The Victorian Age (1832-1901)
Dr. Sylvia Bailey Shurbutt
The Victorian period was one fraught with paradox and contrast, a time when the seeds of Modernism were sprinkled liberally upon the intellectual and literary landscapes. It was also a period rife with the tensions of lingering Romanticism and Modernist ideas poised on the horizon. As Matthew Arnold wrote in "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse," his was an age "Wandering between two words, one dead,/The Other powerless to be born,/ with nowhere yet to rest my head,/Like these, on earth I wait forlorn" (85-88).
The political/sociological landscape of the time evinced extraordinary change, with all the positive and negative effects of the Industrial Revolution and British Colonialism coming to the fore. Mass transportation, modern modes of communication and manufacturing, a population movement from agrarian to urban locations, the expansion of democratic tendencies in a highly structured class society, and the disturbance to the gender status quo precipitated by what was referred to as the "woman question"--all contributed to the tensions and inconsistencies of the period.
This "in-between," transitional condition of the Victorian period thus engendered the following contrasts and possibly contributed to the oft-thought hypocrisy of some social mores of the times:
1) Optimism versus Pessimism: Note a thread of Romantic idealism still lingered in the poetry of Tennyson at the same time as doubt and depression; see "In Memoriam."
2) Industrial, Technological Advancement versus Workhouse Poverty and Slums in the Cities: Note the novels of Dickens which portrayed the evils of industrialized Britain.
3) Scientific, Medical Advancement versus Superstition and Disease: Note the scientific work of Darwin, Huxley, and Macaulay which portrayed both the enlightenment of the period and engendered doubt and loss of faith.
4) Faith in Democracy and Utilitarian Values versus Distrust in such Democratic Tendencies: Note the revolutionizing Reform Bills of the period--1832, 1867, 1884--juxtaposed with Arnold's disdain of Philistinism and Mammonism and Carlyle's distrust of the "herd" mentality.
5) Belief in the Future versus a Yearning for the Past: Note the 1851 Exhibition highlighting industrial and cultural achievements of the period and the architectural wonder of the modernist Crystal Palace juxtaposed with the literary works of Tennyson with their medieval settings, of Browning with their Renaissance settings, and of the Pre-Raphaelites who looked back toward ages of more predictable ideals and social structures.
6) Religious Faith versus Religious Doubt: Note the Oxford Movement and religious and social writings of Newman contrasted with the darkly naturalistic novels of Hardy.
From these contrasts and inconsistencies, come the major motifs of the age: 1) fragmentation, 2) alienation, 3) loss of values and search for faith, 4) yearning for the past, 5) the "modern malady, or, as Arnold's termed, "this strange disease of Modern life"; 6) regeneration through love and suffering; 7) achievement of ones ends through the means of indirection; and
the fortunate fall.
Major Writers of the Victorian Period
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)
Child prodigy and famed poet before she was 20, Barrett Browning dedicated her poetry to a realistic aesthetic and to social reform. Like Shelley, she believed that art was not only "a thing of beauty" but a vehicle for social change. Of the social causes that most attracted her, feminism, abolition of slavery, and the ills of the working classes were central. Major works include:
1) "Sonnets from the Portuguese"
2) "The Cry of the Children"
3) Aurora Leigh
Barrett Browning's poetry was immensely influential on the work of such poets as Emily Dickinson.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)
Poet laureate and premier poet of his age, Tennyson epitomizes the equivocation of his age. His poetry is sometimes light in philosophic content but never fails to offer some of the finest music in English verse after Spenser. Greatly influenced by Keats, Tennyson himself cast a spell upon the Pre-Raphaelites, his verse offering the same attention to detail, extraordinary word color, sensual richness as the paintings of Rossetti, Burne-Jones, and William Morris. In this respect, Tennyson, like Keats, is a forerunner of the aestheticism of the fin de siecle. His work offered, as well, a mirror for his own age, thematically expressing:
1) the dilemma of the artist, caught between duty and escape: Lady of Shalott, Palace of Art, and Ulysses;
2) the tension between religious doubt and faith: In Memoriam;
3) love as the redeeming quality of the Universe;
4) conventional Victorian moral strictures of self-knowledge, self-control, duty, etc.;
5) the woman question: The Princess. His most beloved work, if not his best, is Idylls of the King, based on the medieval Arthurian legends.
