Vous êtes sur la page 1sur 9

Adeel Raza

Prominent Literary Figures of Victorian Era


Jane Austen
Rich in comedy, romance, wit and satire, Jane Austen’s six novels are also pin-sharp reflections of
her social and geographical milieu in and around Hampshire, Bath and Dorset.

The daughter of a Hampshire clergyman, Austen was born at Steventon Parsonage on 16


December 1775. The seventh of eight children, she grew up in a happy and close-knit family, and
the careers and families of her brothers (two clergymen, two admirals, and one adopted by wealthy
relations) inform her stories. She started writing at a young age, and her juvenilia includes dramatic
sketches, spoofs and poems. Friends and family circulated her writings and wooed publishers, but it
was over a decade before Sense and Sensibility (1811) went into print, soon followed by Pride and
Prejudice (1813), which she called ‘my own darling child’. In his journal, Sir Walter Scott contrasted
her ‘exquisite touch’ with his own ‘Big Bow-Wow’ approach, praising the way she made
‘commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment.’[1]

Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice both revolve around sisters, and Austen’s loving
alliance with her only sister Cassandra lasted all her life. Both Jane and Cassandra had romances,
but, like Austen’s heroines, refused to marry for the sake of marriage. They remained single,
supporting their mother after the death of their father in 1805.

In 1809, Austen moved with her mother and her sister to Chawton, a tranquil Hampshire village.
There, in a house given to them by her wealthy brother Edward, Austen spent her happiest years. All
six of her novels date in their finished form from this period. Mansfield Parkwas published in 1814
and Emma, with its heroine whom Austen half-jokingly predicted 'no one but myself will much like', in
1815.

Austen died, aged only 41, on 18 July 1817, leaving the subtle Persuasion and her Gothic
satire Northanger Abbey to be published later that year.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning


Elizabeth Barrett Browning was one of the most fêted poets of her age, a candidate for poet laureate
after the death of William Wordsworth. She is now best known for her Sonnets from the
Portuguese (1850), love poems to her husband Robert Browning, who called her ‘my little
Portuguese’ because of her dark looks. In a letter she described herself as ‘“little & black” like
Sappho … five feet one high … eyes of various colours as the sun shines … not much nose … but
to make up for it, a mouth suitable to a larger personality’.

She was born near Durham, the oldest of the 12 children of a wealthy plantation-owner, and was
educated at home, near Ledbury. An avid reader and writer, she started writing an epic about
Marathon at the age of 11 and had it privately printed when she turned 14. In 1821, she developed a
debilitating spine disease. The family moved to London’s Wimpole Street in 1838, where Elizabeth
socialised with such literary lions as Wordsworth and Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

In 1845, the prolific, but to most people opaque, poet Robert Browning wrote to thank her for
praising his poems, and in turn expressed admiration for the ‘fresh strange music, the affluent

1
Adeel Raza

language, the exquisite pathos and true new brave thought’ of hers. Soon they were in love.
Elizabeth's father disapproved, but Elizabeth had a personal fortune, and in 1846 she and Robert left
for Italy after a secret marriage. They settled in Casa Guidi, Florence, where her health improved,
and in 1849 she gave birth to a son, Robert, known as Pen. Elizabeth addressed women’s rights in
her verse novel Aurora Leigh (1856); her Casa Guidi Windows(1851) supported Italian reunification.
She died in Florence in 1861.

William Blake
William Blake is famous today as an imaginative and original poet, painter, engraver and mystic. But
his work, especially his poetry, was largely ignored during his own lifetime, and took many years to
gain widespread appreciation.

The third of six children of a Soho hosier, William Blake lived and worked in London all his life. As a
boy, he claimed to have seen ‘bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars’ in a tree on
Peckham Rye, one of the earliest of many visions. In 1772, he was apprenticed to the distinguished
printmaker James Basire, who extended his intellectual and artistic education. Three years of
drawing murals and monuments in Westminster Abbey fed a fascination with history and medieval
art.

