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1. INTRODUCTION. THE VICTORIAN SCENE.

The Victorian Era goes from 1830 to 1880. This period is
characterised by the extension of the British Empire, which implied its
political and economical superiority over the rest of the nations, and
by the social effects of the industrial revolution.
New territories were colonised: Gold Coast (1821), Falkland Isles
(1833), New Zealand (1840), Hong Kong (1841), some new territories
in India…
However, liberals criticise the maintenance costs of the
colonies. The main reasons were the cost of the American Revolution;
economic crisis in the West Indies and lack of commercial interest in
the colonies.
It was a period of social agitation:
First, middle class economical growth came together with the
rise of population, and population increase brought about emigration
to the new territories of the Empire.
Secondly, he Industrial Revolution had provoked that the
country became more urban and the population more mobile, mass
production and division of labour were introduced in the economical
system, the smoke and debris invaded the countryside and a non-
ideological and with trades manlike qualities middle class rose.
Finally, the social transition was a peaceful process due to fear
of spread of revolution from the Continent and the Utilitarian ideology,
whose main feature was the tendency to mingle business with
moralism.
Utilitarians were philosophical radicals whose main aim was the
improvement of the nation. Their proposal was the defence of
property based on stopping government interfering with trade;
leaving capital to find its most lucrative course and leaving industries
and intelligence their natural reward, idleness and folly their natural
punishment.
Late Victorian period was characterised by the debate about the
content of English culture, habits of resistance to the standardising

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effects of machines, the second Reform Bill of 1867: enfranchised

working classes in the towns, and the Trade Union Act of 1871: shifts
the centre of power.

2. THE VICTORIAN NOVEL.

There is no doubt that the Victorian era was the age of the
English novel, namely realistic, thickly plotted, crowded with
characters, and long. By the end of the period, the novel was
considered not only the premier form of entertainment but also a
primary means of analyzing and offering solutions to social and
political problems, only challenged by the revival of drama towards
the last two decades. This king style, the novel, is presented with a
political, philosophical or social overtone (Thackeray, Dickens, Brönte)
since was the ideal form to describe contemporary life and to
entertain the middle class.
2.1. EARLY VICTORIAN NOVELISTS.
The early Victorian writers coincided with the deep
transformation of rural England into the industrial one and are,
namely, among others, Charles Dickens (1812-1870), as the dominant
figure of the Victorian novel; the Brönte sisters, who combined
elements of the Gothic with a remarkably imagined account of the
social institutions of Victorian London; Dickens’ rival, Thackeray, who
is namely represented by his work Vanity Fair, a morality novel; and
Mrs Gaskell and Trollope with a less theatrical realism. Other writer
worth mentioning on the limits between the mid and late Victorian
novelists is George Eliot, profoundly preoccupied with the historian of
imperfect lives in their fullest social settings.
2.1.1. THE BRÖNTE SISTERS
Charlotte (1816-1855), Emily (1818-1848), and Anne (1820-49)
were the daughters of an Irish clergyman who held a living in
Yorkshire. Financial difficulties compelled Charlotte to become a
school-teacher and then a governess. Along with Emily she visited

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Brussels in 1842, and then returned home, where family cares kept
her closely tied. Later her books had much success, and she was
released from many of their financial worries. She was married in
1854, but died in the next year. Her two younger sisters had
predeceased her.
The Brontë painted the sufferings of an individual personality,
and presented a new conception of the heroine as a woman of vital
strength and passionate feelings. Their works are as much the
products of the imagination and emotions as of the intellect, and in
their more powerful passages they border on poetry. In their concern
with the human soul they were to be followed by George Eliot and
George Meredith
a) CHARLOTTE BRONTË (1816-1855)
Jane Eyre (1847) is her greatest novel and is full of countryside
details. The love story of the plain, but very vital, heroine is unfolded
with a frank truthfulness and a depth of understanding that are new in
English fiction. The plot is weak, full of improbability, and often
melodramatic, but the main protagonists are deeply conceived, and
the novel rises to moments of sheer terror.
In her next novel, Shirley (1849), Charlotte Brönte reverts to a
more normal and less impassioned portrayal of life. Again the theme
is the love story of a young girl. Villette (1853) is written in a
reminiscent vein, and the character of Lucy Snowe is based on the
author herself. The truth and intensity of Charlotte’s work are
unquestioned; she can see and judge with the eye of a genius. But
these merits have their disadvantages. In the plot of her novels she is
largely restricted to her own experiences; her high seriousness is
unrelieved by any humour; and her passion is at times overcharged to
the point of frenzy. But to the novel she brought an energy and
passion that gave to commonplace people the wonder and beauty of
the romantic world.
b) EMILY BRONTË (1818-1848)

