English literature and culture

English literature and culture

Chapter 7-8

The Victorian age began with the incarnation of Queen Victoria in 1837 and lasted until 1901, and within this period there had been various literal movements. Fiction was the leading genre of the century, and the other genres were poetry and theatre.

High Victorian age (1830-1880) and late Victorian period (1880-1900)

It was a period of colonizing, scientific, and economic progress and encountered many important events:

• The industrial revolution brought to society a lot of improvements in technology (railways, trains, telegraph, photography…) so that travelling became faster, easier and much less expensive. It occurred also the invention of photography, practiced by many Victorian literary authors like Ruskin, Carrolls, Doyle, Hugo, and Zolá.
• In Great Britain, there was a strong growth of the population: it passed from 14 million to more than 32 million people. As a symbol of the great expansion of British power, a massive trade show, the Great Exhibition of London, took place in 1851, showing the massive economic and industrial power of Britain.
• There were also scientific developments in biology and geology thanks to scientific discoveries and the publication of The Origin of the Species by Charles Darwin (theory of evolution and natural selection that went against the theory of creation from the Bible). “All living creatures have taken their forms through a slow process of change and adaptation in a struggle for survival. Only the strongest can survive.”

Positive aspects:

• Progress brought by the industrial revolution
• Rising of the upper and middle classes
• Expanding power of Britain and its empire (India, Africa, Oceania,…)

Negative aspects, suffered by the lower classes:

• Poverty, disease, and deprivation in the working classes, prostitution
• Young children were exploited in the textile mills and mines, poverty and debt crimes to be punished with imprisonment
• Colonization and slavery of other races

The Victorian values

The Victorian values were morality, church, family, and home. They wanted to spread an idea of respectability of the middle-upper classes so that all the negative classes would have been denied and hidden by this compromise. Women were considered as inferior to men (patriarchal society and unit). There was also a conviction of the racial superiority of the English and white men in general. The middle class started to create literature and art in general.

1. The novels

The novels became the leading genre and publication was made real through chapters on periodicals. Notable authors include:

• John Stuart Mill: He was the father of liberalism, believed in bourgeois democracy, freedom of citizens, the emancipation of women, and the non-interference of the government. He believed that Victorian society could improve.
• Thomas Carlyle (Scottish philosopher): He was very critical towards Victorian society and thought that industrialization and capitalism had to be fought against.
• John Ruskin: Believed that artistic values could fight and in the end win against the values of the Victorian society.
• Matthew Arnold (essayist): Thought that literature and art were the two weapons that could be used against the issues of the Victorian society.

2. Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens wrote a huge number of novels, most set in contemporary London. He was a moralist, so his novels present a battle between right and wrong. He describes children working in factories and was very critical towards Victorian society but was not a pessimist. He was instead very optimistic about the evolution of society. Dickens wanted to show the bad condition of workers to his audience (didactic aim).

3. William Thackeray

William Thackeray was a pessimist. His novels, although pessimistic and tragic, contain humor and social satire. Here the narrator is more intrusive since he comments in a very cynical way what happens. He believed that the protagonist of the novel should be a common person.

4. The Brontë sisters

The setting is typically in the countryside and focuses on themes related to the Victorian period.

The Victorian period

It’s usually associated with the reign of Queen Victoria who reigned the longest until Queen Elizabeth II, witnessing enormous advancements and successes especially in the economic field due to the establishment of the English colonial empire; from the colonies, many products were imported. The Victorian period sees the results of the industrial revolution and is often associated with the “Victorian compromise.”

The Victorian period is very long and lasted until the birth of psychoanalysis. In history, there are periods devoted to the celebration of rationality and others of irrationality. In the Enlightenment, there was the celebration of reason and rationality where everything had to be analyzed through rational meanings but in 1764 there was also the publication of the first gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, presented as a manuscript (celebration of irrationality, disharmony, urgency of the unconscious).

5. The novel: Robinson Crusoe

The Victorian period inherits the novel, which was born with Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (1719), who was the survivor of a shipwreck (written in the form of a diary, a journal).

• Plot: Robinson Crusoe lived all alone on an uninhabited island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; having been cast on the shore by a shipwreck, in which all of the men perished apart from him.