In 1782, he married Catherine Boucher, the steadfast companion and manager of his affairs for the
whole of his chequered, childless life. Much in demand as an engraver, he experimented with
combining poetry and image in a printing process he invented himself in 1789. Among the
spectacular works of art this produced were ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, ‘Visions of the
Daughters of Albion’, ‘Jerusalem’, and ‘Songs of Innocence and Experience’.

Although always in demand as an artist, Blake’s intensely felt personal mythology, derived from
radical ardour and the philosophy of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, led to wild mental
highs and lows, and later in life he was sidelined as being close to insanity. On his deathbed, he saw
one last glorious vision, and ‘burst out in Singing of the things he Saw in Heaven’.[1]

Charlotte Brontë
Most famous for her passionate novel Jane Eyre (1847), Charlotte Brontë also published poems and
three other novels.

She was the third of six children of Patrick Brontë, an Irish crofter’s son who rose via a Cambridge
education to become, in 1820, a perpetual curate at Haworth, in Yorkshire. Charlotte was only five in
1821 when her mother Maria died. Four years later her two older sisters died as a result of the harsh
conditions in the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge, Lancashire to which they and the eight-
year-old Charlotte were sent in 1824. Charlotte’s experiences at the school influenced her portrayal
of Lowood School in Jane Eyre. After the death of the two oldest Brontë daughters, Patrick and
Maria’s sister Elizabeth gave the children a stimulating and wide-ranging education at home.
Charlotte, her two younger sisters Anne and Emily Brontë, and their brilliant, unstable brother
Branwell invented complex imaginary worlds, which they wrote about extensively in tiny homemade
books – a fruitful literary apprenticeship. Aged 15, Charlotte enrolled at a new school not far from
Haworth. Roe Head School was less harsh than the Clergy Daughters’ School, but Charlotte spent
only 18 months there before returning home.

2
Adeel Raza

As an adult, Charlotte worked as a governess and spent some years teaching at a boarding school
in Brussels; her unrequited love for the school’s headmaster, informed her novels Villette (1853)
and The Professor (published posthumously in 1857). It was the passion and rebellion of Jane
Eyre (1847) that earned her fame, and when visiting London she moved in the best literary circles,
befriended by Mrs Gaskell and Thackeray – the latter remembered ‘the trembling little frame, the
little hand, the great honest eyes’. Shirley (1849), written during and after the tragic deaths of her
three siblings within a single year, displayed Charlotte’s engagement with both women’s rights and
radical workers’ movements.

In June 1854, she married her father’s curate Arthur Nicholls, who had long been a loyal suitor. She
became pregnant but, severely weakened by morning sickness, died aged 38 on 31 March 1855.

Emily Brontë
Best-known for her novel Wuthering Heights (1847), Emily Brontë also wrote over 200 poems which
her sister Charlotte Brontë thought had ‘a peculiar music – wild, melancholy, and elevating’.

Emily was the fifth of the six children of Patrick Brontë, Irish-born perpetual curate of the remote
Yorkshire moorland parish of Haworth. After the death of their mother Maria when Emily was three,
the children were given an inspiring and wide-ranging liberal and academic education by their father
and thoroughly instructed in domestic ‘order, method and neatness’ by their aunt, Elizabeth
Branwell.

For amusement the siblings invented imaginary worlds, drawing maps and writing stories and
magazines – all in tiny micro-script, as if written by their miniature toy soldiers. Charlotte and
Branwell created the kingdom of Angria; always stubbornly independent, Emily created the
breakaway island of Gondal with her younger sister Anne. Surviving poems about this fantasy world
show the influence of Wordsworth, Walter Scott and Byron. By then Emily was the tallest of the
sisters, slim and graceful with – in the words of family friend Ellen Nussey – ‘kindling liquid eyes’.
She was, however, very reserved, and it soon emerged that she was unsuited to life away from
Haworth. ‘Stronger than a man’, Charlotte wrote, ‘simpler than a child, her nature stood alone.’