Robert Browning (1912-1889)
Browning is the master of psychological realism (Prospice) and an experimenter in multiple focus points of view (Pippa Passes). He is also a forerunner of the stream of consciousness narrative style, particularly effective in such poems as My Last Duchess, The Bishop Orders His Tomb, and Soliloquy in a Spanish Cloister. Brownings dramatic presentation of character, with its Freudian undertones and satiric irony, is best illustrated in the dramatic monologue. His interest in psychology and in the holes and corners of history can be seen in his magnum opus, The Ring and the Book. For all these reasons, Browning is one of the most influential of the Victorians on modern poetry and prose.
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)
Possessing neither the intellect or imagination of Browning nor the musical ear or poetic expertise of Tennyson, Arnold was, nonetheless, the Victorian writer to best express the spirit of his age, its Zeitgeist. Arnold was also an astute critic of his times, distinguishing between the Hebraism (prudish British moral propensities) and Hellenism (sweetness and light); see Culture and Anarchy. The overbearing hyper-morality and narrow-mindedness of the Victorians was summed up in Arnolds description of Philistinism. (Arnolds ideas were countered by Thomas Huxley in Science and Culture.) Arnold is also responsible for providing in literary criticism the touchstone approach for measuring great works of poetry (The Study of Poetry) and for establishing the critical stance of disinterestedness when evaluating works of art and literature. Like Shelley, he visualized the poet as a moral legislator, and he gave us a still valid definition of the critic as one who achieves a disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world (The Function of Criticism in the Present Time). Arnolds poetry is reflective of many of the darker themes of Victorianism: the questioning of the Romantic nature myth (In Harmony with Nature), alienation and fragmentation (Marguerite poems), the unsettled quality of his time and the modern malady (Dover Beach).
Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)
First of the Pre-Raphaelites to see publication, Rossetti and her work were long misunderstood--limited and defined by contemporary critics as merely a poet of childrens verse and religious sentiment. However, feminist critics have established the rich sensual and sexual quality of her verse (Goblin Market, as well as her revisionist myth-making tendencies (In the Artists Studio). Her verse has all the qualities of Pre-Raphaelite poetry and painting, in particular in its vibrant color and extraordinary richness of detail. Her most famous poem, Goblin Market can be read as both an affirmation of the Victorian ideal of angel in the house and as a feminist revisioning of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained.
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)
Hopkins is one of the most atypical and interesting of the Victorian poets, his work influenced both by his religious conversion to Catholicism and by his Anglo-Saxon studies. His most important innovation is sprung rhythm--the use of stressed syllables and alliteration to give a springing effect to the poetic line. Hopkins believed that the universe was characterized by the unique designs of myriad individual identities (inscape), with the recognition of this feature (instress) being the central aim of his poetry. Poems such as Pied Beauty, The Windhover, and Gods Grandeur achieve this feature. His most critically acclaimed works are the Terrible Sonnets and The Wreck of the Deutschland.
The Victorian Novelist
The novel genre comes into its own as a major literary type in the Victorian age, forecasting its place of prominence in the 20th Century. Victorian fiction is characterized by the same dichotomies and contrasting tendencies as the poetry. Predominating, however, is the "problem novel" characterized by the work of Dickens, a direct reaction against social ills of the period.
The Brontes
Writing under the pseudonyms Ellis, Currer, and Acton Bell, Emily (1818-1846), Charlotte (1816-1855), and Anne (1820-49) Bronte published books that are a blending of Romantic and feminist elements, although Emilys Wuthering Heights in its power and raw energy transcends such labels. The novels are most often characterized as gothic in tone and atmosphere (Charlottes Jane Eyre, Annes Tenant of Wildfell Hall), but there are gender issues that both Anne and Charlotte address in their work. Emily was also a brilliant poet, her poetry addressing such Romantic themes as the wish to escape (Stanzas and Riches I Hold in Light Esteem), the wish to transcend earthly limitations (Alone I Sat)--in many ways she is a female (Victorian) Byron, without the Romantics proclivities for debauchery.
Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
Charles Dickens was perhaps the most beloved writer of his age, devoting the bulk of his work to wonderful satire (Pickwick Papers) and offering an indictment against the social and economic horrors of the Industrial Revolution (Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, David Copperfield, and Hard Times). In the tradition of Ben Jonsons comedies of humours and later the Restoration comedies of manners, Dickens offers a world of unforgettable characters and realistic social commentary that did much to engender social reform. As a storyteller, he tends toward melodrama at times, but his prose is often rich with purple passages the best of the century.