Other novels at the beginning of the genre are Pamela, an epistolary novel by Samuel Richardson, and Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift written in the form of a journal, of memories. Victoria’s coronation in 1837 signals the official inception of the literary form that we now designate as the Victorian novel, just as her death in 1901 marks its official demise.

By the time of the Great Exhibition in 1851, the novel was firmly established as the literary form of the age and by 1870 it had gained a hegemonic hold over the British reading public. When the novel was born, it was with a strong connection with reality, and novels were published as documents, as they were real, as they really happened; the main subject of the Victorian novel was the relation between self and society.

6. The Victorian novel

The Victorian novel is a realistic kind of novel: it describes things as they really are, the portrayal of society as it really is, and it portrays men in society. In the Victorian period, there was this belief that you could present a version of society that could be shared, that was objective and the same for everybody: during this period, there is a faith in language to mirror reality and to convey a moral message (there’s no linguistic crisis that will happen at the end of the 19th century).

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. The Victorian writer is convinced to have a didactic role, a social role, and thinks that the reader will share the values he puts in the novel, his point of view; there’s this belief of a common view of society that had to be the same for everyone. All of this changes with modernism, in the form of the novel, in the language and in the issues addressed by the writer to the reader.

7. Charles Dickens

He is considered as the major representative of the Victorian age, he was very clever and up to date with his own time. He lives in the period of the mechanization of the editorial industry, the advances brought up by the industrial revolution have entered also the publication industry: the publication of journals and novels had become a quicker process and this allowed reaching more people, also the lower classes. Dickens was able to keep in contact with all the levels of society and became a writer both for the elites and for the lower classes.

He was in contact with his readers and used to give public readings of his novels in which he impersonated his characters: they were sort of theatrical spectacles, through which his characters could, this way, reach a lot of people belonging to different social classes. He was aware also of the birth of the popular culture, and embraced it but still standing in between and embracing the developments and the evolutions of his own culture.

In his novels, Dickens offers a lucid analysis of society, denounces the defects and the failures of the Victorian society but then in his novels, there’s always something unexpected that brings things back to normal, to a resolution (devices that can be used in order to resolve a conflict in the plot). In particular, he denounces what hides behind the institution of the workhouses, that was presented as an act of care for the poor by the government, and the exploitation of children (Oliver Twist, 1838 and in the Poor Law of 1834).

8. Oliver Twist

Oliver Twist escapes from the workhouse, arrives in London where he meets a boy who belongs to a group of pickpockets led by Mr. Fagin, who gives him a place to stay, a sort of family. 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 was immune to the polluted society. At the end, the only person (prostitute) who cared about Oliver dies and deus ex machina resolves the situation: Oliver belongs to the upper classes of society but we don’t worry about the other children. Dicken’s style is a cinematic style (when we think about Dickens we see the images of his characters) and a pictorial style.

9. Wilkie Collins

He’s related to Dickens because his brother married one of Dickens’ daughters, but Dickens was not happy about this marriage: they were in a close connection but they were also rivals in their literary careers. Collins had two partners and so two families: with one woman, he sort of adopted the daughter of this woman and was an effective stepfather, with the other woman he had his own children; this shows that he had a very unconventional lifestyle.

In The Woman in White, he has the courage to denounce things: he denounces illegitimacy, and he observes that if there are illegitimate children, according to Victorian mentality the fault was the woman (that’s what the society said), but Collins says “if there’s an illegitimate child there’s both a mother and a father, so let’s try to see what the father did and who he was.” One of the villains in the novel is an illegitimate child but Collins has the courage to say that was not his fault but circumstances forced him to act in an evil way.

10. The Victorian compromise

The Victorian compromise is that mostly, in the Victorian period, people tended to underline only the positive aspects and to ignore and to pass under silence the negative aspects that were there. For example, the industrial revolution brought significant positive aspects but also the creation of the slums, poor neighborhoods where there was a lack of water, food, and health.

Another author that deals with the effects of the industrial revolution on the country is Thomas Hardy: with the creation of the machines people lose their jobs and move to London (increasing the group of the poor), or they try to act differently, staying in the country as it happens in his novel, Tess of D’Urbervilles. The setting of his novels is Wessex, one of the ancient Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.

