Victorian Age in English literature
Victorian and Victorianism
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Victorian era, in British history, corresponding roughly but not exactly to the period of Queen Victoria’s reign (1837–1901), rather that of the period approximately between 1820 and 1914, characterized by rapid industrialization, a stable government, a growing state, and economy and above all the status as the most powerful empire in the world, having a juxtaposition between its deep rooted morality and religious foundation and the gradual scientific progress and rational outlook of the time.
The Early Victorian era (roughly 1832-1850) was a time of significant social and economic upheaval due to the Industrial Revolution and political reforms.
The Mid-Victorian period (around 1850-1870) was characterized by economic prosperity, imperial expansion, and a general sense of confidence.
The Late Victorian era (c. 1870-1901) saw an economic slowdown, growing criticism of societal values, and the rise of new artistic and cultural movements like Aestheticism and Decadence
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Victorianism refers to the socio-cultural phenomenon of the British people during Queen Victoria's reign (1837–1901), characterized by industrialization, rising prosperity, a strong middle class, and social reform.
Often the term “Victorianism” is used in a derogatory way to connote narrow-minded middle class orthodox attitude, repressive gender binaries and its determination to maintain feminine “innocence” in preferring the position of the women as “angels of the house”.
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The Victorian phenomenon : scopes and hiccups
- Imperialism : During Queen Victoria's reign the British Empire was extended significantly in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Other additions to the Empire include New Zealand (1840), Northern Somalia (1884), Burma (1886), and Egypt. The centre of the Empire was India, which was controlled by the East India Company until 1858. But after the Indian Mutiny of 1857 India was included in the British Crown's direct control and in 1876 Queen Victoria was declared the Empress of India. This unprecedented expansion and consolidation of colonial territories was driven by economic motives, strategic interests, and an eurocentric racist ideology of a "white man's burden" to civilize other cultures, led to the exploitation of resources, the destruction of local traditions, and the subjugation of diverse populations.
- Rapid Technological & Industrial Progress: Rapid technological advancement led to industrial growth and made the transition of Britain’s economy from agrarian to capitalist.
- Strict Morality and Respectability: Victorian society emphasized a high standard of moral behavior, restraint, and personal responsibility, especially within the middle class.
- Idealization of the family: The family was seen as the central unit of society, with Queen Victoria and her family serving as a model for the nation.
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- The Great Exhibition of 1851: The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations was organized in the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park,London. Prince Albert believed the exhibition symbolized peace and progress while critics like John Ruskin regarded it as vulgar. Different objects and artefacts across the world were collected and many of them were from the newly included colonies of the British Empire. To make a show off of British industrial supremacy seemed to be the purpose of that exhibition and it successfully drew millions of visitors during the five months of its running.
- The rise of the middle class: Industrial flourishing created a lot of scopes for employment and also paved the way to use entrepreneur skills to rise in the social ladder. Social mobility was noticeable.
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- Population Growth & Migration: Victorian age was marked by noticeable population growth and the consequent migration. People moved from the countryside into the new industrial cities to find work. Migrants from across the world also settled in Britain, notably Jews from Europe and Russia. The Irish people moved in large numbers to England and Scotland, as well as abroad after the Irish potato famine in 1845. Many Britons left England for North America or the other colonies in search of a better life and future.
- The growing sense of Nationalism: The fervor of Nationalism was seen during the age of Queen Elizabeth during England’s fight and glorious victory against the Spanish Armada. After that it lost its previous splendour. But after the French revolution the nationalist zeal was evident and inculcated by leaders like Gladstone and Disraeli who suggested that the English nation was the best, a logic that further strengthened the foundation of colonialism.
The idea of British Nationalism was grounded on industrialism, a narrative of progress and the Empire, the glory.
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- The spirit of nationalism was crucial to the political establishment and to harness manpower proclaiming the prosperity of the Nation. Curriculums were designed in schools to promote British glory. Festivals, rituals, granting of voting rights and pompous public events like the Great Exhibition created the public spectacles of Unity and a sense of belongingness to this prosperity. A national culture and language were imbibed in the public through the newspapers that sought to create a sense of national community.
