Ivana Jankovic

The Victorian Period, literary features of the age

Chapter 1. The Victorian Period, literary features of the age

The coming of Queen Victoria to the throne of England and her very long rule(1837-1901) made England enjoy one of her most prosperous periods great industrial advancement, surge of national pride, power and prestige never paralleled before, expansion of the British Empire and an increase in popularity of the institution of monarchy. This golden age represented a turning point in the evolution of English and British society and a re-evaluation of previous values. Victoria was the daughter of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, the fourth son of King George III. Both the Duke of Kent and King George III died in 1820, and Victoria was raised under close supervision by her German-born mother Princess Victoria of Saxe- Coburg -Saalfeld. She inherited the throne at the age of 18, after her father's three elder brothers had all died leaving no legitimate, surviving children. The United Kingdom was already an established constitutional monarchy, in which the Sovereign held relatively little direct political power. Privately, Victoria attempted to influence government policy and ministerial appointments. Publicly, she became a national icon, and was identified with strict standards of personal morality.1 Queen Victoria became one of the countrys best-loved queens whereas Victorias husband, Prince Albert, known for his interest in the arts, social and industrial advancement, was an agreeable presence in the stiff atmosphere of the Royal Court and a constantly positive influence on the Queen. In no other period in the history of mankind had scientific discoveries changed the customs, the ideas and even the characters as they did in the nineteenth century when the Industrial Revolution had started its sweeping march forward. The result was that man seemed to have become the master of nature. Machines driven by steam took over as a prolongation of mans power while industrial production gradually replaced manual labor. The telegraph diminished the distances between cities and continents and communication became easier and
1

Cartianu, Ana, Istoria literaturii engleze. Secolul al XIX-lea. Realismul critic, Ed. de Stat Didactic i Pedagogic,

Bucureti, 1961, p.27.

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The Victorian Period, literary features of the age

more significant in a country that was to establish itself as an imperial power over a large territory. The initial result of the economic boom was significant rises in wages and share value. England soon became an industrial and commercial nation, one of the wealthiest, most prosperous and representative in the world. She was in centre of the world trade with one of the biggest fleets and the most accessible and effective coal mines and one of the most prosperous bourgeoisies that knew how to use the new inventions to its advantage. The country was getting and richer and London became one of the most important capitals of the world as a result of this industrialization process.2 The highpoint of Victorian Britain was the Great Exhibition opened on 1 May 1851 by Prince Albert in the newly constructed Crystal Palace, a blazing arch of lucid glass (Matthew 463). It was a good opportunity for the proud achievements of the nation to be displayed for everybody to admire and to celebrate Britains economic progress, and its place as leader of world market. One of the most important social effects of the age was the emergence of the epoch. The prevalent spirit was one of Puritanism which resulted in the adoption by bourgeoisie of high blueblooded standards of living and conservative snobbishness. In this period for the first time were the lower and the middle classes the greater part of the common people given real access to culture. Education was now more widely distributed and the result was that more and more people were able to read and write. Cheap editions as a consequence of the improved printing techniques found an unlimited reading public for the works of the past and present writers, and the book reviews contributed to the wider diffusion of literature. Lending and circulating libraries appeared and became very popular. As work in factories became more efficient and women were freed of the traditional household chores, like for instance, the making of bread, there was more time for many to read and enjoy literature. This age saw the creation of the modern newspaper as vehicle of information and the popular education and provider of publishing space for the serial novel. The result was the rise in the circulation figures of periodicals, journals and pamphlets most of them with a literary page as the public grew more and more accustomed to having their newspaper as part of their daily life.
2

Galea, Ileana, Victorianism and Literature, Ed. Dacia, Cluj-Napoca, 1994, p.38

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The Victorian Period, literary features of the age