Emily’s work first appeared in print when, on Charlotte’s urging, a collection of the three sisters’
poems was privately published in 1846 under the names of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell; outstanding
among them is Emily’s ‘No coward soul is mine’.

Wuthering Heights, which was published in 1847, is reminiscent of Gondal in its moorland setting
and passionate war between two families. One review dismissed it as ‘coarse and loathsome’. Emily
began another novel, but it was destroyed by Charlotte after Emily’s death, aged 30, from
tuberculosis in December 1848. Wuthering Heights was only rescued from obscurity in the 1880s,
championed by Algernon Swinburne, Matthew Arnold, and G K Chesterton, who described it as
‘written by an eagle’.

Robert Burns
Robert Burns was born on 25 January 1759 in Alloway, a small village near the river Doon just south
of the town of Ayr in south-west Scotland. Burns received a good education in mathematics and
English literature, but from his teens had to contribute hard labour to the working of the family’s
rented farm.

3
Adeel Raza

Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect was published at Kilmarnock in 1786 and made him famous;
an expanded edition appeared at Edinburgh the following year, and through his new friends among
the Scottish ruling class he was able to get a job in the Excise service in Dumfriesshire, where he
moved in 1788. Here he concentrated his creative energies in contributing song lyrics to two major
collections, each published in several volumes over a period of years: The Scots Musical
Museum (1787–1803) and A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs (1793–1841). Long-standing
health problems led to his early death on 21 July 1796.

Lord Byron
Dedicated to freedom of thought and action, and anarchic in his political views and personal
morality, the poet and adventurer Lord Byron was the personification of the Romantic hero.

He was the only son of the flamboyant naval captain ‘Mad Jack’ Byron and the doting and naïve
Lady Catherine Gordon. His father deserted his mother in 1790, and died a year later. The death of
a cousin made Byron heir to the Byron barony and the family’s Nottinghamshire seat Newstead Hall
at the age of six; he became Lord Byron when he was 10. Brought up in Aberdeen, he was educated
at Harrow and Cambridge. Dark and dashing, he soon developed a reputation for promiscuity and
profligacy equal to his father’s. He won the hearts of countless women with passionate letters and
poems, describing the first of his many loves Margaret Parker as ‘made out of a rainbow’, and
immortalising the last, Teresa Guiccoli, as ‘fair as Sunrise – and warm as Noon’.[1] Widely-read in
classic literature, he soon developed the biting line in satire that characterises his greatest poems.

In 1809-11, he toured Mediterranean countries such as Albania and Greece, returning to


publish Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812), an overnight success that epitomised the disillusioned
melancholy of his generation. He was famously summed up as ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’
by Lady Caroline Lamb; he called her ‘a little volcano…the cleverest most agreeable, absurd,
amiable, perplexing, dangerous, fascinating little being that lives.’[2]

In 1815, he married the wealthy and scholarly Annabella Milbanke; their only child Ada became a
notable mathematician. The couple separated in 1816, and Byron left England, never to return. His
last and most enduring love affair was with Teresa, teenage wife of the elderly Count Guiccoli.

His most famous and hugely successful work was the satiric epic Don Juan, which he began to
publish in 1819, and had still not finished in 1824, when he died of fever at Missolonghi, where he
had sailed to support the Greek fight for independence.

Lewis Carroll
Lewis Carroll is the pseudonym of mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, which he adopted
when publishing his famous children’s novels and nonsense verse.

The son of a Cheshire parson, Dodgson grew up in a large family which enjoyed composing
magazines and putting on plays. In 1851, he went to Christ Church, Oxford. By 1855, he was a
fellow (which necessitated celibacy), lecturing in mathematics. He occupied a tower in the college for
the rest of his life. He wrote many books on mathematics and logic, and enjoyed inventing puzzles
and games and playing croquet.

4
Adeel Raza

His love of paradox and nonsense and his fondness for small children led to the writing of Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland (1865), a story which he began while rowing Lorina, Alice, and Edith, the
three small daughters of the College Dean H G Liddell, up the Thames for a picnic near Binsey. A
sequel, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, appeared in 1871. Interviewed
when she was old, Alice remembered him as tall and slender, with blue/grey eyes, longish hair, and
‘carrying himself upright, almost more than upright, as if he had swallowed a poker’.