- The growth of Democracy: The voting rights were gradually extended to the working classes and by 1918 there was universal suffrage for men. The fight for votes for women was in full swing, and 1930 onwards, women too achieved the same voting rights as that of men.
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- Social Reforms: This period also witnessed some important reforms including____i)legislation on child labour, ii) safety in mines and factories, iii) public health, iv) the end of slavery in the British Empire, v) reformation of the Prisons, vi) legislation protecting child and adult workers began to be enacted as the result of the campaigns of Michael Sadleir and the Earl of Shaftesbury, and reports by parliamentary commissions, vii) by 1880, education was made compulsory for all children up to the age of 10.
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Challenges:
- Colonial exploitation and violence: The negative aspect of imperial expansion was that it was often brutal and exploitative. The extension of the empire was founded on the basis of subjugation and violence against indigenous peoples. Colonial subjects faced economic exploitation and cultural infiltration.
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- Poverty and Slums: The unevenly distributed wealth generated by industrialization led to the class distinctions. Widespread poverty, unsanitary urban slums, and poor working conditions were rampant, particularly in the "hungry forties".
- Poor Working Conditions & child labour: Under the strict moralism deep-seated social problems and hypocrisy were hidden, like, the exploitation of factory and mine workers, particularly of women and children.
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- Class division and gender binaries: Victorian society was organized hierarchically in terms of race, religion, gender, region, and occupation and the chief determining principles of Victorian society were gender and class. Victorian gender ideology was premised on the “doctrine of separate spheres.” “Men at work, women at home” was the moral outlook of the time that adhered to women’s silent domesticity and male voice in public spheres.
- The working class, the majority of the population, got its income from wages. The middle class used to get its income from salaries and profit and grew rapidly during the 19th century, from 15 to over 25 percent of the population. During the 19th century, members of the middle class were the moral leaders of society and also achieved some political power. The very small and very wealthy upper class got it from property, rent, and interest. The upper class owned most of the land in Britain and thus controlled local, national, and imperial politics.
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- Lack of healthcare: Due to the lack of sanitation and inadequate housing, especially in urban areas, diseases like cholera, tuberculosis, and scarlet fever were rampant and due to the lack of medical knowledge and expertise and a lack of effective drugs and treatments, doctors often had to stand by helplessly, relying on remedies like opium, rest, or dietary changes. While scientific and technological advancements occurred, they often benefited only the wealthy, who could access better medical care whereas the poor often received treatment as "cases" and were subjected to experimentation.
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Victorian Compromise:
The Victorian Compromise describes the era's pervasive contradictions, particularly the contrast between industrial progress and the affluence of the upper/middle classes, and widespread poverty, disease, and exploitation for the working classes. This paradoxical coexistence of strict morality with hypocrisy, a rigid patriarchal family structure challenged by nascent feminism, and a tension between established religious dogma and emerging scientific questions, all of which were reflected in Victorian literature and society.
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Religion in Victorian society
- The Church of England was the major religious institution in Victorian England and it is undeniable that church-going was an important aspect of Victorian society and the people of that age strictly conformed to the religious structures that were significant to their religious practices.
- The nation was immersed in its Christian ideology and faith and to attack or question the doctrines of religion in public was still out of question except for a few intellectual platforms that allowed this much liberty. Much of the concerns of public discussions were religious and the popular literature of the time was stuck in its core Christian background.
- The importance of the Church was to present itself as a platform for the argumentations over matters of religion and its relevance in forming contemporary social life and its ideologies.
- Despite the predominance of the Church of England, significant departures from the mainstream religious praxis were noticeable in the emergence of Evangelicalism, Oxford Movement, Methodism and Agnosticism.
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Evangelicalism:
- It refers to a movement within the Church of England in the 18th & 19th centuries with its emphasis upon the principle of “vital Christianity”, a strict moral code and the importance of good work, inspired by Calvinism and formed parish churches on the model of the Church of England.