The doctrine of the age was Utilitarianism with its focus upon the pragmatic finality of an act rather upon its intrinsic nature or the motives of the agent. The result was that total benefit was maximized at all costs and such terms as conscience, moral sense, right, love, sensitivity, affections, emotions or feelings no longer had any value. The underlying principle was laissezfaire or Liberalism which made private interest in economy or commerce enjoys unrestricted freedom to the detriment of their agents. The main attitude, seen as the main spur in mans behaviors, was that of personal egotism generated by such personal egotism generated by such personal interest. But the prosperity of the Victorian Age was not last for ever, especially in the 25 years of the century. But problems arose starting with the fourth decade of the nineteenth century the so called Hungry Forties when the Industrial Revolution had completely dislocated the traditional structure of English society , bringing riches to a few and misery to quite a lot. In spite of the displayed prosperity, in many cases the living conditions of the working classes forces to live where factories, roads, canals, and railways allowed them to live often turned to be unimaginably sordid: squalid houses with rooms in which as many as 20 people had to live, with polluted drinking water, bad sanitation, and stinking yards filled with filth. London with its slums and East End district, the new industrial cities of the North, such as Liverpool or Manchester, are cases in point. As Chew and Altaic mention (1283), the pictures of filthy conditions in Dickenss Oliver Twist or Bleak House are transcripts from reality and not Romantic or Gothic exaggerations. The agricultural working class, deprived of subsistence on the land by the enclosures of the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, had to toil on the other peoples land or thronged to the cities of the Midlands and the North where the liberal policy of the government directed towards private interests, forced them to work long hours in almost inhuman conditions for miserable wages, and threw them out of employment altogether as soon as the markets went down.3 For people who ere unable to support themselves the system of workhouses continued to exist through the age as it had been set up under the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 although many individual houses existed before this legislation. Though writers of the age such as Dickens presented workhouses in bleak colors, these institutions were basically meant to offer relief
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Ibidem., p5.

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The Victorian Period, literary features of the age

shelter, food, and work possibilities for deprived people who had exhausted all other possibilities of self- support. The workers poverty stricken working and living conditions, but also their lack of political power and representation made them attempt to defend their economic, social and political interests by forming trade unions, a fact bitterly resented by the employers. The representation of the working class struggle was channeled by the Chartist Movement whose request were embodied in the Peoples Charter published in My 1938, i.e. adult male suffrage, vote by ballot, annual Parliaments, payment of members of Parliament, equal electoral distribution based on equal electoral districts and abolition of property qualification. The rejection of a petition with millions of signatures to the Parliament in 1839 - petition repeated in 1848 was followed by a series of industrial strikes, demonstrations and repressive measures by the Government. All these events led to the belief that Chartism would bring revolution and terror to England. Therefore, any working class militancy was perceived as threat to social order. British industry was threatened by the competition of the younger nations and the export trade ceased to grow. The overall economic activity of the country showed a decline. Unemployment and poverty were on the increase, strikes, as a result, grow more numerous; a chronic feeling of unrest set in and socialism, which since 1850 had practically disappeared, once again was seen as an active force. Happy expectations and easy victories were past and gone, this feeling of anxiety was widespread in the atmosphere of the century drawing to its end. The Victorian frame of mind was dominated by three basic formative agents. The first is directly linked with the Industrial Revolution with its unprecedented economic development of England but also with massive displacements of population from the rural areas to the industrial cities which soon became overcrowded, associated with unemployment, housing problems and pollution of the environment. The Industrial Revolution went in parallel with an unequalled development of sciences, which led to the belief that sciences could solve all problems and everything could be scientifically explained. The second influence comes from the doctrine of Utilitarianism, previously mentioned. The third influence is direct result of the Darwinian theory about the origin of man and evolution exposed in his book On The Origin of Species, a theory which, as Matthew underlines (467), laid stress on the idea of evolution as determined by the laws of science. When this theory was corroborated with the extreme belief in the power of sciences, all biblical theories were shattered as people were led to think that the laws governing 6

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The Victorian Period, literary features of the age

human evolution were just as precise as those of the material world. The result was a serious spiritual crisis which went directly to the fundament of religion and its sacred canons. One of the trends of the age was to associate art with morality which implied that the artists in their process to communicate with their public had to maker their message socially and morally significant. This implies that a moral aesthetic was expected in every creation. For Ruskin the best of art was that novelists had to entertain and educate at the same time. It is therefore not surprising that the aesthetic movement at the end of the century rose its voice against such postulates to proclaim that art should never be indebted to morality but only to itself. This is also the age in which women became aware of their position and status in society and started claiming equal rights with men. But the process of their emancipations was only in an incipient phase and feminism as movement was something that had not been invented yet. What women did was that they became aware of their status of marginalization and, as a consequence, tried to move to the centre by imitating the male culture, by attempting their identities and criticizing the male standards, values and norms.4 The Victorian spirit goes along two essentials directions of streams of thought discussed in the section below to which two groups of writers were associated. Very often within the same group of writers and occasionally in one and the same author, rational criticism was associated with and attitude of rebellion against excess of scientific dogmatism or social pressure. Coercive doctrines that subordinated the individual to society or the Empire and their norms found themselves in contact with attitudes that recognized no measure, no reason and no law but their own. At the end of eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries Romanticism as trend of expression had exhausted much of its forces and writers now turned to other sources of inspiration. The new age was an age of order and reason opposed to emotions, dreams and tumults of the soul, which called for discipline, reason and balance in all things. The literary phase which was about to begin would return to what Romanticism hade previously rebelled against neoclassicism. Now the coordinates of creation were given by the desire for truth and realism of representation.

