Old English Literature

Victorian Novel

Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës

Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

• middle class origins;

• his schooling ended at 15;

• worked as:

• a clerk in a solicitor’s office,

• a shorthand reporter at the law courts,

• a parliamentary and newspaper reporter.

• In 1836 his Pickwick Papers appeared, and Dickens became the most popular author of the day.

• started editing a monthly magazine, Bentley’s Miscellany, in which Oliver Twist appeared between 1837 and 1839;

• He became a public figure, praised for his after-dinner speeches, for his amateur acting and his reports in the press;

• In the 1840s Dickens founded and edited several periodicals;

• he remained the public's favourite until his sudden death in 1870.

Dickens’s Early Novels

• e.g. Pickwick Papers, often display overly sentimental and melodramatic passages that are loosely connected and lack solid structure.

• As all his early works were published in serial form (just a collection of short stories and anectodes, rather than complete novels?).

• Oliver Twist stands out; although still containing humorous passages, it is already more focussed on social problems and moral evil.

Dickens’s Later Period

• his later period: he focuses on the social wrongs of contemporary society and finds virtue and human decency most often among the poor, humble and simple. (David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times and Little Dorrit).

• His final novels (the 1860s); his finest achievements: Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend.

Typical Features

• attacking social evils and inadequate institutions;

• topical issues;

• situated in London;

• a not very intellectual belief in benevolence, i.e. the conviction that the world would be a better place if people were nicer to each other. In his old age Dickens becomes more pessimistic;

• Dickens's novels offer a fascinating and detailed description of all the classes forming the British society of his time.

Strong Characterisation

• strong characterisation – label names (e.g. the Veneerings in Our Mutual Friend, emphasizing their superficiality) link the characters to one dominant feature or detail;

• his characters do not develop and change during the novel and that some of them border on one-dimensional caricatures.

Women and Children

• ideal of the passive and helpless woman;

• Children are the pure and innocent representatives of humanity. Other characters are judged by their reaction to them: if you treat them well, this is the sign of your general goodness; if you treat them badly, this shows your deep corruption, and general sinfulness.

William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863)

• born in Calcutta, India;

• studied at Cambridge, but left for London without taking a degree;

• considered painting as a profession for a while and went to Paris to study art where he soon lost all his fortune through gambling and bad investments;

• a correspondent from Paris for his stepfather's newspaper;

• Thackeray returned to London where he became a journalist.

• Between 1847 and 1848, he published in monthly parts the novel Vanity Fair which brought him fame and prosperity.

Vanity Fair

• a satirical and sometimes world-weary portrait of the top level of society;

• two school friends, Amelia Sedley and Becky Sharp;

• Becky fights her way up through society; she is good-looking, intelligent and ruthless,

• Amelia is wealthy, well born and passive, the Victorian ideal of a good woman;

• At the end: Amelia marries the good Colonel Dobbin, and Becky devotes herself to charitable works.

The Brontës

• Their work expresses violence, passion, and the emotions;

• they grew up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire;

• Their novels were strongly influenced by Romanticism, e.g. Gothic plots and Byronic passions.

Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855)

• her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847)

• the governess Jane Eyre marries above her, and the man she loves, however, both parties have to undergo suffering (Rochester, the hero, for example is almost burnt alive)

• Jane Eyre is at one and the same time a Cinderella, rags-to-riches story, a moral tract, and a novel of passion, love and mystery.

Emily Brontë (1818-1848)

• her only novel, Wuthering Heights (1847)

• Emily died from tuberculosis in 1848 at the age of 30.

• The novel generates its own morality, rising up above conventional morals and making them seem irrelevant to the great love affair that is at its centre.

Wuthering Heights

• The novel is almost tragic in its scope, dealing in good and evil;

• it is imbued with an elemental, primitive force (e.g. civilised people are kidnapped, and dealt with violently; a man starves himself to death willingly for the sake of along-dead lover; babies are dropped over banisters; anvils thrown at people; a pet spaniel hanged from a tree by the man who is going to marry the dog's owner; and a character beats his head against the tree in anguish until the blood flows).

