The Victorian Age 1660 – 1776

Words from the Empire

As with Latin and the Roman Empire, the geographical extension of the British Empire meant for
Britain not just new political and commercial opportunities, but also an unprecedented
expansion of the English language.
The expansion worked in many ways:
• English was spoken from Canada to Australia, from Malta to South Africa;
• the English spoken in the colonies resulted in many local variations – American
English is the most notable one;
• in the new territories they encountered different flora and fauna, new products,
food, customs, and all this was naturally reflected in the language.

Victorian poetry
Early Victorian poetry: late Romantic tendencies
Between Queen Victoria’s accession and about 1850, two outstanding poets emerged and
became fundamental models for the poets of the second half of the century: Alfred Tennyson
and Robert Browning.
Unlike the Romantic poets, however, the early Victorian poets did not believe in a life vision.

The dramatic monologue

The early Victorian poets privileged indirect ways of dealing with human and social problems.
The most typical example of this tendency is the dramatic monologue: a fairly long poem in
which only one character speaks about himself or something important that has happened to
him. The best use of this form was by Robert Browning.

Poetry of sensual dreaming

The most representative poet of the age was Alfred Tennyson; his verse has a musical grace
tinged with sadness and a desire for a lost world, often set in a dreamy past.
Typical of Tennyson’s poetry is Ulysses (1842), a dramatic monologue where the classical hero
expresses a Romantic restlessness and desire to break conventions but at the same time is sadly
disillusioned about the possibility or the necessity of heroism.
 The sentimental comedy and the comedy of manners
For Tennyson’s Ulysses, as for its author, the world of epic action is. over Tennyson’s poetry, with
its languid melody and sensuality, leads to Aestheticism in the last part of the century. In Italy,
Giovanni Pascoli felt its influence.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded by a group of artists and poets in 1848. They
advocated a return to the purity of late medieval Italian art, before the stylization that set in
with Raphael and his followers.
They wanted to return to the simplicity tempered with mysticism of the Middle Ages, when
spiritual values when mechanization had not yet destroyed individual creativity.

The Aesthetic Movement

Aestheticism spread through Europe during the latter part of the 19th century, and became a
cultural force in Britain particularly in the 1890s.
Its major representative on the theoretical side was Walter Pater (1839-94), the author of
Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), where he states that the only way to combat
the meaninglessness of existence is to live hedonistically, devoting oneself to pleasure.
The culmination of Aestheticism in Victorian England was reached with the figure and works of
the Irish-born Oscar Wilde, who enjoyed a reputation as the leader of the Aesthetic
Movement.
His best-known poem, however, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898) shows no traces of
Aestheticism but is derived from a tragic experience: Wilde’s imprisonment in Reading jail.
 The dramatic monologue
Technical features
A dramatic monologue is a fairly long poem in which only one character speaks about
himself/herself or something important that has happened to him/her. The features of the
dramatic monologue can be summed up as follows:
• it is recited by a first-person speaker, usually a historical figure;
• it is set in a precise historical and geographical context;

• there is a silent listener who is essential to the dramatic or theatrical quality of the
piece;
• it centres on a crucial point or problem in the speaker’s life;
• the language is colloquial and the rhythm as abrupt as that of real live speech;
• irregular or unusual syntax and punctuation are used.
Here, as in many other monologues by Browning, the speaker is a man who is powerful but
unhappy in his private life, though he refuses to admit it. Browning’s monologues present a very
modern awareness of the way the human mind works: in speaking their minds, the characters
reveal their personalities through unexpected mental associations.

The early Victorian novel

The leading genre
For the first time in literary history, the novel became the leading genre. It reflected the new
social and economic developments, scientific discoveries, and the ethical problems raised by
the Industrial Revolution.
Novels were commonly read aloud by well-to-do families. Public readings were also common
among the lower class, where larger groups listened to the best reader in the group.

The writers’ compromise

Generally speaking, Victorian readers expected to be instructed and at the same time to be
entertained. Novelists were conditioned by their readers’ expectations and so they clearly show
both the desire to please and the fear of shocking.
This explains why early Victorian novels present conformity to accepted moral standards
together with a great liveliness.
Charles Dickens is the most representative novelist of the age; in his great novels he shows his
consciousness of social injustice, the poverty and suffering of the masses, political
incompetence and corruption.
Dickens’ social concerns, however, don’t make him seriously question the foundations of
Victorian society. Hard Times (1854) is typical of such ambiguity. It deals with the themes of the
inhumanity of the factory system and the unnatural teaching methods of the utilitarian
philosophy; it treats them with great participation and efficacy but, in the end, chooses a
narrative solution that divides the characters into good and bad.

Novels of Romantic love

The Romantic Age in England never produced great novels of Romantic love: in Jane Austen, for
instance, love is always subordinated to social conventions. Novels of Romantic love came with
two early Victorian women novelists: Emily Brontë and Charlotte Brontë.
They lived a life of isolation in the countryside, but they were also well-educated and part of a
larger literary family.