Dickens, Charles, Nicholas Nickleby, Penguin Books, London, 1994, p.8.

Ivana Jankovic

The Victorian Period, literary features of the age

Therefore, English literature, in the first half of the Victorian era, was deeply molded by the authority of reason which had grown more exacting and active, and which found its direct and main outlet in science. But this period of rationality and confidence was not to last long. When in the third quarter of the nineteenth century the equilibrium of the nation and society in which everybody believed was submitted to various shocks, its place was taken by a discipline and reason were replaced with restlessness, divergence and need for renovation. If, before, England had felt proudly isolated and, as such, quite refractory to external influences, now the English temperament became more open to foreign intellectual movements and welcomed more readily influences from abroad. What had previously constituted subjects of inspiration was no longer satisfactory or acceptable and the reign of the machine and its kingdom of iron, stone and ugliness had cease their existence and their representation had to turn to something else. Previously, feeling had it submit to various sets of rules mostly dictated by science, but now the philosophy and the literature of the declining century were filled with an impassioned revolt against science. The Victorian strict discipline social life and morals was more and more relaxed, and, as a consequence, the repressed instincts were let lose again beyond any rule of repression, while the senses claimed their freedom. A new spirit of restlessness, anarchy and adventurous experiment was on its way to replace the decorous wisdom of Victorian compromise in all things. Victorian literature has been placed by many at the crossroads between tradition and modernity, between conservatism and innovation, bearing the mark of the tension, between enclosure within tradition, post Romantic exuberance and pre modernistic innovation. In this context, the two directions mentioned above enhanced this tension and shaped up the culture and the literature of the age non fictional or fictional, in verse or in prose. The Victorian age is a prolific age in writings in the field of economics, science, philosophy, politics and religion in which their authors tried to find meaning in the shaken certitudes and confusing changes of their time. Some of such writings were very influential and shaped the public frame of mind.

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The Victorian Period, literary features of the age

Victorian non fiction moved between two poles represented to a certain degree of Thomas Carlyles transcendentalism and authoritarianism of Romantic legacy and John Stuart Mills rationalism and democracy of eighteenth century inheritance. Thomas Carlyle attacked the failures of the Victorian industrial society, basically its materialistic spirit and was very much against the Utilitarian doctrine. In this context he developed his theory about leadership and the rule of strong personalities in ensuring the correct governance of the society. John Stuart Mill also found the theory inadequate and tried to demonstrate in his book Utilitarianism1836) that laws should be made in such a way so as to fact that science and the whole universe are based on facts, but he also recognized that this world of facts has to be reconciled with that of the senses, accepting what the philosopher George Berkeley had argued before, that matter is a permanent possibility of sensation. For him, human feelings such as happiness, pleasure or pain are relative and often display differences of quality and depend upon the state of persons soul and cannot be, as such, quantified. In so far as a science of social life in concerned, he asserted that the liberty of the individual cannot be a self sufficient principle but must exist within the limits imposed by social life. Nonetheless, this vision is to a certain extent contrary to what he declares in On liberty (1859), where his belief is that a societys public opinion or its government cannot obstruct the individuals right or liberty. Another important representative of non fictional prose was Matthew Arnold who also wrote against the lack of moral value in Victorian England and the importance of education in retrieving the lost moral standards of the age. His writings also cover the field of literary criticism which he associated with a moral purpose.5 Towards the end of the century as the age progressed towards its spiritual crisis, the doctrine of aestheticism became more and more influential. This movement, whose primary theorist was Walter Pater, began as another reaction to the prevailing Utilitarian social philosophies and the idea that art should be moral principle of art for art sake, postulated hedonism and asserted the autonomy of aesthetic standards from mortality, utility, or pleasure. Besides social and philosophical writings, the most authoritative and influential being Charles Darwin who, in his On the Origin of Species developed his theory about evolution,
5

Dickens, Charles, Great Expectations, Prietenii Crii, Bucureti, 1994, p.5.