- The Evangelicals were socially influential as the majority of their followers belonged primarily to the upper and the middle classes.
- The Evangelicals insisted upon the strict observance of the Sundays and were against the perpetuation of the slave trade. The Evangelicals played significant roles in founding the missionary societies.
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Oxford Movement:
- The Oxford Movement, a 19th century development centered at Oxford, questioned some of the foundational principles of the Church of England.
- The four most influential figures of this movement include John Henry Newman whose editing of the 90 Tracts for the Time initiated the argument for the movement and so it was also called the Tractarian Movement.
- This movement sought to re-emphasize the importance of the Roman Catholic position as an alternative to the predominant Church of England as their leaders were critical to the Anglican Church and adhered to the Roman Catholic Church.
- The movement was crucial in introducing many ritualistic and doctrinal practices in the contemporary religious scenario and to the development of the Anglo Catholic Church in England.
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Methodism:
A Protestant Christian tradition and movement, founded by John and Charles Wesley in 18th-century (though still popular in Victorian religious phenomenon) England to revitalize the Church of England with its emphasis upon the power of the Holy Spirit, personal relationships with God, social holiness, and charity towards the poor and vulnerable.
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The divisions within the Anglican Church was a kind of manifestation of the newly formed interrogatory attitude of the Victorian society developed by the scientific rationality and praxis, a consequent effect of Darwinism, scientific development, the overall material prosperity owed to scientific progress which resulted in Faith/Doubt binaries and Agnosticism.
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Darwinism
Darwinism is the theory of biological evolution by natural selection,resulting in adaptive evolution and the formation of new species over time. Charles Darwin in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species posited that when more organisms are born than can survive, leads to a "struggle for existence" where individuals with advantageous, inherited traits are more likely to survive and reproduce, passing those traits on to their offspring creating the notion of the “Survival of the fittest”.
The theory of evolution by natural selection leads to the inspiring literary movements like Naturalism that challenged the Biblical notion of God's creating the World and Man, and the societal norms of Man’s superiority, instead, it treated man as animals like any other animals whose characteristics are result of the two aspects of heredity and environment. Writers like Émile Zola incorporated these ideas into his works, emphasizing the biological and environmental factors influencing human character and destiny.
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Agnosticism:
Victorian-era agnosticism was a movement among intellectuals and scientists, led by figures like Thomas Henry Huxley and Herbert Spencer, who (Huxley) coined the term "agnostic" in the 1860s. Greatly influenced by the growing importance of science, particularly Darwinian evolution, and a shared disillusionment with orthodox Christianity, it rejected religious dogma in favor of evidence-based, scientific reasoning, asserting that claims about God's existence are unknowable rather than definitively false.
Agnostics distinguished themselves from atheists by affirming the potential existence of an unknowable reality while prioritizing moral conduct rooted in reason and the natural world, representing a significant shift in the intellectual landscape's relationship with religion.
Prominent Victorian agnostics included biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, philosopher Herbert Spencer, writer Leslie Stephen, and physicist John Tyndall.
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In this regard it is undeniable that despite the impact of Darwinism and scientific rationality in the socio-cultural domain of Victorian life that contested the foundational religious principles and its conservative moral outlook and philosophical queries seemed to have apparently shaken the foundational principles of religion but the preoccupation with orthodox morality was still intact in Victorianism. Firstly, the daily life of the average Victorian was unaffected by Darwinism and secondly, the faith/doubt binaries were strictly confined to the intellectual people and it was only towards the final stages of the age that the questioning of religious ideology was a matter of curiosity of the Modernist think tanks.
Overall, the Victorian age was marked by the mutual existence of the opposing tendencies of science and religion and its relative contradictions to an extent that both science and religion became the two important aspects of Victorian life that eventually went beyond the matrix of binarism.