Emily’s novel is the archetypal novel of Romantic love: in Wuthering Heights Heathcliff, is
dominated by his self-destructive passion for Catherine; Catherine, the heroine, is forced to
sacrifice her love for Heathcliff for the sake of social conventions.

Novels without heroes

William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-63) was Dickens’ counterpart as a novelist. He reflected
the point of view of the upper class.
The scenes and characters of his greatest novel, Vanity Fair (1847-48), come from the upper
class and are precisely described through Thackeray’s refined style. The novel’s title points to its
author’s intentions: to reveal the hypocrisy and lack of morals of the ruling class.

Technical features of the early Victorian novel

The general tendency of the period was towards a mild realism. The characters of the novel
tended to be acceptable to the majority of readers, and identification on the part of the public
was mainly in terms of comedy (especially Dickens’ characters) or the drama of passion
(especially the Brontë sisters’ heroines). Narrators were generally omniscient, at different
levels: the narrator in Dickens, for example, is usually a companion to the reader, and shows
sound common sense; in Charlotte Brontë it is a passionate deeply-involved first-person
narrator. Emily Brontë, however, is a notable exception since in Wuthering Heights she makes
use of three different narrators involving a shifting point of view.

The late Victorian novel

A general realistic trend
The late Victorian novel featured a much more decided tendency towards realism than that of
the early Victorian novel. Realism, as an intellectual and literary movement, carefully studied
the influence of the social environment on man.
It also tended to concentrate on a direct presentation of its object, giving a precise picture of it
avoiding any judgement or comment. With its predilection for poor and degraded social settings
and failed characters, it was in itself a reaction against the triumphant Victorian ideology and
the official image of England as an imperial power and the world’s leader in commerce and
industry.

Crime and horror novels

The best writer in the horror and crime tradition, and one of the greatest English novelists by
far, is Robert Louis Stevenson.
His masterpiece, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) on a second and deeper level
casts serious doubts on human nature: man is in part inherently bad and science cannot hope
to separate the good from the bad artificially, and so solve all the problems of mankind.

Novel of philosophical pessimism

An extremely original reaction to accepted Victorian standards came from Thomas Hardy. His
stories are mostly set in rural Wessex, a fictional region in South-West England.
This is the world of Hardy’s major novels – such as Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) – which all
have love as their central theme.
Hardy called these works “Novels of Character and Environment”, to stress the two elements
that he thought shaped man’s destiny.
In contrast with a too easy Victorian optimism based on progress, he adopted, from the German
philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, the notion of an “immanent will”, a universal power
indifferent to the fate of man.

Aestheticism
As the century went on, other novelists followed the general anti-Victorian trend. This
culminated in the disengagement of the Aesthetic Movement, with its belief in “Art for Art’s
sake”. The Aesthetic creed derived from the French writer Théophile Gautier’s theory, summed
up in his slogan “L’Art pour l’Art”, according to which art is good in its own right, an end in itself.
The movement spread all over Europe during the last part of the 19th century and became a
cultural force in Britain in the 1890s. Its major representative was Oscar Wilde.
He only wrote one novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), which met with an immense
success and is the most outstanding work of fiction in the Aesthetic tradition

First examples of colonial novels

The greatest expansion of the British Empire, in the last quarter of the 19th century,
corresponds to the first examples of novels which both came from and were about the overseas
colonies. Rudyard Kipling was the first major writer to explore the relations between the
British and the Indians. He never seems seriously to question the right of the British to be in
India, but, however, was seriously attached to and
fascinated by the Indian continent. His best-
known novel, Kim (1901), contains
colourful and passionate
descriptions of
India’s various races and beliefs.
 Drama in Victorian Age
Apart from music- hall and farce, light melodrama was the favourite genre.
Melodrama was often adapted from popular French models and it also tended to follow the
narrative of the Victorian novel, especially those of Dickens or the horror and crime novels.
The best plays before the triumphal appearance of Wilde on the London stage, however, were
the comic operas by William S. Gilbert (1836-1911) and Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900), for which
Gilbert wrote the libretti and Sullivan the music.
Their most interesting work is Patience (1881), a satire of the Aesthetic Movement and in
particular of its main exponent: Oscar Wilde.

The new "comedy of manners”

The era of modern British drama really begins with the plays of Oscar Wilde and George
Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), in the 1890s, when for the first time since the Renaissance major
writers devoted their literary talent to the stage and attracted the public just as poets and
novelists did.
The wit of Wilde was carried further by Shaw who used it to shock the audience.
Wilde revived the Restoration “comedy of manners” adapted to Victorian society. His greatest
play, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), was immensely popular for its wit and sparkling
dialogues.

Beneath its brilliant surface, though, the superficial and shallow lives of the English upper
classes are exposed.