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Although Emily wrote less than Charlotte, Emily Brönte is in

some ways the greatest of the three sisters. Emily’s unique Wuthering
Heights (1847) breathes the very spirit of the wild, desolate moors
where the main characters conceive their passions in gigantic
proportions. The novel often reaches the realms of poetry and has a
series of climaxes which increase the intensity of the novel by means
of unbelievable peaks of passion, described with a stark realism. She
also tried with poetry though just a few of her poems reached the
very highest levels. Her finest poems are probably “No Coward Soul is
Mine” and “Cold in the earth, and the deep snow piled above thee”.
2.1.2. CHARLES DICKENS (1812-1870)
Born at Portsmouth, he grew up in great poverty, little
education, and he was sent to work in a blacking business at ten.
Then, he attended school until he was 15. Taught himself shorthand
and became a parliamentary reporter. Began writing sketches for
papers, which were collected in the book Sketches of Boz (1835).
Gained public success and financial ease with The Pickwick Papers,
and then wrote one book after another. Promoted public reading and
travelled to the Continent and the States. His public readings were
successful, but exhausting, and led him to a breakdown in his health.
Died in 1870, at the age of 58, and was buried in the Poets´ Corner of
Westminster Abbey.
Dickens’ novels were so demanded despite the crudity of plot,
the unreality of characters and the looseness of style. His novels were
also issued in parts, this resulting in much padding and slow work.
Yet, his style is characterized by:
· Dickens’ interest in social reform, which embody no systematic
social or political theory but the evils of his day (boarding schools in
Nicholas Nickleby, workhouses in Oliver Twist, the new manufacturing
system in Hard Times, the Court of Chancery in Bleak House). His
crudest realism showed pictures of poverty rather than political
pictures of legislation, but all his novels show his preoccupation with
social problems;

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· His imagination, shown in the multiplicity of characters and

situations to create a whole world of people.
· His humour and pathos, which gave him the reputation of a good
humorist. His humour is not very subtle, but it goes deep, and is free
and vivacious in expression. His pathos appeared in the deaths of
little children, which he describes in detail (the death of Bill Sikes).
· His mannerisms so as to create a characterization of the
protagonists in stereotypes: the round character and the flat
characters.
· His style is neither polished nor scholarly, but it is clear, rapid, and
workmanlike, as the style of a journalist. He would use cockneyisms,
and tiresome circumlocutions. In his deeply pathetic passages, he
adopted a lyrical style, a kind of verse-in-prose, which is blank verse
slightly disguised.
2.1.3. WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THAKERAY (1811-1893)
William Makepeace Thackeray was born at Calcutta, in India but,
after his father’s death in 1816 and mother’s remarriage, he was
educated in England. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1829.
Both at school and college he struck his contemporaries as an idle
and rather cynical youth, whose main diversions were sketching and
lampooning his friends and enemies. He spent part of his youth in
Europe as a painter, gambling away his money and, as a result, the
loss of his fortune drove him to seek some means of earning a living.
These were the miseries from which, financially at least, he emerged
in the 1840s as a brilliant sketch-writer and caricaturist.
After publishing The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon (1844), a
picaresque novel, telling of the adventures of a gambling rascal who
prowls over Europe, and The Book of Snobs (1849), which continued
to be Thackeray’s pet abhorrence. Next, Vanity Fair appeared monthly
in 1847-1848. Later, he published Pendennis (1848-1850), The
History of Henry Esmond (1852), a historical novel of great length and
complexity, The
Newcomes (1853-1854) and The Virginians (1857-1859).