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Utilitarianism
Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, described utility as the capacity of actions or objects to produce benefits, such as pleasure, happiness, and good, or to prevent harm, such as pain and unhappiness. To put in simple words, utilitarianism is an effort to provide an answer to the practical question “What ought a person to do?” The answer is that a person ought to act so as to maximize happiness or pleasure and to minimize unhappiness or pain.
Utilitarianism is a version of consequentialism, which states that the consequences of any action are the only standard of right and wrong.
John Stuart Mill modified Bentham's idea of utilitarianism.While Bentham focused on the quantity of pleasure, Mill's utilitarianism emphasized both the quality and quantity of pleasure. Mill distinguished between "higher" (intellectual, mental) and "lower" (physical) pleasures, arguing that higher pleasures have greater intrinsic value and are more desirable than lower ones. Bentham, by contrast, believed all pleasures were fundamentally similar, differing only in degree.
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Women in Victorian world
- The questioning of the social marginalisation of women though began during the Age of Enlightenment and afterwards in the works of Mary Wollstonecraft whose A Vindication of the Rights of Women presented the polemics of the socio-cultural representation or rather the subjugation of women, The Victorian society and its orthodox morality was still rooted in the traditional belief of women as “the angels of the house”, emphasizing her strict domesticity and her secondary role with correspondence to her male counterparts.
- Social position : Women were denied accessibility to the public sphere. Women's position was considered to be best suited within the domestic periphery. Though the benefits of having domestic help (a consequence of the Industrialisation) lessened the burden of work, not the strict patriarchal objectification of womanhood. The writers like Bronte sisters and George Eliot even had to adopt a male name to create their artistic visibility and acceptance.
- Parameters of beauty: Long hair was considered one of the parameters of beauty in the Victorian idea of a woman. Females could wear their hair “down” in polite society until around the age of 16. After marriage, women had no choice but to wear their hair “up,”. Hats were perched high on the head, or even tilted forward to accommodate the volume of hair at the back. “Letting her hair down” was an act that only occurred in the bedroom when a woman took the hairpins out and brushed her long hair only in front of her husband or her maid.
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- Dress: Styles evolved throughout the Victorian era, with the increasing layers of voluminous petticoats and crinolines providing skirt fullness, initially bell-shaped and later becoming full in the back with the bustle alongside accessories like bonnets and shawls.
- Opportunity for economic independence: The process of visualizing men at work and women at home binaries were evidently exercised. Women were allowed only the liberty to opt for a career of a governess or a teacher ___ careers that were “feminine” enough to identify her femininity. Economically, the career of a governess was not a financially profitable and socially elevating, rather confined her position only at the periphery.
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- Acceptance: Another social aspect of the working women was that their work outside the home remained unrecognized and after returning home they had to play “the angels of the house” to get her “appraisal”.
- Angels vs Whores: Womanhood in Victorianism was largely based on two ideas —-- “an angel of the house” and “the fallen women” who resisted the role determined for her. In this regard, The Duchess in Browning’s My Last Duchess and Tess in Hardy’s Tess of the d'Urbervilles suggest the politics and praxis of representation of women.
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New Women : A Voice of Resistance:
- Before the 1880s, women primarily used dependent forms of cycling, such as two-seater sociables or tricycles, often with a male escort. Women riding bicycles, especially after the 1885 "safety bicycle," represented a new, independent "New Woman" who challenged traditional gender roles and became a symbol for the suffrage movement. Cycling also led to revolutionary changes in women's fashion, encouraging more practical clothing like "bloomers" (shorts) and impacting women's newfound freedom, mobility, and participation in public life that caused moral panic and fears of societal decay.
- In the hands of the Bronte sisters, womanhood found its new and more practical articulations. Jane Eyre’s questioning of the orthodox morality and her transgression from a docile mistress to a financially independent woman through an unexpected inheritance, allowed her to marry Rochester on equal terms, finding a balance between her passionate nature and moral integrity. Catherine Earnshaw’s conflict between her wild and passionate love for Heathcliff and her “practicable” marriage into sobriety with Edgar Linton causes her psychological break off and shows how a woman in her attempts to play the traditional roles are broken from within.