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The Victorian Period, literary features of the age

natural selection and survival of the fittest. This book created an enormous scandal and a lot of controversy and shattered the fundamental religious beliefs of the Victorian age as it questioned the very existence and role of God in the process of life and evolution. If the Romantic age was the age of poetry the age of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelly or Keats the Victorian epoch was the epoch of the novel, par excellence, a literary genre which, being more accessible, best suited the rising middle classes and their need for entertainment and education and was considered only as an instrument of pleasure. Poetry in the Victorian age was characterized by an inward movement; it often found a way of itself and became a select or elitist genre for educated readers with cultivated knowledge unlike the novel which was more mass oriented, a genre more easily affordable and accessible, more on everyones hand. Victorian poetry goes along three main streams of thought or directions places outside any form of antagonism or priority. The first direction tends to continue the Romantic Movement but on new coordinated, the second identifies itself with the contemporary movement in the intellectual and critical thought, stressing the need for objectivity, and aiming at a standard balance, while the third direction, a kid of re - emergence of the first , seems to favor the idealistic reaction, with its desire for emotion, its cult of beauty and its dreamy tendency, weaving the main themes of vision round the subtle blending of imagination and sensibility. However, seen in the context of the age, the poets of the second group occupy a position of slight precedence in relation to those of the first and third. As previously pointed out, the Romantic movement continued its existence in the Victorian period but less force and new dimensions as it got adapted to the requirements of the age. There is an element of Romanticism in all the Victorian poets but the new features are more balanced, the forms are more exact, the content more disciplined, and a stringent intellectualism tends to govern imagination. If there is any sympathy with emotions, the Romantic obsession of the self has gradually disappeared, and mans feeling, passions, pleasures or sensuality are dealt with in a more refined and elaborate manner. The properly Romantic inspiration appears now in mixed forms, and combines with psychological elements which characterize the new period. The most remarkable representative of the first and more subjective stream of thought is Alfred Tennyson, considered as a continuator of the Keaston and Wordsworth tradition, to whose poetry the more imaginative one that of the 10

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The Victorian Period, literary features of the age

third group of the Pre-Raphaelites and of other poets of the late Victorian period is to be added: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti, Morris, Swinburne, Meredith. The poets of the second stream of thought are under the influence of the new scientific discoveries, they are preoccupied with the restless activity of the mind, mere truth, and philosophy and psychology appeal to them. Their poems are analyses demonstrations, where science with its method has shown the way the poets ideas seem to be more objective. Robert Browning with his more cerebral poetry may be considered to be at the centre of this more objectives, restrained and balanced group of poets. Nonetheless, such classifications are often arbitrary and often writers cannot be judged and studied according to rigid orders and categories. The Industrial Revolution and mechanized Victorian England, with its robotic minds, materialist individuals, with people working more and thinking less could not be considered as sources of inspiration for Victorian poets. Dissatisfied with what they saw around them, feeling alienated and isolated, they tried instead to find acceptable substitutes in an obvious tendency to escape from reality. The poetry of the age, in spite of its sometimes deviating drifts was not shattered by inner convulsions; it had no ideology of its own produced no doctrines or programmatic documents. Pre-Raphaelitism was only a tendency, a movement that gave poetic voice to the divergences of the age as it tried to drift away from its mechanism and ugliness but, since it was not very well defined or oriented; it soon lost pace and disappeared. The aestheticism of the fin de sicle present in the poems of Swinburne and the versification revolution in the case of Hopkins appeared late in the Victorian age and manifested themselves more plenary in the twentieth century. The Pre-Raphaelite Movement was initially a mid-nineteenth century movement of revolt against artificial art and convention of representation that was imposed by the Royal Academy. But soon it widened its scope and turned out into a movement of avant-garde in painting with reverberations in poetry in its attempts to rejuvenate in both in content and form, such as in its themes, means of expression or versification techniques. The movement started when in 1850 a group of artists that were to call themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood felt that that their spiritual needs could not be satisfied by the grave sentiment of post-Romantic and neo-classical poetry found in Tennyson or Arnold, or the realism and didacticism of Brownings creation. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was originally a painters movement founded in 1848 11

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The Victorian Period, literary features of the age

by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Holman Hunt, William Michael Rossetti and the others. The PreRaphaelite may be considered a sort of Romanticism revisited and transferred to new coordinates. It is related with the later literary tendency of the age associated with feelings of restlessness, divergence and the need for renovation. Aestheticism or the Aesthetic Movement manifested itself in Europe in the late nineteenth century and centered on the doctrine that art exists for the sake of its beauty alone. The seeds of aestheticism are found in England in works of the artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood through the cultivation of sensuousness. The movement advocated the freedom of art and the fact that the artist should be allowed to express itself freely without any moral or ethical constraints paying attentions only to the form or the technique employed in his work. In literature the results were creations where feelings and sensations were represented with great frankness, which often offended contemporary readers. The nineteenth century was the age of the novel and the Victorian epoch brought about an unprecedented flourishing of it. This was due to several reasons, many of them pointed out in Flint. The Industrial Revolution led to the development of cities with concentrated markets; middle- classes rose in power and importance and the novel was the literary genre that best represented these classes; more and more people became educated and capable of reading; the coasts of printing and distribution became lower due to productivity; the new system of advertising and promotion of books yielded good result. Then, public reading increased and the number of lending libraries grew in parallel with the modernization and development of book publishing in the modern sense of the word.6 The public merely wished to be entertained with what was familiar; to pretend that what was found in books did really happen, that literature was journalism and fiction was history. In consequence, the literary trend that such expectations generated was realism, seen as representation of truth social, economic or individual - of the typical and familiar in real life, rather than an idealized formalized or romantic interpretation of it. The readers wanted to read about easily identifiable situations with ordinary people like themselves but liberated from the dullness of daily routine. Great writers like Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte or Elizabeth Gaskell felt the necessity to undertake rigorous documentation before starting to write their novels. Such
6

Dickens, Charles, The Old Curiosity Shop, Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1995, p.7.

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The Victorian Period, literary features of the age

necessity to represent truth with as much accuracy as possible was due to the socio- economic conditions of the epoch, but also to the development of sciences whose influence was ever increasing. Even in the cases when they fictionalized reality , such writers knew how to create the illusion that what they spoke about was directly related to real life, that their books were a transcript of what really happened. The best Victorian novels managed to transcend the petty requirements of their contemporary readership and be thus associated with larger audiences situated on different temporary levels and with different horizons of expectation. Very many novels were published initially in part-issue form and later in weekly papers in the form of serial publication. This became common practice with many greatest novelists such as Charles Dickens, W. M. Thackeray or George Eliot. The method of serialization affected the structure of the novel and had advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand it enhanced the role of the suspense from one technique commonly used in TV serials today, closer contact between writer and his readership, which enabled the writer to test the readers reaction to the narrated events. On the other hand there were incongruities, inconsistencies in character treatment or damages to the unity and harmony of the whole novel. The Victorian novel is essentially based on the chronological presentation of events where the hero emerges with the plot and the reader knows him as the story unfolds or in which the writer gives his hero an initial descriptive portrait. The novel often makes the writer feel the necessity to teach a moral lesson to improve the morals and manners of his readers, to make generalizations about human nature, or even to discuss the heros actions with the readers in an attempt to please them or to attend to their desires. If before many novels finished with happy-endings, this ceased to be common practice throughout the nineteenth century and even if there was a happy- ending, it was often contrived or suggested as in Dickenss novel Great Expectations. The narrative techniques is also traditional, the most frequently used being the third person narration with the writer emerging as an omniscient author this is the case of W. M. Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte or George Eliot. Another perspective is that offered by the third person narration. In Charlotte Bronte Jane Eyre it has pseudo autobiographical overtones. Anne Brontes novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a more complex combination of two first person narrations. An interesting case is found in Bleak House of Charless Dickens where the 13

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The Victorian Period, literary features of the age

subjective narration in the first person of participant in the story is made to alternate with more objective third person narration of nameless onlooker and outsider. The novelists of the Victorian age are not grouped around theoretical principles. In general, their creations deal with social, political and philosophical topics. However, there are two quite distinctive generations of writer that cover this period. The first one, from early Victorian Period, is represented by such writers as Charles Dickens, W. M. Thackeray, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, the Brontes, and George Elliot, who were very popular at that time. They are sort of spokespersons of the epoch, critical of the age but confident in sciences and progress and moral improvement of the individual. The second generation from the late Victorian period represented by Samuel Butler, George Meredith and Thomas Hardy, who were less popular then is more pessimistic and less confident in Victorian values, hence certain satirical overtones and insistence on the inner and darker sides of human personality. Victorian Period was a time of change, but time of GREAT literature.

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