a cohesive force in society vs populace.

1880, Mason College in Birmingham. It was the first college who offered scientific training. Humanities vs scientists and science as culture.

T.H. Huxley: advocacy of a primarily scientific education tempered with plenty of history, sociology, English Literature and foreign languages (Science and Culture).

1882, Arnold pleads for a primarily humanistic and specifically classical education tempered by science enough to make its recipients understand the singularly un-Hellenic world in which they find themselves living (Literature and Science).

Industrial revolution: technological progress, less expensive printing press, new urban geography, working class audience. Technological progress = cultural decay.

Anarchy: popular culture, disruptive nature of working-class culture.

The mass of mankind will never have any ardent zeal for seeing things as they are; very inadequate ideas will always satisfy them whoever sets himself to see things as they are will find himself one of a very small circle; but it is only by this resolutely doing its own work that adequate ideas will ever get current at all.

30.09.25 Linda M. Shires, “The Aesthetics of the Victorian Novel”

Realism privileges a reading focusing on central character or several central characters. It stresses a model of coherence or consistency not only in its form but also in the construction of characters. When the consistency or coherence of a character is challenged, through any number of disrupting desires or external events, the movement of the narrative usually reinstates order. The ending is normally that of marriage or death.

This form not only places the reader in position of privileged knowing and moral judgment, thus shaping his/her subjectivity into middle-class Victorian norms, but often does so with the aim of creating conformity. The realist novel largely accepts middle-class ethics and more. The emotionally complex hero or heroine is molded to the bourgeois ideal of the rational man or woman of virtue.

Relying on a structure of the classic realist novel allows psychological development, lapses from bourgeois code but treats them as errors of judgment owing to immaturity. Paradigm of maturing or refining one’s relation to society. Maturing correctly is a prerequisite for functioning well in Victorian bourgeois society.

The 18th century novel had insisted on the value of an individual independent of birth and inherited wealth, a value that resided in such qualities of mind as reason, morality, sympathy, and the will to be oneself against all odds.

The 19th century novel problematized that individual sought to contain, constrain, and normalize him or her in ways that at once created, reinforced, and updated a new and modern social classification system.

Difficulties in accommodating the self in a world in which it no longer finds much security at all. The stable self is forcefully attacked both from within and without.

The sensation novel of the 1860s and several fantastic narratives from the fin de siècle do not conform to the tenets of “classic bourgeois” realism.

• Sensation Fiction: Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White, 1859.
• Detective Fiction: Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone 1868 – Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White.
• Charles Dickens, Bleak House 1852-1853.
• A. C. Doyle, Sherlock Holmes 1887.

The Victorian family: structures and stresses

In the Victorian period female gothic became an increasingly complex and contradictory genre which not only represented women’s fears of domestic imprisonment, but also enacted, and, simultaneously, or by turns, managed and recontained their fantasies of escape from the physical and psychological confinements of the domestic and conventionally defined femininity.

The Victorian Gothic - Gothic novel

• 1765: H. Walpole, the Castle of Otranto.
• 1796: M.G. Lewis, The Monk.
• 1818: M. Shelley, Frankenstein.

Changing attitude towards the gothic/the Middle Ages.

18th century: Gothic: from decorum to imagination. Barbarous, medieval, supernatural.

Walpole: interest for a chivalrous age. Reversed the popular conception of the word gothic. Gothic revival in architecture. Tension between the human and the divine. Gothic cathedral. Terror and gloom. Horror and disorder vs rationality. Inhuman and