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The theme of a woman's madness has been treated with a psychological curiosity that puts into challenge the traditional image of the “madwomen in the attic”.
George Eliot's writing style is defined by profound realism in detailed portrayals of everyday life in the intricate social dynamics, a deep psychological insight into characters, and a distinctive omniscient narrative voice along with the often moralistic themes showcase her sharp intellect and wide-ranging erudition, creating complex, sympathetic characters whose motivations are meticulously explored. She, being a woman writer , did not only emphasize gynocentric attitudes, rather presented the male struggle and male worldview.
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Victorian Poetry : Characteristics and Genre
- Realism
- Pessimism
- Focus on masses and city life
- Questioning to God
- Morality
- Interest in Medieval Myths and Folklore
- Conflict
- Imperialism
- Contemporary politics
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Genres
- Dramatic Monologue
- Lyrics
- Sonnets
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Lord Alfred Tennyson
He is a typical Victorian who adopted the conventional religious and social views and values of his age. His early poems were not much accepted, but gradually he sharpened his skill. His later poems are serious, thoughtful and musical.
- His poem The Idylls of the King is preferred by many people even today.
- In Morte D Arthur he turned Malory’s story into poetry. He did it with different meters.
- In his long poem In Memoriam he laments for the death of his friend Arthur Hallam. Tennyson’s shorter poems are generally better than longer ones.
- Ulysses is his most controlled and perfectly written poem which presents the heroic voice of the aged hero.
- The Princess is the collection of his fine lyrics which shows his mysterious and musical quality.
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Robert Browning - Browning is a major Victorian poet who voiced the mood of optimism in his work and also criticised rigid morality and gender representation. His poetry is marked by psychic reality. His reputation is higher as the writer of dramatic monologues.
- One of his successful dramatic poems is Pippa Passes, telling the story of Pippa, a young girl who works in a silk factory and spends her one day off wandering through the Italian countryside.
- Sordello is a good example of his difficult poem that consists of a fictionalised version of the life of Sordello da Goito, a 13th-century Lombard troubadour depicted in Canto VI of Dante Alighieri's Purgatorio.
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- The Ring and the Book is a poem based on a historical murder case from 1698 Rome, centered on exploring themes of justice, love, and the nature of truth.round Count Guido and his wife, Pompilia exploring themes of justice, love, and the nature of truth.
- My Last Duchess is a dramatic Monologue that portrays the gender politics of representation.
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Matthew Arnold
- Arnold was both a poet and a critic of his time. His works truly represent modern life complexity, its sick hurry and divided aims with a sad undertone.
- Rugby Chapel is a heartfelt tribute to Arnold's father, reflecting on his loss and the lasting impact of his spirit.
- Thyrsis is a poem of lament for his friend, Clough.
- In his poem The Scholar Gipsy the poet talks about an Oxford man who joins a band of gypsies and wanders with them.
- Memorial Verses is his sad poem in which the poet laments for the deaths of many poets at home and abroad.
- He also wrote a critical sonnet on Shakespeare, whom he praised too much.
- One of his other poems, Empedocles on Etna, has been highly praised, perhaps because it is not altogether sad.
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Elizabeth Barrett Browning
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning was held in higher critical esteem among all female poets of the English-speaking world in the 19th century.
- Aurora Leigh, a long blank-verse poem telling the complicated and melodramatic love story of a young girl and a misguided philanthropist.
- Much of her best work is contained in Sonnets from the Portuguese. She pretended at first that these sonnets were translated from the Portuguese; they were really an entirely original expression of her love for Browning.
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Edward Fitzerald
- One of the greatest poetic translators was Edward Fitzgerald.
- He translated six of Calderon’s plays, the Agamemnon of Aeschylus.
- He also translated Rubaiyat of the Persian poet Omar Khayyam. Most translations lose something and are not as good as the originals. But this book is considered by some Persian scholars to be better than Omar Khayyam’s work. In this translation of the Rubaiyat, he entirely omitted the hidden meanings of the original.