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Regarding his style, he was namely recognized by his struggle

through neglect and contempt to recognition; his method, which
protested against conventions and reacted against the popular novel
of the day, particularly, against romanticism; his humour and pathos,
mixed with a good deal of criticism, the desire to reveal the truth and
his satire; finally, he had a mimetic faculty and as a result, he was
brilliant in his burlesque.
2.1.4. ANTHONY TROLLOPE (1819-1888)
Anthony Trollope was born in London. Soon he was educated at
Harrow and Winchester, and obtained an appointment in the Post
Office. After an unpromising start he rapidly improved, and rose high
in the service. He is known as a prolific novelist and actually, he wrote
40 pages each week, each of 250 words, often while travelling for the
Post Office by train or ship. His Autobiography says that he began a
new novel the day after finishing the last.
Most of his books are set in London. He lived in Ireland for
eighteen years, and travelled more than any other 19th-century
writer, in Europe, Africa, the Americas and the Pacific. Unless Dickens
he has no violently good or evil characters, and less melodrama than
George Eliot. The realism in which he excels is broad and everyday
rather than deep of intense, and is reflected in his prolific number of
works.
Trollope began his career with Irish tales such as The Kellys and
the O’Kellys (1848), which had little success, and then produced the
Barsetshire novels on which his fame rests. This series, in which many
of the same characters appear in several novels, deals with life in the
imaginary county of Barsetshire and particularly in its ecclesiastical
centre, Barchester. It began with The Warden (1855); then came
Barchester Towers (1857), Doctor Thorne (1858), Framley Parsonage
(1861), The Small House at Allington (1864), and finally The Last
Chronicle of Barset (1866-1867). Later Trollope turned to the political
novel. Among his works in this kind were Phineas Finn (1869) and

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Phineas Redux (1874). One of his most interesting books in An

Autobiography (1883).
Trollope is the novelist of the middle and upper-middle classes.
With urbane familiarity and shrewd observation he presents an
accurate, detailed picture of their quiet, uneventful lives in a matter-
of-fact way which gives his works the appearance of chronicles of real
life. His main concern is with characters rather than plot, but his
characters, though clearly visualized and described in great detail,
lack depth, and Trollope never handles the profounder passions. The
framework of his novel is a series of parallel stories moving with the
leisureliness of everyday life. His style, efficiently direct, simple, and
lucid, is seen to particular advantage in his dialogue. A vein of easy
satire runs through many of his novels, and he makes skilful use of
pathos. Within his limited scope he is a careful craftsman whose
works retain their popularity.
2.1.5. ELIZABETH GASKELL (1810-1865)
Mrs Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell was born in London and died in
Hampshire. In order to offer an overall view of her life, it is relevant to
say that her mother dying a month after her birth, she was adopted
by an aunt who lived at Knutsford, near Manchester; in 1832 she
married William Gaskell, a distinguished Unitarian minister working in
Manchester; she was mother of a large family; although she began to
write at thirty-seven, Dickens secured her for his magazines; she
wrote Charlotte Brontë’s biography. Following Alexander: “her work
has the virtues of 19th-century realist fiction, of Jane Austen and
Anthony Trollope.”
It is convenient to consider Mrs Gaskell’s writings in two groups
rather than in the chronological order of their appearance. Her first
novel was a sociological study based on her experience of the
conditions of the labouring classes in the new cities of the industrial
North. Mary Barton, A Tale of Manchester Life (1848) gives a realistic
view of the hardships caused by the Industrial Revolution as seen
from the workers’ point of view. It is weak in plot, but nevertheless