He published Phantasmagoria and Other Poems in 1869, The Hunting of the Snark in 1876
and Sylvie and Bruno in 1889.

Dodgson wrote and received ‘wheelbarrows full’ of letters (a letter register he started in his late 20s
and kept for the rest of his life records more than 98,000 sent and received). Many of these were on
religious and political issues while others were full of light-hearted nonsense. He excelled in artfully
staged photographs, many of children in costumes and others of friends, including Dante Gabriel
Rossetti, Holman Hunt and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. He died, aged 65, of pneumonia.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge


One of the most influential and controversial figures of the Romantic period, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge was born in 1772 the son of a clergyman in Ottery St Mary, Devon. His career as a poet
and writer was established after he befriended Wordsworth and together they produced Lyrical
Ballads in 1798.

For most of his adult life he suffered through addiction to laudanum and opium. His most famous
works – 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', 'Kubla Khan' and 'Christabel' – all featured supernatural
themes and exotic images, perhaps affected by his use of the drugs.

Coleridge was as much a prose and theoretical writer as he was a poet, as revealed in his major
work, Biographia Literaria, published in 1817. Coleridge's legacy has been tainted with accusations
of plagiarism, both in his poetry and critical essays. He also had a propensity for leaving projects
unfinished and suffered from large debts. But, such was the originality of his early work, that his
place and influence within the Romantic period is undisputed.

Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens is perhaps as famous today as he was in his lifetime, the author of 15 novels, five
novellas, and countless stories and essays, he also generously promoted the careers of other
novelists in his weekly journals, and concerned himself with social issues. He excelled in writing
about London settings and grotesque and comic characters (Uriah Heep and Fagin, Miss Havisham
and Scrooge, the Artful Dodger and Sam Weller).

He was born in Portsmouth on 7 February 1812, son of John Dickens, a feckless and improvident
navy clerk with a great love for literature, and his wife Elizabeth: Charles drew an ironically
affectionate portrait of them in Mr and Mrs Micawber (David Copperfield). A happy childhood in
Chatham, during which he read voraciously, ended with a move to London in 1822. Family poverty
meant the young Charles had to earn money, and he spent a humiliating year labelling bottles in a
blacking factory; during this period, his father was imprisoned for debt. Both experiences informed
later novels.

5
Adeel Raza

After leaving school, he became a parliamentary journalist and sketch-writer. He first won fame in
1836 with the antics of the cockney sportsmen portrayed in The Pickwick Papers, which was issued

in 20 monthly parts. In the same year he married Catherine Hogarth, daughter of Evening
Chronicle editor, George Hogarth; they had 10 children.

Next, written in monthly instalments with prodigious speed, came Oliver Twist (1838) and the semi-
comedic Nicholas Nickleby (1839). Dickens soon graduated to writing the complex and resonant
masterpieces that have ensured his enduring fame, including David Copperfield(1850), Bleak
House (1853), Great Expectations (1861) and Our Mutual Friend (1865).

An enthusiast for the theatre, he enjoyed performing his own works, and twice toured America
lecturing. After the collapse of his marriage in 1858, he continued his liaison with the actress Nelly
Ternan. He died of a stroke in 1870, leaving The Mystery of Edwin Drood unfinished.

George Eliot
George Eliot was the pen name of the novelist Mary Ann Evans. She grew up in Warwickshire at a
time when industrialisation was transforming the countryside. Her mother died when she was 17,
and in 1841 she and her father moved to Coventry which she would use as inspiration for the
fictional town of Middlemarch. There she joined a circle of free-thinking intellectuals, and lost her
Christian faith. After her father died in 1849, she travelled abroad before settling in London working
as an editor at the left-wing Westminster Review. This led to her meeting the philosopher and critic
George Henry Lewes, married but separated from his wife. Eliot lived with Lewes openly and started
referring to herself as Marian Lewes, in defiance of Victorian notions of propriety.

