History of English literature (from Victorian Age to Modernism)

History of English Literature from Victorian High Victorian Literature 1830-1880

During the long reign of queen Victoria (1837-1901), Britain experienced a period of stability, economic prosperity, trade, and colonial expansion. This was also a period of explanations and theories, pessimism, progress, and tensions evident in literature. In 1832, the “reform bill” expanded the right to vote, including many more middle-class voters. The progress of the British was spectacular: expansion of industrial cities, growth of the middle class, overpopulation of cities, poverty, and lack of sanitation.

The Victorian compromise and conflicts

In these years, there was the so-called “Victorian compromise”; a policy of total non-interference by the economic state, rejecting the imposition of any rule on the market, but also inhuman conditions imposed on the workforce. The conflicts between religion and science increased: the theory of evolution by C. Darwin in the essay “The Origin of the Species” shook the traditional beliefs. In literature, the novel became the main genre: readers wanted to see themselves in the novel, and novelists had social and moral responsibility. Features include omniscient narrator, city as setting, and long, complicated plots.

The condition of England: Carlyle and Dickens

Thomas Carlyle attacked the Victorian tradition, criticizing democracy and the new industrial civilization. His career began with translations of Schiller, Novalis, Goethe, on which he wrote several essays. “French Revolution” (1837) opens with Louis XV's death.

Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth at the beginning of the 19th century. His autobiographical novels are Oliver Twist and David Copperfield, while Bleak House, Hard Times, and Great Expectations are about social issues. Dickens learned to direct his fiction to social priorities and inequalities, speaking against what he saw as injustice. His success comes from the theological framework of Christianity as a moral basis for his thought and action. He condemned the rigidity of the Victorian morality and denounced the evils of his society. Dickens' novels reflect the nature of Victorian urban society with all its conflicts and disharmonies.

“Oliver Twist” is a child of unknown parents, born in a workhouse. The narrators of Dickens are usually third-person and omniscient, and in the end, there is the triumph of justice. In this case, he was reacting to the supporters of the New Poor Law (workhouses for poor people), discussing the criminal life. The attack on the effects of the workhouses is only in the first chapters.

“Nicholas Nickleby”, which was serialized, is about the exploitation of unwanted children in a bleak Yorkshire school, but the novel also attacks a do-nothing aristocracy, the inefficiency of Parliament, and capitalism. Between the chapters, there are some short stories.

“Dombey and Son” uses semi-autobiographical material and a first-person narrator, like “David Copperfield”, which evokes the sufferance of Dickens’ boyhood. The novel analyzes relationships, marriages, and social problems too. Dickens talks about the effects of the Industrial Revolution in northern England in Hard Times. Regarding his style, the language is full of analogies, he has a sense of humor, and the style is fluent and effective. Dickens’ Hard Times remained the most important novel dealing with the social and industrial problems of mid-Victorian England.

Macaulay and Thackeray

Thomas Macaulay is famous for the five volumes of “The History of England”, which discusses the revolutions of the seventeenth century, particularly the origins and effects of the glorious revolution. The reader of Macaulay has to be active.

William Thackeray’s most important work is “Vanity Fair”, the novel without a hero, monthly serialized. It’s about Becky Sharp’s ambitions. The narrator is a sort of showman or preacher.

The Brontë Sisters

Their first fictions were about the fantasy kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. Emily, Anne, and Charlotte decided to use pseudonyms, Ellis, Currer, and Acton Bell. Jane Eyre by Charlotte is realist fiction and a training novel because the reader follows the growing up of the protagonist. The story sees Jane from childhood to maturity. There’s a first-person narrator, and because of the plot, it can be considered an autobiography. Jane and Charlotte are both orphans, they went to cheap schools, and they’re teachers. There are also gothic elements: the sense of imminent danger, the mystery in Thornfield Hall, and the mysterious past of Mr. Rochester. Jane is an unusual heroine compared to those of the Victorian novels. She’s got a lot of moral qualities, but not physical ones.