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G. M Hopkins
G.M. Hopkins is known for his Spring Rhythm, a poetic rhythm designed to imitate the rhythm of natural speech and Curtail Sonnets, a 10.5-line poem written in the spirit of the sonnet such as "Pied Beauty" and "Peace".
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Some Notable Literary Schools of Victorian age
Pre-Raphelite Poetry
- Pre-Raphaelite poetry was a literary counterpart to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood group of young British painters who banded together in 1848 in reaction against the unimaginative and artificial historical painting of the Royal Academy, instead, were inspired by Italian art of the 14th and 15th centuries direct and uncomplicated depiction of nature typical of Italian painting before the High Renaissance and, particularly, before the time of Raphael. They used to contribute to their periodical called The Germ.
- Poets associated with this movement, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and William Morris.
- Poets used descriptive language to create vivid, detailed imagery similar to paintings, focusing on color and precise detail to evoke a scene.
- They sought to revive the spirit of medieval art and literature, emphasizing a return to nature, beauty, and spiritual symbolism.
- Pre-Raphaelite poetry valued art for art's sake, focusing on aesthetic beauty and intense emotional experience rather than moral or social reform.
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Their poems often conveyed a sense of melancholy and longing, reflecting a deep engagement with themes of love and mortality.
Through their innovative use of language and imagery, Pre-Raphaelite poets made significant contributions to the development of symbolism and aestheticism in later literary movements.
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Examples: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “The Woodspurge” is evident in the contemplative but uncomplicated subjects of its poetry. William Morris was known for poems like "The Haystack in the Floods" and "The Defence of Guenevere". Algernon Charles Swinburne contributed with works such as "The Garden of Proserpine" and the verse drama “Atalanta in Calydon”. Christina Rossetti, both a close associate and critic of the group in her poem “In an Artist’s Studio” offers a critique of the Pre-Raphaelites’ treatment of their female subjects, describing a painter who renders a woman “not as she is, but as she fills his dream.” Her other notable works include "Remember," "Goblin Market," and "Song".
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Aestheticism and Decadent Movement
- Aestheticism challenged the values of mainstream Victorian belief that literature and art fulfilled important ethical roles, and emphasized upon the idea of “art for art's sake”. Aestheticism was named by the critic Walter Hamilton in The Aesthetic Movement in England, in 1882 and this movement flourished in the 1870s and 1880s. By the 1890s, the Decadent Movement shared the similar motto of “art for art's sake” and challenged the Victorian artificiality and excess in favour of naturalness and conventional morality, intertwined with the Aesthetic movement.
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- Having its roots in German Romanticism, the artists and writers of Aesthetic style tended to profess that the Arts should provide refined sensuous pleasure, rather than convey moral or sentimental messages.
- The main characteristics of the style were: suggestion rather than statement, sensuality, great use of symbols, and synaesthetic effects—that is, correspondence between words, colours and music.
- Predecessors of the Aesthetes included John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, along with some of the Pre-Raphaelites, who, themselves, were a legacy of the Romantic spirit.
- Notable writers of the Aesthetic Movement are Walter Pater whose Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), revised as The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1877) advocated an ideal of the intense inner life, was taken as a manifesto of Aestheticism and Oscar Wilde whose works like The Picture of Dorian Gray (novel) and the play Salome explored themes of aestheticism, perversion, and moral corruption.
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- Decadent writers often displayed an ennui and intellectual weariness against the codes of Victorian industrialized society and had an eye for the esoteric and the complex, prioritizing beauty and aesthetic refinement and often explored transgressive sexuality, morbid themes, and a general dissatisfaction with conventional life of morality.
- Chief practitioners of Decadent Movement were Charles Baudelaire, a French poet
- Joris-Karl Huysmans whose novel Against the Grain became known as the "breviary of the Decadence" for its exploration of the movement's themes, Oscar Wilde,whose works like The Picture of Dorian Gray (novel) and the play Salome explored themes of aestheticism, perversion, and moral corruption and Arthur Machen, an English writer associated with Decadent themes, known for his prose like The Hill of Dreams.