Lewes encouraged her to write fiction, for which she adopted a male psuedonym, partly in order to
avoid her work being judged in relation to her scandalous domestic situation. Her first Warwickshire-
set tales, profoundly influenced by the interest in ordinary people typical of both Wordsworth’s poetry
and contemporary genre painting, appeared in Blackwood’s Magazinefrom 1857; they were
published as Scenes From Clerical Life in 1858. Adam Bede followed in 1859, and The Mill on the
Floss in 1860. She published three more novels in the following decade, including Silas
Marner (1861), as well as some poetry. Her most famous book, Middlemarch, was published in eight
instalments from 1871 to 1872.

A year and a half after Lewes’s death in November 1878, Eliot married the much younger John
Cross, but she died from kidney disease within a year.

Elizabeth Gaskell
The novelist Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell is now best-known as the author of Cranford and North and
South, and the biographer of her friend Charlotte Brontë. Her greatest books were written in reaction
to the industrialisation of Manchester, where she lived for much of her life. ‘I had always felt a deep
sympathy with the care-worn men, who looked as if doomed to struggle through their lives in strange
alternations between work and want’ she wrote in the preface to Mary Barton.

She was born in Chelsea, London on 29 September 1810, the daughter of two devout Unitarians,
William Stevenson and Elizabeth Holland. After her mother died in 1811, she was brought up by her
aunt, Hannah Lumb, in Knutsford, Cheshire. In 1832, she married William Gaskell, a Unitarian

6
Adeel Raza

minister and later a professor of history, literature and logic; both were interested in new scientific
ideas and literature. The couple settled in Manchester.

Shattered by the death of her infant son in 1845, she turned to writing for solace. Mary Barton,
published anonymously in 1848, won praise from Charles Dickens, who called her his ‘dear
Scheherazade’ and invited her to contribute to his journals. In January 1853 she published the
controversial Ruth, the story of a seduced seamstress. Cranford, a gentle but acutely observant
Knutsford-set tale of two spinster sisters, was serialised in Household Words later that year. And in
1855, she published North and South, a study of the tensions between mill-owners and workers.

Gaskell met Charlotte Brontë while on holiday near Windermere. They became close friends through
their letters to one another, and after Charlotte’s death in 1855, Gaskell wrote a carefully researched
and protective biography of her.

She was still working on Wives and Daughters, a humorous coming-of-age tale, when she died
suddenly of a heart attack on 12 November 1865.

Thomas Hardy
The poet and novelist Thomas Hardy is perhaps most famous for his powerfully visual novels,
concerned with the inexorability of human destiny. His works unfold against a rural background
drawn as an elegy for vanishing country ways, but which also provides much-needed comic relief.

Thomas Hardy was born in Higher Bockhampton, Dorset - and the fictitious Wessex where he sets
most of his novels is clearly inspired by south-west England. Son of a stonemason, and trained as
an architect, he wrote in his spare time until the success of Far From The Madding Crowd (1874).
He could then give up architecture for writing, and marry Emma Gifford, whom he had met in
Cornwall in 1870.

Between 1874 and 1895, he wrote over a dozen novels and collections of stories, including The
Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) and Tess of the d'Urbervilles(1891).
After the adverse reception of the savagely bleak Jude the Obscure (1895) he turned to poetry,
which he continued to write and publish throughout the rest of his life.

By the end of the 19th century, he had gained an international reputation and a wide circle of literary
friends. His changed circumstances led his and Emma’s interests to diverge; in many of his novels,
impulsive passion leads to disaster. Their rift was increased by Emma’s objection to the unremitting
gloom of Jude the Obscure, and its pessimistic view of marriage. However, after her death in 1912,
Hardy suffered deep remorse; a visit to the Cornish coast where he had met Emma produced a
stream of magnificent poems in her memory, published as Poems of 1912-13. In 1914 he married
his much younger secretary, Florence Dugdale. He died at Max Gate on 11 January, 1928, the
house in Dorchester that he had designed himself over four decades previously.

John Keats
John Keats’s poetic achievement in a span of a mere six years can only be described as
astonishing. But in his own lifetime, critics came close to destroying him.

7
Adeel Raza

Born in London in October 1795 to a respectable London innkeeper Thomas Keats and the lively
and comfortably-off Frances Jennings, he lost his father after a riding accident when he was eight,
and his mother to tuberculosis when he was 14. In the summer of the same year, he was
apprenticed to a surgeon neighbour of his maternal grandparents in Edmonton. In 1815 he began
medical training at Guy’s Hospital. Despite qualifying, he never practised medicine, turning instead
to writing poetry.

His first volume of poems, published in 1817, attracted little attention beyond the odd dismissive
remark - despite including ‘On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer’. In the same year, Blackwood’s
Magazine published a series of reviews denouncing what it called the ‘Cockney school’: poets and
essayists associated with the writer Leigh Hunt, of which Keats was one.

His long and ambitious Endymion (1818) fared little better critically than the 1817 volume.
Nevertheless, he was encouraged by appreciative friends including Hunt, William Hazlitt and
Benjamin Haydon, who classed him with Percy Bysshe Shelley as a rising genius. Between 1818
and 1819, the most fertile period of his life, he fell in love with his ‘Bright Star’ Fanny Brawne, and
produced his six famous odes, and such great narrative poems as ‘Isabella, or The Pot of Basil’,
‘The Eve of St Agnes’, ‘Hyperion’, ‘Lamia’, and ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’. Even then critical praise
was grudging.

In 1820, he was, like his mother and brother Tom, fatally stricken with tuberculosis. He sailed for
Italy in the hope of recovering, but died in Rome on 23 February 1821.

The second half of the century at last brought him fame, praised by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Algernon
Charles Swinburne and the Pre-Raphaelites. Today he is one of the best-loved and most quoted of
all English poets.

Christina Rossetti
Christina Rossetti by Dante Rossetti, British Library

Christina Rossetti’s reputation as a remarkably direct and compelling lyric poet has grown over the
years; ‘Goblin Market’, ‘In The Bleak Midwinter’ and ‘Remember’ are now among the best-loved
English poems.

Born on 5 December 1830 into a lively artistic and literary Bloomsbury family, she was the youngest
child of the Italian scholar Gabriel Rossetti, and sister to the poet and artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
and the writers William and Maria Rossetti. Their mother was Frances Polidori, sister of John
Polidori, who was Lord Byron’s friend and physician. Love of all things Italian ruled the household.

Christina was given a stimulating education at home, but when her father’s health failed early in the
1840s, her mother turned to teaching outside the home to earn money. Maria became a governess,
William a civil servant and Gabriel went to art school. In 1845, Christina suffered a nervous collapse,
which had a lasting effect on her character. Around this time she, her mother and her sister all
became deeply interested in Anglo-Catholicism.

She learnt to write poetry by imitation, experimenting with different verse forms (privately printed as
'Verses' in 1847). Her first published poems appeared in The Athenaeum in 1848; she modelled for
her brother Dante Gabriel’s ‘Girlhood of Mary Virgin’, and later for other paintings. She explored this
experience in her poem ‘In an Artist’s Studio’ (composed in 1856). Although much admired, and

8
Adeel Raza

painted, by Dante Gabriel’s friends in the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, she refused marriage, breaking
off an engagement and turning down two other suitors. Conflict between the sacred and the secular
is a recurring theme in her work.

Goblin Market and Other Poems was published to critical acclaim in 1862, and Christina was hailed
as a successor to Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Other collections followed, including Sing-Song: A
Nursery Rhyme Book (1872); Speaking Likenesses (1874), a distinctly strange collection of tales ‘in
the Alice style’; and the devotional work Seek and Find (1879). She died of cancer in 1894. Her
brother William edited a near-complete edition of her poems, published as Poetical Works in 1904.

Vous aimerez peut-être aussi