This Post is for B.A. Hons 2nd Year Students of English Literature under curriculum from National University
Main Features of Victrian Literature
The Victorian era, from the coronation of Queen Victoria in 1837 until her death in 1901, was an era of several unsettling social developments that forced writers more than ever before to take positions on the immediate issues animating the rest of society. Thus, although romantic forms of expression in poetry and prose continued to dominate English literature throughout much of the century, the attention of many writers was directed, sometimes passionately, to such issues as the growth of English democracy, the education of the masses, the progress of industrial enterprise and the consequent rise of a materialistic philosophy, and the plight of the newly industrialized worker. In addition, the unsettling of religious belief by new advances in science, particularly the theory of evolution and the historical study of the Bible, drew other writers away from the immemorial subjects of literature into considerations of problems of faith and truth. During the last two-thirds of the 19th century, the Victorian era produced an amazing number of popular novelists and poets. This time period saw the rise of an increasingly urbanized, middle-class, and educated society that included a much larger reading audience. Many authors wrote about characters and situations well-known or easily comprehensible to their audience and became universally popular and in touch with their vast readership to a degree not matched in the 20th century. Perhaps the most famous author of this time was Charles Dickens, who portrayed the hardships of the working class while criticizing middle-class life. Writers prominent during the heart of the Victorian period include George Eliot, who, despite being a critic of Christianity, was known for her intense, moral novels; William Makepeace Thackeray, who wrote humorous portrayals of middle- and upper-class life; the Brontë sisters—Charlotte, Emily, and Anne—whose novels tended to be autobiographical. The most popular of the many Victorian poets was Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Other famous poets include Matthew Arnold, Christina Georgina Rossetti, and Robert Browning and his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. By the end of the 20th century, English had become a true world language, and English literature is taught today in secondary schools and universities everywhere. Famous English poets, playwrights, and novelists are quoted, translated, and loved throughout the world.
Now we will discuss about some key features of Victorian literature chiefly based on poetry, novel, non-fictional prose and, essays.
➦ Victorian Poetry: Victorian poetry like other branches of Victorian literature, is found to have been dominated by the social thoughts of the age. The age saw a number of powerful poets— Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Clough, Rossetti, Swinburne, Morris and many more. Victorian poetry should not be taken as completely apart from Romantic poetry. It is a continuation, in its very spirit as well as pattern, of the latter, with certain additions, deviations and transformations. The three notable poets of the Victorian Age became similarly absorbed in social issues. Beginning as a poet of pure romantic escapism, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, soon moved on to problems of religious faith, social change, and political power, as in “Locksley Hall,” the elegy In Memoriam (1850), and Idylls of the King (1859-1885). Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era. In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of 1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, “Ulysses” a form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. His style, as well as his peculiarly English conservatism, stands in some contrast to the intellectuality and bracing harshness of the poetry of Robert Browning. Browning's most important short poems are collected in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1841-1846) and Men and Women (1855). Only with the publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in "Rabbi Ben Ezra" the most extreme statement of Browning's celebrated optimism. His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning's work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven. Matthew Arnold, the third of these mid-Victorian poets, stands apart from them as a more subtle and balanced thinker; his literary criticism Essays in Criticism, (1865, 1888) is the most remarkable written in Victorian times. His poetry displays a sorrowful, disillusioned pessimism over the human plight in rapidly changing times for example, “Dover Beach,” (1867). Matthew Arnold's first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849), combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a more impersonal manner. His greatest work "Switzerland," "Dover Beach," "The Scholar-Gipsy" is, however, always elegiac in tone. Other Victorian poets, include James Thomson, noted for The City of Dreadful Night, Edward Fitzgerald well celebrated for his free poetic adaptation from the Persian, Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Arnold's friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with frankness, and a metrical liveliness, unequaled in Victorian verse. Of the women poet of the Victorian era, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the wife of Robert Browning, is, perhaps the most significant name along with Christina Georgina Rossetti. In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and "A Musical Instrument" (1862) is one of the century's most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet's role.
➦ Victorian Novel: The novel gradually became the dominant form in literature during the Victorian Age. A fairly constant accompaniment of this development was the yielding of romanticism to literary realism, the accurate observation of individual problems and social relationships. The huge bulk of Victorian literature is mainly made of the novels of the age. Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, George Elliot, Mrs. Gaskell and the Brontes are the great names in the fictional literature of the great Victorian age. They reign as the lawful and undisputed monarchs of Victorian literature. It was only in the Victorian novelists Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray that the new spirit of realism came to the fore. The Victorian novel certainly constitutes a golden phase in the history of English literature. But it is nothing absolutely new or unconnected with the great tradition of the past. As a matter of fact, the Victorian novel is a continuance of the tradition of novel-writing set up by the four wheels of the English literature, by Richardson, Fielding, Smollett and Sterne.