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Victorian Novel
Novel was the predominant literary genre of the Victorian age and its growing popularity was for its insistence on the realistic narratives that appeared closer to life and it was easy for the readers to connect with.
Themes in Victorian novels
- The Victorian novelists addressed the socio-economic and cultural changes in their contemporary world —- railways, growing materialism, urbanisation, educational opportunities, loss of childhood innocence —- all found expression in the notable works of the period with the difference in representation. As Thackeray aimed to satirize and Dickens endeavoured to caricature it.
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- Victorian novels were concerned with women's lives in the binary of “angel in the house” and “fallen women”. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair represents the opposite extremes of “good” and “evil” respectively through Amelia and Becky. Hardy’s Tess of the d'Urbervilles and the Return of the Native portrayed the notion of “fallen women” and questioned the objectification of women as well.
- Marriage and love was a commonly engaging theme and importance was given on the family values, restrain and order in choice of marriage as in Emily Bronte’ Wuthering Heights, Catherine Earnshaw’s conflict between her wild and passionate love for Heathcliff and her “practicable” marriage into sobriety with Edgar Linton causes her psychological break off and shows how a woman in her attempts to play the traditional roles are broken from within. Anne Bronte’s Agnes Grey dealt with the different conditions of marital experience.
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- Middle class morality and corruption of the then society was articulated by Thackeray in his Vanity Fair that characterized materialistic orientation and Dickens in his Oliver Twist and Dombey and Sons that explored the rampant corruption in the Victorian world by showing how a child lost his innocence under the threat of materialistic “progress”.
- The conflict between the society and individual, of surface and depth, of money and values are responded by George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, and Daniel Deronda.
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- The societal conflict, the struggle for existence of the people belonging to the lower social strata and the tragic tone is evident in Hardy's world of Wessex novels.
- The Condition of England novels in the 1840s and 1850s portrayed the impact of the Industrialisation on man and society and were also known as “social problem novels” or “industrial novels”. Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Burton and North and South showed the working class life and critiqued the dehumanization of human life brought by industrialization. Dickens’ Dombey and Son dealt with the mercenary pursuit and Benjamin Disraeli's Coningsby and Sybil raised the issue of leadership in an industrial society divided by class division. Dickens' Hard Times inaugurated the theme of Utilitarianism and caricatured the emphasis upon the mechanical way of life.
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The Victorian Prose
- The term Victorian prose encompassed a wide variety of rhetoric dealing with the condition of England, religious argumentations, scientific queries and philosophical questions including Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, philosophical texts of John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold and Ruskin.
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- A combination of a variety of genres—-- autobiography, novel and essay Sartor Resartus by Carlyle demonstrated the distinction between appearance and reality and demonstrated some of the aspects of Victorian society with analogical representations.
- John Henry Newman’s philosophical prose was often engaged with the paradigms of the Man/God relationship and his Apologia Pro Vita Sua is an autobiographical account of his controversial tracts that founded the propositions of the Oxford Movement by addressing the problems of The Church of England and a modification of it.
Funlit with Anushua https://youtu.be/mcJSFd9m_XQ
- Matthew Arnold’s prose writings were tinged with moral strains that extended beyond the binaries of good and evil, instead, focused on cultural orientation and his thesis of the touchstone method made it possible for him to situate the literary heritage of English Literature within the ambit of his idea of culture. He carefully scrutinized the relationship between self and society in the cultural framework that was influenced by his understanding of both Classical and the Continental society.
- John Ruskin asserted his views on economic aspects of society in Unto This Last which seemed out of tune from the mainstream Victorian cultural criticism. His other prose works like Modern Painters and The Stones of Venice dealt with ideas that went beyond the aesthetic queries of Pre-Raphelite brotherhood and Aestheticism with which he was often loosely associated. His autobiographical Praeterita encompassed multiple genres.
Funlit with Anushua https://youtu.be/mcJSFd9m_XQ