Emily’s Wuthering Heights could be considered a gothic novel. The novel is built around two houses, Wuthering Heights of Heathcliff and Thrushcross Grange of the Lintons family. The narration is complex, with shifts of time and the viewpoints of two major and five minor narrators. Everything is wuthering, the nature too, during the entire narration. Only in the last chapter, there is the church under a benign sky, but a glass of it has been broken by the storm.

Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelite Poets

Tennyson’s early poetry derived from the emotional norms of the second generation of Romantics, especially from Shelley and Keats. After the death of one of his friends, Hallam, he wrote “In Memoriam”, which is an evocation of a desperate sense of exclusion from a community. He talks about the love for God and humanity and the author doubts religion. It insists on the benign inevitability of progress.

In 1848, a group of six painters founded an art movement called the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. They opposed the nineteenth-century academic painting and considered as inspiration the primitive Italians, who lived before Raphael. They wanted the right to choose the subjects of their paintings and be free to paint as they preferred. There is a return to nature with an accurate representation, and in literature, there is a link between the romance and the aesthetic movement.

The Brownings

Elizabeth Browning deals with love poetry in the “Sonnets from the Portuguese”, addresses from a woman to a man. She married Robert Browning. Her novel “Aurora Leigh” is about two careers, one male and one female, one philanthropic and one artistic; it is a digression into other lives from that of the heroine. The poem ends with the vision of a new dawn reflecting the heroine’s name.

Robert Browning’s “The Ring and the Book” obliges the reader to play the role of investigator. The source of the poem is a collection of documents concerning a sensational Roman murder trial. It explores the contortions of the minds of sinners and criminals. The novel appeared in four volumes.

The Drama, the Melodrama, and the Sensation Novel

The influence of Shakespeare is present in Victorian writers, who tried to evolve a modern equivalent to his tragedies and history plays. In the Victorian melodrama, there are frequent excesses, popular taste, misrepresentations of Shakespeare, and some absurd plots. Novels are adapted for the theatre; for example, Dickens' stories were dramatized too.

William Collins was interested in detective stories, his novels are the “sensation fiction”, centered on theft, and murder.

The new fiction of the 1860s: Meredith and Eliot

George Meredith’s volume of poetry “Modern Love” may have emerged from a personal crisis and situation; it’s a modern work due to the circumstances of marital breakdown and the incompatibility of an unloving partner. He consoles himself with a mistress. Meredith’s female characters have a particular distinctive quality, impulsive, and independent. This writer had a sort of appeal for critics and readers of the 19th Century who wanted to escape from the restrictions of mid-Victorian moral earnestness.

George Eliot is a female writer. One of her works, called “Adam Bede”, was read by Queen Victoria too. It is a detailed representation of a rural working community, free of the confusions and contradictions of the industrial and urban present. There is a new kind of heroism, which emerged from the conditions and morality of ordinary country life. The writer did not escape into a rural idyll. She explores a society undergoing change, divided by war and industrialization, but still held together by religion and class-interdependence. Despite her male pseudonym and a narrator with the opinions and clothes of a man, Dickens, for example, perceived something strange and new. No one had been so capable of thinking like a woman as in this case. She dedicated herself to a historical novel too, “Romola”. The main character is a true feminist heroine, and her world is Renaissance Florence; she rejects the obligation of the church. It is clearly a historical fiction.

The strange disease of modern life: Mill, Arnold, and Ruskin

After the 1860s, the Macaulayan confidence concerning the benefits of progress had been disturbed by an increasing consciousness of the more worrying consequences of intellectual and social development. In this period, there’s the publication of Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” (1859), about humankind and his place in the order of creation. After the 1880s, pessimism emerged in literature; Darwin deleted the idea that humankind stood at the pinnacle of the universe as the lord of creation and the master.

John Mill, leader of liberalism, supporter of the Reform Bill of 1867, was a supporter of individual liberty. One of his essays, “On Liberty”, is about the freedom of citizens and non-interference of government.

Matthew Arnold was a representative of the middle-class intellectuals. He opposed utilitarianism, materialism, and the optimism of the Victorian Age. As a social critic, he wrote “Culture and Anarchy”, defining culture as a study of spiritual perfection, opposed to the idea of progress. This work divided English society into three classes: a barbarian aristocracy, a philistine bourgeoisie, and an unlettered populace. The strictures of an inherited Hebraism needed the balance of a softer and sweeter art of the ancient Greeks. The satire is barbed, and the vision of the future offers a bright escape in a world which has abolished tyranny. His criticism of the culture and institutions of the time emerged from an interest in education too and from his practice as a poet and student of the European poetic tradition. Arnold is very ambiguous about the present, and he felt nostalgia about an easier and idealized past, for example, in “Thyrsis”, with an Oxfordshire landscape and reminiscences of the Greek and Roman pastoral tradition. Thyrsis represents the dead poet soul, which could bring joy to a world that, despite its beauty, lost its spiritual way.

John Ruskin’s agnosticism consists of a rejection of the Protestantism of his childhood. He deals with the economic and social integrity of mid-Victorian Britain, and the essays try to redefine value by moving beyond economic theory into moral speculation. His basis is Christian, from which he derives its language, for example, from Jesus’ parables. “Unto This Last” applies Christianity to an urban civilization that he found morally and aesthetically repugnant. It later became one of the most important English untheoretical Socialism works. “Modern Painters” essay is about the painter Turner and definitions of truth, beauty, imagination, representation, and nature.

He talks about modern society problems, especially in the second volume of “The Stones of Venice”. His discussion of the triumph and decline of Venice links geography to geology, urban history to economic and social history. Venice is observed in its historical context, and it’s a paradigm for Victorian Britain. He accused the industrial society of degrading the human personality and making men like machines, then the deterioration of the English landscape caused by the industrial revolution and the horror of the inhuman conditions in which working men and women lived. The economic life of a nation should not be governed by the idea of profit, but by the interests of the entire society. As a solution to the ills of the world, Ruskin proposed art, which is the product of the human spirit inspired by vices or virtues, and so closely connected with morality.

The second spring and Hopkins

Despite the post-Darwinian accentuation of the so-called Victorian “crisis of faith”, the nineteenth century remained a profoundly religious age. In the early 1830s, there’s the origin of the “Oxford Movement”, a reaction against State interference in religious affairs in the Age of Reform. The dominant figure is John Newman. To Dickens and other Victorian progressives, the assertiveness of the Oxford Movement and the magnetism of the Roman Church seemed to be a dangerous example of Ecclesiastical Dandyism.

Gerard Hopkins converted to Roman Catholicism at Oxford and entered the Society of Jesus, which cut him off from the convention of contemporary English life. His world is collected in Poems, which shows a complex religious experience and the inadequacy of the human being to express the ineffable aspects of a goddess perceptible only by mystical intuition. The manifestation of the beauty of divinity is the truth, which is in everyone’s heart. To express these concepts, he uses a style full of alliteration and assonance; it’s a new poetic language, independent of the Victorian tradition. His particular observation of nature is an influence of Pre-Raphaelite poets. Most of his poems are God-centered. Hopkins saw order where Victorians saw anarchy.

Coda: Carroll

Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson) in 1865 published Alice’s Adventures Underground, renamed Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The followings are Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There and The Hunting of the Snark. It is an exploration of nonsense because it offers a new way of viewing things. The emergence of children’s literature was one result of the revolution. These works transformed adults by considering them through children’s eyes. Victorian literature doesn’t exclude adult concerns, but that world remained a space in which the playful and the joyfully absurd could triumph. There is sadness in Carroll’s works; he was lonely and frustrated. Childhood seems to offer release. The Alice books have the same main protagonist, a child insistent on the rightness of the values of middle-class society, who survives her nightmares.

Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature 1880-1920

Although Queen Victoria reigned until January 1901, Victorian values and beliefs were already being challenged by a new generation of intellectuals and writers. There is the naissance of the New Woman, a movement for women's rights.