Dickens's novels of contemporary life (Oliver Twist, 1838; David Copperfield, 1849-1850; Great Expectations, 1861; Our Mutual Friend, 1865) exhibit an astonishing ability to create living characters; his graphic exposures of social evils and his powers of caricature and humor have won him a vast readership. Thackeray, on the other hand, indulged less in the sentimentality sometimes found in Dickens's works. He was also capable of greater subtlety of characterization, as his Vanity Fair (1847-1848) shows. Nevertheless, the restriction of concern in Thackeray's novels to middle- and upper class life, and his lesser creative power, render him second to Dickens in many readers' minds. Charles Dickens first attracted attention with the descriptive essays and tales originally written for newspapers, beginning in 1833, and collected as Sketches by “Boz” (1836). On the strength of this volume, Dickens contracted to write a historical novel in the tradition of Scott (eventually published as Barnaby Rudge in 1841). By chance his gifts were turned into a more distinctive channel. In February 1836 he agreed to write the text for a series of comic engravings. The unexpected result was The Pickwick Papers (1836–37), one of the funniest novels in English literature. By July 1837, sales of the monthly installments exceeded 40,000 copies. Part dramatist, part journalist, part mythmaker, and part wit, Dickens took the picaresque tradition of Smollett and Fielding and gave it a Shakespearean vigour and variety. His early novels have been attacked at times for sentimentality, melodrama, or shapelessness. They are now increasingly appreciated for their comic or macabre zest and their poetic fertility. Dombey and Son (1846–48) marks the beginning of Dickens's later period. He thenceforth combined his gift for vivid caricature with a stronger sense of personality, designed his plots more carefully, and used symbolism to give his books greater thematic coherence. Of the masterpieces of the next decade, David Copperfield (1849–50) uses the form of a fictional autobiography to explore the great Romantic theme of the growth and comprehension of the self. Bleak House (1852–53) addresses itself to law and litigiousness; Hard Times (1854) is a Carlylean defense of art in an age of mechanism; and Little Dorrit (1855–57) dramatizes the idea of imprisonment, both literal and spiritual. Two great novels, both involved with issues of social class and human worth, appeared in the 1860s: Great Expectations (1860–61) and Our Mutual Friend (1864–65). His final book, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (published posthumously, 1870), was left tantalizingly uncompleted at the time of his death. Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. Thackeray stands as a contrast to Dickens. He is the novelist of the upper classes of people, as Dickens of the lower depths. He is found to be a powerful and penetrative analyst of both the upper middle class and the aristocratic community of his time. For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens's procedure of publication in monthly parts. Thackeray's satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains. Of his social novels, with moral notes, Vanity Fair, Pendennis and The Newcomes are vigorous works. His historical novels Henry Esmond and the Virginians present historical facts with finely fictional flavours. Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the 1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia's Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis (1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot's novels of provincial life. In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine's marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example, the heroine's choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of moral realism. Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel, Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an extravagantly Gothic theme. Other important figures in the mainstream of the Victorian novel were notable for a variety of reasons. Anthony Trollope was distinguished for his gently ironic surveys of English ecclesiastical and political circles. George Eliot, for her responsible idealism; George Meredith, for a sophisticated, detached, and ironical view of human nature; and Thomas Hardy, for a profoundly pessimistic sense of human subjection to fate and circumstance.
➦ Victorian Prose: From the literary point of view, Victorian literature appears to be a continuation of romanticism, but has its own distinctive literary features which are particularly more defined and pronounced in the prose literature of the age. Of the masters of Victorian non-fictional prose writers, the first name certainly be Thomas Carlyle. This is not merely because of his earlier emergence but rather because of his profound literary influence on his age. Carlyle is admitted as much a literary dictator of his age, as Dr. Johnson of the English literature of the eighteenth century. Thomas Carlyle advanced a heroic philosophy of work, courage, and the cultivation of the godlike in human beings, by means of which life might recover its true worth and nobility. This view, borrowed in part from German idealist philosophy, Carlyle expressed in a vehement, idiosyncratic style in such works as Sartor Resartus (The Tailor Retailored, 1833-1834) and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) The French Revolution and so on, are animated with a spirit of faith and idealism and mark him distinctly as a prophet too, of his age. His two later works— Letter and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell and The Biography of Frederick the Great are quite massive and moralistic. The historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, in his History of England (5 volumes, 1848-1861) and even more in his Critical and Historical Essays (1843), expressed the complacency of the English middle classes over their new prosperity and growing political power. Other answers to social problems were presented by one fine Victorian prose writer of a different stamp. The social criticism of the art critic John Ruskin looked to the curing of the ills of industrial society and capitalism as the only path to beauty and vitality in the national life. Ruskin’s literature is essentially of an artist. His Modern Painters devoted to painting, is of a kind almost new to his country. Ruskin’s other works include some masterpieces, such as Unto the Last and Sesame and Lillies. Other Victorian prose writers include Arnold for his Essays on Criticism, Culture And Anarchy and Literature and Dogma. These works are the monumental additions to the non-fictional prose literature in English. Arnold who is more noted as a poet. Yet, Arnold, the prose writer remains more prominent in English literature than Arnold, the poet. And William Morris, noted as a poet has eminence too, in Victorian prose. Like Arnold and Ruskin, he is found opposed to modern industrialism too. His optimistic socialism is well expressed in his News from Nowhere, which is really an attractive piece of prose writing. A Dream of John Bull and Hopes and Fears in Arts also contribute to his writings.
