History of English literature (from Victorian Age to Modernism)

Jane Eyre by Charlotte is a 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 Trushcross Grange of Lintons family. The narration is complex, there are 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 friend, 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 the humanity and the author doubts

about 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 were in

opposition to the nineteenth-century academic painting and consider as inspiration the primitive Italians, who lived

before Raphael. They want the right to choose the subjects of their painting 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 btw 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 “The Ring and the Book” obliges the reader to play a role of investigator. The source of the poem are

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, a popular taste, misrepresentations of Shakespeare and some

absurd plots. Novels are adapted for theatre, e.g. Dickens stories were dramatized too.

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

The new Fiction of the 1860s: Meredith and Eliot

George Meredith ‘s volume of poetry “Modern Love” maybe emerged from a personal crisis and situation, it’s a modern

work because of the circumstances of marital breakdown and the incompatibility of unloving partner. He consoles

himself with a mistress. Meredith’s female characters have a particular distinctive quality, impulsive, independence.

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So this writer had a sort of appeal for critics and readers of the 19 Century who wanted to escape from the restrictions

of mid-Victorian moral earnestness.

George Eliot is a female writer. One of her work 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 the morality of ordinary country life.

The writer was not escaping into a rural idyll. She explores a society on changing, divided by war and industrialization,

but still held together by religion and class-interdependence. Despite her male pseudonym and a narrator with opinions

and clothes of a man, Dickens e.g. perceived something strange and new. No one had ever been so capable to think like

a woman like in this case. She dedicated herself to an historical novel too, “Romola”. The main character is a true

feminist heroine and her world is the Renaissance Florence, she rejects the obligation of the church. It is clearly an

historical fiction.

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

After 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 “On the origin of species” (1859), about humankind and his

place in the order of creation. After 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 the 1867, he was a supporter of the 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 was opposed to utilitarianism, materialism

and optimism of the Victorian Age. As a social critic, he wrote “Culture and anarchy”, he defined the 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 unlettered populace. The strictures of an inherited Hebraism, needed the

balance of a softer and sweeter art of the ancients Greeks. The satire is barbed and the vision of the future offers a bright

escape in a world, which has abolished the tyranny. His criticism of the culture and institutions of the time emerged

from an interest in education too and from his practice as 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, e.g. 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,which, despite its beauty, lost its spiritual way

John Ruskin ‘s agnosticism consists in a rejection of the Protestantism of his childhood. He deals with economic and

social integrity of mid-Victorian Britain, the essays try to redefine value by moving beyond economic theory into moral

speculation. His basis is Christian, from which he derives its language, e.g. from Jesus’ parables. “Unto this last”

applies Christianity to a urban civilization that he found morally and aesthetically repugnant. It later became one of the

most important English untheoretical Socialism work. “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.

So he accused the industrial society to degrade the human personality and to make 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. 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 the 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 Ecclesiastic Dandyism.

Gerard Hopkins converted to Roman Catholicism at Oxford and he entered the Society of Jesus, which cut him off

from the conventional 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. 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 the 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 Dogson) 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 the nonsense, because it offers a new way of viewing things. The emergence of a

children’s literature was one result of the revolution. These works transformed the 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. The childhood

seems to offer release. The Alice’s books have the same main protagonist, a child insistent on the rightness of the values

of middle-class society, she survives her nightmares.

Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature 1880-1920

Although Queen Victoria reigned until January 1901, Victorian values, beliefs were already been challenged by a new

generation of intellectuals and writers. There is the naissance of New Woman, a movement for women rights

The Agnostic Fiction of the Late Century th

Henry James American novelist of the late 19 Century, the first period of his fiction is in “The Portrait of a Lady”,

about the contrast between Europe and America, it’s a study of a young woman from Albany who brings to Europe her

provincialism and her ref