The Later Victorian Novel, Victorian Poets and Theatre

The Later Victorian Novel

• George Eliot

• Thomas Hardy

George Eliot

• Mary Ann Evans (1819-1880);

• stern religious education; kept house for her father until his death in 1849.

• took private lessons; influenced by the ideas of Ludwig Feuerbach and Auguste Comte, she lost her faith and embraced rationalism and positivist materialism.

• After the death of her father, she lived with various friends for a while.

• In 1851 she decided to move to London and work as a free-lance writer and as subeditor of The Westminster Review.

• She fell in love with George Henry Lewes, a married journalist, and lived with him openly as his wife until his death. Encouraged by Lewes, she started writing stories which brought her instant success.

• When Lewes died in 1878, Evans married her banker John Walter Cross, 19 years her junior, and died the same year.

• Her reputation has declined lately and rests nowadays on her longer novels: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), all of them providing close studies of English rural life, her masterpiece Middlemarch (1871-1872), a study of the life of a provincial town, and Daniel Deronda (1876), contemporary portrayal of a Jewish family.

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

• a son of a stonemason and jobbing builder, grew up in an isolated cottage in Dorset and was educated at local schools.

• meagre formal education, intensive self study.

• became apprenticed to an architect and worked as a draftsman in one of the leading architectural offices in London. When he was 32 he devoted himself completely to literature.

• Between 1870 and 1900 Hardy wrote 14 novels, some of them the finest achievements of the period. But since his works got some brutally hostile reviews, he turned to poetry in the new century.

• He published a total of 8 collections of poetry which brought him enormous fame at home and worldwide.

• major prose works: the novels recreating the rural life in his fictional Wessex, The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895).

• His novels proved particularly suitable for film and television adaptation.

Victorian Poets

• Alfred Tennyson

• Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning

• Matthew Arnold

• Gerard Manley Hopkins

Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)

• born in Lincolnshire, the son of a rector; educated at Cambridge

• went to Spain to support the unsuccessful revolution against Ferdinand VII.

• left Cambridge without taking a degree.

• In 1850 he happily married and published his elegies for Arthur Hallam, In Memoriam. His speculation about death and mortality proved immensely successful with reviewers, the public and the Queen, who appointed him poet laureate in succession to Wordsworth.

• raised to the peerage in 1884.

• the leading poet of the Victorian Age in England – the spokesman for the educated middle-class Englishman in every regard, from morality and religion to politics and literary taste - lost its appeal today.

• Criticism: Tennyson’s technical skill often covers up deficiencies in thought. Ideas matter a great deal less than sensations and musical quality in his poetry.

Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning

• Robert Browning (1812-1889);

• a slight formal education;

• He started his literary career by writing plays in verse and long poems (1832-1846);

• He married Elizabeth Barrett (1806-1861), already an established writer and a semi-invalid and lived with her in Italy, mainly in Florence;

• The most important works of Robert’s last years were long narrative or dramatic poems, often dealing with contemporary themes.

Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)

• educated at Oxford and worked for 35 years as an Inspector of Schools, travelling all over the country.

• In 1857 he was elected to the Oxford chair of poetry which he held for 10 years.

• theoretical approach to translation, arguing for the plainness and nobility in style (On Translating Homer (1861)).

• an extremely important literary, social and religious critic.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

• a prosperous middle-class family; educated at Oxford.

• became a member of the Jesuit order in 1868; served as parish priest in various Jesuit churches in London, Oxford, Liverpool and Glasgow. In 1884 he was appointed professor of Greek literature at University College in Dublin, where he also died.

• Hopkins’ poetry:

• intense, spiritual, sensual and highly experimental for its time;

• his language is consciously literary and full of new words, combined in surprising and original ways;

• No conventional metrical structure;

• Influenced immensely modern poetry, e.g. T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden.

Victorian Theatre

• only two theatres allowed by law in London, Covent Garden and Drury Lane;

• Their monopoly ended in the middle of the 19th century.

• early Victorian drama was a popular art form, appealing primarily to an uneducated audience.

• the influence of two non-English dramatists: the Russian Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), and the Norwegian Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) who in his social drama offered a refreshing new blend of naturalism and symbolism.

• In the 1890s, some outstanding dramatic innovations were introduced by two Irishmen: Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw.