The Victorian era, from the coronation of Queen Victoria in 1837 until her
death in 1901, was an era of several unsettling social developments that forced
writers more than ever before to take positions on the immediate issues animating
the rest of society. Thus, although romantic forms of expression in poetry and
prose continued to dominate English literature throughout much of the century,
the attention of many writers was directed, sometimes passionately, to such
issues as the growth of English democracy, the education of the masses, the
progress of industrial enterprise and the consequent rise of a materialistic
philosophy, and the plight of the newly industrialized worker. In addition,
the unsettling of religious belief by new advances in science, particularly
the theory of evolution and the historical study of the Bible, drew other writers
away from the immemorial subjects of literature into considerations of problems
of faith and truth. h2o24ok
Nonfiction
The historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, in his History of England (5 volumes,
1848-1861) and even more in his Critical and Historical Essays (1843), expressed
the complacency of the English middle classes over their new prosperity and
growing political power. The clarity and balance of Macaulay's style, which
reflects his practical familiarity with parliamentary debate, stands in contrast
to the sensitivity and beauty of the prose of John Henry Newman. Newman's main
effort, unlike Macaulay's, was to draw people away from the materialism and
skepticism of the age back to a purified Christian faith. His most famous work,
Apologia pro vita sua (Apology for His Life, 1864), describes with psychological
subtlety and charm the basis of his religious opinions and the reasons for his
change from the Anglican to the Roman Catholic church.
Similarly alienated by the materialism and commercialism of the period, Thomas
Carlyle, another of the great Victorians, advanced a heroic philosophy of work,
courage, and the cultivation of the godlike in human beings, by means of which
life might recover its true worth and nobility. This view, borrowed in part
from German idealist philosophy, Carlyle expressed in a vehement, idiosyncratic
style in such works as Sartor resartus (The Tailor Retailored, 1833-1834) and
On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841).
Two fine Victorian prose writers of a different stamp presented other answers
to social problems. The social criticism of the art critic John Ruskin looked
to the curing of the ills of industrial society and capitalism as the only path
to beauty and vitality in the national life. The escape from social problems
into aesthetic hedonism was the contribution of the Oxford scholar Walter Pater.
Poetry
The three notable poets of the Victorian Age became similarly absorbed in social
issues. Beginning as a poet of pure romantic escapism, Alfred, Lord Tennyson,
soon moved on to problems of religious faith, social change, and political power,
as in “Locksley Hall,” the elegy In Memoriam (1850), and Idylls
of the King (1859-1885). All the characteristic moods of his poetry, from brooding
splendor to lyrical sweetness, are expressed with smooth technical mastery.
His style, as well as his peculiarly English conservatism, stands in some contrast
to the intellectuality and bracing harshness of the poetry of Robert Browning.
Browning's most important short poems are collected in Dramatic Romances and
Lyrics (1841-1846) and Men and Women (1855). Matthew Arnold, the third of these
mid-Victorian poets, stands apart from them as a more subtle and balanced thinker;
his literary criticism (Essays in Criticism, 1865, 1888) is the most remarkable
written in Victorian times. His poetry displays a sorrowful, disillusioned pessimism
over the human plight in rapidly changing times (for example, “Dover Beach,”
1867), a pessimism countered, however, by a strong sense of duty. Among a number
of lesser poets, Algernon Charles Swinburne showed an escapist aestheticism,
somewhat similar to Pater's, in sensuous verse rich in verbal music but somewhat
diffuse and pallid in its expression of emotion. The poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti
and the poet, artist, and socialist reformer William Morris were associated
with the Pre-Raphaelite movement, the adherents of which hoped to inaugurate
a new period of honest craft and spiritual truth in property and painting. Despite
the otherworldly or archaic character of their romantic poetry, Morris, at least,
found a social purpose in his designs for household objects, which profoundly
influenced contemporary taste.
The Victorian Novel
The novel gradually became the dominant form in literature during the Victorian
Age. A fairly constant accompaniment of this development was the yielding of
romanticism to literary realism, the accurate observation of individual problems
and social relationships. The close observation of a restricted social milieu
in the novels of Jane Austen early in the century (Pride and Prejudice, 1813;
Emma, 1816) had been a harbinger of what was to come. The romantic historical
novels of Sir Walter Scott, about the same time (Ivanhoe, 1819), typified, however,
the spirit against which the realists later were to react. It was only in the
Victorian novelists Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray that the
new spirit of realism came to the fore. Dickens's novels of contemporary life
(Oliver Twist, 1837-1839; David Copperfield, 1849-1850; Great Expectations,
1861; Our Mutual Friend, 1865) exhibit an astonishing ability to create living
characters; his graphic exposures of social evils and his powers of caricature
and humor have won him a vast readership. Thackeray, on the other hand, indulged
less in the sentimentality sometimes found in Dickens's works. He was also capable
of greater subtlety of characterization, as his Vanity Fair (1847-1848) shows.
Nevertheless, the restriction of concern in Thackeray's novels to middle and
upper class life, and his lesser creative power, render him second to Dickens
in many readers' minds.
Other important figures in the mainstream of the Victorian novel were notable
for a variety of reasons. Anthony Trollope was distinguished for his gently
ironic surveys of English ecclesiastical and political circles; Emily Brontë,
for her penetrating study of passionate character; George Eliot, for her responsible
idealism; George Meredith, for a sophisticated, detached, and ironical view
of human nature; and Thomas Hardy, for a profoundly pessimistic sense of human
subjection to fate and circumstance.
A second and younger group of novelists, many of whom continued their important
work into the 20th century, displayed two new tendencies. Robert Louis Stevenson,
Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad tried in various ways to restore the spirit
of romance to the novel, in part by a choice of exotic locale, in part by articulating
their themes through plots of adventure and action. Kipling attained fame also
for his verse and for his mastery of the single, concentrated effect in the
short story. Another tendency, in a sense, an intensification of realism, was
common to Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, and H. G. Wells. These novelists
attempted to represent the life of their time with great accuracy and in a critical,
partly propagandistic spirit. Wells's novels, for example, often seem to be
sociological investigations of the ills of modern civilization rather than self-contained
stories.
19th-Century Drama
The same spirit of social criticism inspired the plays of the Irish-born George
Bernard Shaw, who did more than anyone else to awaken the drama from its 19th-century
somnolence. In a series of powerful plays that made use of the latest economic
and sociological theories, he exposed with enormous satirical skill the sickness
and fatuities of individuals and societies in England and the rest of the modern
world. Man and Superman (1903), Androcles and the Lion (1913), Heartbreak House
(1919), and Back to Methuselah (1921) are notable among his works. His final
prescription for a cure, a philosophy of creative evolution by which human beings
should in time surpass the biological limit of species, showed him going beyond
the limits of sociological realism into visionary writing.