George Eliot (1819-1880)
Eliot (Marian Evans) was one of the most intellectual, thought-provoking of the Victorian novelists. At the other end of the spectrum from Jane Austen, Eliot offers a panoramic range of English life, particularly in such novels as Middlemarch. Learned, well-read, and early experiencing religious doubt, she was both a critic of her contemporary society (Adam Bede, Silas Marner, Felix Holt, and Scenes of Clerical Life) and of times past (Romola). Eliots work addresses timeless moral questions as well as contemporary issues such as feminism (Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch).
William Makepiece Thackery (1811-1863)
Thackery is one of the premier satirists of his age. His best novels are characterized by their realism (he saw himself in many ways as a remedy to Dickens) and by their panoramic portrayal of British life (Vanity Fair and Henry Esmond). There is a mocking, cynical tone to his work, and he is apt to portray a more clear-eyed impression of his country and its shortcomings than Dickens, as well as to evince an authorial omniscient point of view that echoes the patriarchal voice of the period.
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
The last of the great Victorian novelists, Hardy portrays a naturalistic world where characters stories are determined by happenstance and cruel fate. His novels (The Return of the Native, Tess of the DUrbervilles, The Major of Casterbridge, and Jude the Obscure) present a tragic vision, almost existential angst, with little hope for individuals beyond a stoic acceptance of lifes tragedies. His work in the broadest sense evinces Victorian misgivings and uncertainty prompted by the influence of science, material progress, religious doubt, and industrial and technological developments. When Hardy turned from prose to poetry at the end of the century, he continued these themes that are remarkably modern in tone.
Victorian Non-Fiction
With the advent of such remarkable social change, an array of nonfiction writers came on the scene to comment on the age and its problems and social/political conditions.
Thomas Carlyle (1975-1881)
An early Victorian sage and prophet, Carlyle wrote defiantly against what he considered the negative social, economic, and political tendencies of his time. He rued the loss of spiritual value in mans perception of both himself and the natural world around him, writing of the Universe as one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference (Sartor Resartus). He was offended at the materialism, mammonism, of his contemporaries, at their herd mentality, and at the increasing trend toward secularism (Past and Present). He theorized that the history of the world was neither more nor less than the sum total of the biographies of great men, setting the stage for the superman, or ubermann, that must serve as prophet and forge a destiny for humankind. Some of Carlyles ideas would be criticized in the years after fascism developed in Europe.
John Henry Newman (1801-1890)
Theorizing about education and speculating on his own spiritual doubts, Newman was the consummate prose stylist. His Idea of the University has become the ideal for the liberal arts education, an education that allows one to think and to reason and to compare and to discriminate and to analyze, to refine ones taste, to form ones judgement and to sharpen ones mental vision.
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)
Political philosopher and liberal legislature, Mill is best known for his essays On Liberty and On the Subjection of Women, both written in collaboration with his companion, later his wife Harriet Taylor. Mills father James and his friend Jeremy Bentham were proponents of the Utilitarian philosophy, a materialistic economic philosophy which espoused the idea of the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Mill himself was educated in strict adherence to this philosophy (note Dickens satire in Hard Times), and these youthful experiences precipitated later a crisis in his life and depression that caused him to rethink the ideas of his father and attempt to engender the importance of imagination and emotion as necessary for human happiness, as well as a kinder, gentler version of Utilitarianism. Mills Autobiography details his experiences and many of his ideas about society and life. His most significant contribution was to humanize the Utilitarian philosophy of his day and address issues of gender equality.
John Ruskin (1822-1888)
Another polished prose stylist, Ruskin began as an art critic and moved on to social criticism. He was a champion of the work of the pre-Raphaelite painters and J. M. W. Turner (Modern Painters), and much of his speculation about art is connected to his ideas about society and living. In The Stones of Venice from The Seven Lamps of Architecture series, he writes about how architecture reflects the moral values of society--the gothic, for example, is indicative of the purity of national faith and the domestic virtue of medieval society, while Renaissance architecture reveals domestic corruption and moral infidelity. In Unto This Last he attacked the laissez-faire economists and Utilitarian philosophers.