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has some fine scenes, and it is carried forward by the strength of its
passionate sympathy with the downtrodden.
North and South (1855) is on a similar theme and its plot is
better managed. Like its predecessor it has some fine dramatic
incidents. Sylvia’s Lovers (1863) is a moralistic love story in a
domestic setting, which scenes of wilder beauty and human violence
are well blended, but the novel is spoilt by its unsatisfactory and
rather melodramatic ending. Her last, and unfinished, novel, Wives
and Daughters (1866), is by many considered her best. It is an ironical
study of snobbishness, which is remarkable for its fine female
characters such as Mrs Gibson, Molly Gibson, and Cynthia Kirkpatrick.
This is her most distinguished book which anticipates George Eliot in
its steadily built-up exploration of family and provincial life shaped by
historical contingencies.
2.1.6. GEORGE ELIOT (1819-1890)
George Eliot was the pen-name of Mary Ann Evans, the
daughter of the steward of a Warwickshire estate, a circumstance
which would inform all her work. She was born near Nuneaton, and
after being educated at Coventry, she lived much at home. Her mind
was well above the ordinary in its bent for religious and philosophical
speculation. In 1846 she translated Strauss’s Life of Jesus, and on the
death of her father in 1849 she took entirely to literary work.
Adam Bede (1859) was a full-length novel, which announced the
arrival of a new writer of the highest calibre. It gives an excellent
picture of English country life among the humbler classes. The story
of Hetty and the murder of their child is movingly told, and the book is
notable for its fine characters, outstanding among whom are Mrs
Poyser, Hetty, and Adam Bede himself.
Her next work, considered by many her best, was The Mill on
the Floss (1860). The partly autobiographical story of Maggie and Tom
Tulliver is a moving tragedy set in an authentic rural background, and
the character of Maggie is probably her most profound study of the
inner recesses of human personality. As yet her novel is not

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overloaded by the ethical interests which direct the course of her later
works. In style it is simple, often almost poetical. Silas Marner: the
Weaver of Raveloe (1861) is a shorter novel, which again gives
excellent pictures of village life; it is less earnest in tone, and has
scenes of a rich humour, which are skilfully blended with the tragedy.
Like The Mill on the Floss, it is somewhat marred by its melodramatic
ending.
Regarding her style, we may highlight her choice of subject,
always focused on the individual personality, the development of
human soul, or the study of its relationship to the greater things
beyond itself; her characters are usually drawn from the lower classes
of society, and she shows a great management of psychology. Hence
her studies of the English countryman show great understanding and
insight, and she is particularly interested in self-deceivers and stupid
people; the tone of her novels is one of moral earnestness and
humour; and finally, we may consider her style to be lucid, simple,
and reflective as well as often overweighed with abstractions. She
handles the dialogue for the revelation of her characters, and she
shows a great command of the idioms of ordinary speech, which
enables her to achieve a fine naturalness.
2.2. LATE VICTORIAN NOVELISTS.
Within the group of late Victorian writers, we find that novel
writers went along with and above a broadening mass market, as did
Hardy and James respectively. The main reason for the decline of the
novel was that at the centre of the stage the late nineteenth century
saw the revival of literary theatre (drama) with Wilde and Shaw as
leading figures, and to a lesser extent, poetry with Housman and
Kipling. However, we will examine the main late Victorian novelists
such as George Meredith and Thomas Hardy.
2.2.1. GEORGE MEREDITH (1821-1904)
Regarding his life, we have scanty details of his earlier life. All
we know is that he was born at Portsmouth, and for two years he was
educated in Germany. Like so many of the eager spirits of his day, he