11. The façade

The façade is what everybody can see, what is outside. In the Victorian period, there was also a strong and strict division of roles: men (they could go out, live a public life) and women (stayed at home, took care of the house, of the family, had to give birth to children and cared for the education of her children) were relegated to different spheres and contexts: the public sphere belonging to men and the domestic sphere, belonging to women.

The woman was called “The angel of the house,” from a long poem dedicated to his own wife by Coventry Patmore: his wife was the model for all Victorian women. Women had to be passive, couldn’t talk in public, had to be virtuous and to preserve the honor of the family, had to be there when the husband came back from the outside world in order to comfort him. And all this was codified and protected by law: the woman in the Victorian period did not exist individually, she had no personal identity (she was a mother, a daughter, or a wife).

If a woman raised money she had to give them to her husband and she couldn’t denounce him, she didn’t have the legal identity to do that. Widows and not married women (with marriage, the woman did not possess anything) were really powerful and usually wealthy women, very feared from society. The eldest daughter in The Woman in White stays unmarried and she is able to take all of her money from the bank and use them for herself, being admired by the village for her intelligence and cleverness.

In the Victorian period, the first movement for the recognition of women’s rights was protofeminism supported by some men; women wanted to show that even they had an identity and economic independence (the possibility of their own property).

12. Sensation novel

(Collins was its major representative) In sensation novels, there are a lot of descriptions of emotional reactions through the body and also sensation novels are linked to sensationalism: the journals reported not only short Victorian stories but also crimes, murders, what happened in society; so the writers took inspiration from journals and articles in order to create a plot for their novels.

For example, in their novels, the wife kills the husband, or there are cases of double or fake identities. An example is in Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon: here the criminal, the villain, the murderer is the woman. Here’s there’s a case of double identity: she pretends to die and lives under another name because she had been abandoned by her husband and she wanted to live not as an abandoned woman but instead she reacts and conquers a place in society through crimes. The attention to the figure of the woman is given also through the figure of the femme fatale. The Victorian period is multifaceted.

13. The Victorian house

The Victorian house was a sort of defense for the family: it was very important to keep a good reputation, a good name in order not to ruin the honor of the family. The value of the family in the Victorian period was very strong. The detective, the investigator enters the Victorian house and discovers all the secrets, and the privacy had to be violated.

In Victorian houses, there were heavy curtains so that the public world remained outside and so that the inner dimension would be preserved; people could hide something behind curtains (The Picture of Dorian Grey). Even if there’s the façade, the inner aspects of personality start to emerge (The Picture of Dorian Grey, The Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde).

This cultural atmosphere prepares to Freud, who breathes the same air of Oscar Wilde and Stevenson but he elaborated it in another way and direction, creating psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic texts. At the end of the 19th century, a character that emerges is Jack the Ripper, who caused a great shock in Victorian society. In the Victorian period, there’s also the theatre and the music hall (they created their own characters, for example, Dan Leno), as a form of entertainment when people didn’t have to work.

14. The Victorian novel: sensation and gothic novels

The Victorian period was overall a very strict period that offered a strict regulation about the behavior of people in society, both in the domestic sphere of the family and in the public sphere. It was not simple to impose values upon an individual, because the self can struggle against these rules and impositions.

“There were difficulties of accommodating the self to a world in which no longer finds much security at all. The stable self is forcefully attacked both from within (from the analysis of the inner part of men that emerges powerfully to the surface in the 20th century) and without (from the society)” (Linda M. Shires, The Aesthetics of the Victorian Novel).

“Realism privileges a reading focusing on a 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 stereotypical restoration of order (marriage or death) since Shakespeare” (Linda M. Shires, The Aesthetics of the Victorian Novel).

This critic underlines how realism privileges a reading focused on a central character or several central characters so usually, we have no more than two or three male characters that accompany the reader through the narration. The novel is rigorous and consistent in its construction and also the construction of characters is consistent. The author can put the construction of the character under discussion through an external event or an internal aspect (disrupting desires). But, at the end of the novel, order is reestablished and restored and if you can’t reconcile, if you can’t reestablish the order, the characters will be dead and removed from the plot.

“This form not only places the reader in a 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 mores. The emotionally complex hero or heroine is molded to...”