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was deeply interested in the struggles of Italy and Germany to be

free. For some considerable time he was reader to a London
publishing house; then, as his own books slowly won their way, he
was enabled to give more time to their composition. For a time in
1867 he was temporary editor of The Fortnightly Review. He died at
his home at Box Hill, Surrey.
His first important novel is The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859).
Almost at one stride he attains to his full strength, for this Novel is
typical of much of his later work. In plot it is rather weak, and almost
incredible toward the end. It deals with a young aristocrat educated
on a system laboriously virtuous; but youthful nature breaks the
bonds, and complications follow. Most of the characters are of the
higher ranks of society, and they are subtly analysed and elaborately
featured. They move languidly across the story, speaking in a
language as extraordinary, in its chiselled epigrammatic precision, as
that of the creatures of Congreve or Oscar Wilde. The general style of
the language is mannered in the extreme; it is a kind of elaborate
literary confectionery.
The next novel was Evan Harrington (1861), which contains
some details of Meredith’s own family life; then followed Emilia in
England (1864), the name of which was afterward altered to Sandra
Belloni, in which the scene is laid partly in Italy. In Rhoda Fleming
(1865) Meredith tried to deal with plebeian folk, but with indifferent
success. The heroines of his later novels – Meredith was always
careful to make his female characters at least as important as his
male ones – are aristocratic in rank and inclinations. Vittoria (1867) is
a sequel to Sandra Belloni, and contains much spirited handling of the
Italian insurrectionary movement. Then came The Adventures of
Harry Richmond (1871), in which the scene is laid in England, and
Beauchamp’s Career (1876), in which Meredith’s style is seen in its
most exaggerated form.
In The Egoist (1879), his next novel, Meredith may be said to
reach the climax of his art. The style is fully matured, with much less

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surface glitter and more depth and solidity; the treatment of the
characters is close, accurate, and amazingly detailed; and The Egoist
himself, Sir Willoughby Patterne, is a triumph of comic artistry.
2.2. THOMAS HARDY (1840-1928)
Hardy was born at Upper Bockhampton, in the county of Dorset.
His first published work was the rather sensational Desperate
Remedies, which appeared anonymously in 1871. In the following
year the success of Under the Greenwood Tree established him as a
writer.
The art of Thomas Hardy was his poetry, but after his marriage
he put it aside to earn a living as a novelist. So, with respect to his
novels, the involved construction of Desperate Remedies (1871) gave
place to the charming idyll Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), one of
the lightest and most appealing of his novels. It was set in the rural
area he was soon to make famous as Wessex. The success of this
book, though great, was eclipsed by that of the ironical A Pair of Blue
Eyes, which appeared in Tinsley’s Magazine in 1873; and the following
year (1874) saw the first of the great novels which have made him
famous, Far from the Madding Crowd, a tragicomedy set in Wessex.
The rural background of the story is an integral part of the novel,
which reveals the emotional depths which underlie rustic life.
The rural setting is even more strikingly used in The
Woodlanders (1887), the tragic story of Giles Winterbourne and Marty
South, two of Hardy’s most noble figures. Then, separated by The
Well-Beloved (1892, reissued 1897), came Hardy’s last and greatest
novels, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895),
both of which, by their frank handling of sex and religion, aroused the
hostility of conventional readers. They seem modest enough by the
standards of to-day, but Tess of the D’Urbervilles was rejected by two
publishers and originally appeared in a somewhat expurgated version,
and the outcry which followed the appearance of Jude the Obscure led
Hardy in disgust to abandon novel-writing, though at the height of his
powers.

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In these two books we have the most moving of Hardy’s

indictments of the human situation; both contain unforgettable
scenes; the studies of Tess and Sue are two of his finest portrayals of
women, and the character of Jude surpasses in depth of insight
anything Hardy had previously achieved.
The main features of Hardy’s novels were his subjects, which
depicted human beings facing up to the onslaughts of a malign
power, the man as an individual, and a pessimist view of the period;
his treatment of themes, which showed Hardy’s concerns on his
philosophy of life, coincidence, and the suffering of his characters;
similarly, his characters are mostly ordinary men and women living
close to the soil, briefly sketched as country type individuals, and
their actions being told with a pithy humour.

3. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alexander, M. 2000. A History of English Literature. Macmillan Press.
London

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