➦ Victorian Essays: The affluence of English literature is manifested in different spheres, including the essay, as a literary exercise. The English essay has a long history and a steady march through several centuries to achieve today a level of perfection as well as diversity. The first real essays in English came from Francis Bacon in 1597, but truly speaking, there were certain anticipations of essay before the publication of Bacon’s work. The history of English essay has a further development in the eighteenth century. The coming of the periodical press seems to have opened a new feature in essay writing, and in the works of Steele and Addison, in The Tatler and The Spectator, the English essay is found to stride forward distinctly and rapidly. Daniel Defoe, Swift and Pope, great names in the eighteenth century prose, are found to have all contributed to different periodicals with different views. They are also the essayists of note in the great eighteenth century. In this connection Dr. Johnson, the literary dictator of the 18th century, also deserves a rank among the English essayist for his The Rambler and The Idler, both of which contain quite serious periodical essays. Lord Chesterfield and Oliver Goldsmith are also to be mentioned here as essayist. Goldsmith is a great master on the art of essay writing. His Citizen of the World is a memorable work and places him among the best essayist between Addison and Lamb. In Charles Lamb is found the prince of the English essayists. None but Bacon deserves to have a place by his side among the English essayists. The full flowering of the romantic essay is evident in Lamb’s Essays of Elia, and Last Essay of Elia, in which fancy, humour, wit, humanity and pathos are all perfectly intermingled. Of the historical essayists, Thomas Carlyle is by far the richest and profoundest. Of course, his essays have been overshadowed by his greater works, but whatever he has written as essays, like Shooting Niagara, German Romance, Science of the Times and so on. Next to Carlyle must be mentioned the name of Macaulay, his volume of essays Historical Essays forms a grand collection of some brilliant, though full of exaggerations, essays. Among other essayists, Coleridge, Wordsworth, De Quincey are worth mentioning.
Now we will discuss about some key features of Victorian literature chiefly based on poetry, novel, non-fictional prose and, essays.
➦ Victorian Poetry: Victorian poetry like other branches of Victorian literature, is found to have been dominated by the social thoughts of the age. The age saw a number of powerful poets— Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Clough, Rossetti, Swinburne, Morris and many more. Victorian poetry should not be taken as completely apart from Romantic poetry. It is a continuation, in its very spirit as well as pattern, of the latter, with certain additions, deviations and transformations. The three notable poets of the Victorian Age became similarly absorbed in social issues. Beginning as a poet of pure romantic escapism, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, soon moved on to problems of religious faith, social change, and political power, as in “Locksley Hall,” the elegy In Memoriam (1850), and Idylls of the King (1859-1885). Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail him as the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined in two volumes the best of his early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The collection established him as the outstanding poet of the era. In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in 1833, however, left him vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics that this highly subjective verse was insufficiently engaged with the public issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of 1842 contains two remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, “Ulysses” a form of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used occasionally by writers since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the technique was developed independently by both Tennyson and his great contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by which many of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. His style, as well as his peculiarly English conservatism, stands in some contrast to the intellectuality and bracing harshness of the poetry of Robert Browning. Browning's most important short poems are collected in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1841-1846) and Men and Women (1855). Only with the publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of fame that Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in "Rabbi Ben Ezra" the most extreme statement of Browning's celebrated optimism. His The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge. Browning's work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven. Matthew Arnold, the third of these mid-Victorian poets, stands apart from them as a more subtle and balanced thinker; his literary criticism Essays in Criticism, (1865, 1888) is the most remarkable written in Victorian times. His poetry displays a sorrowful, disillusioned pessimism over the human plight in rapidly changing times for example, “Dover Beach,” (1867). Matthew Arnold's first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849), combined lyric grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period. The title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained statement of the modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the process that Arnold called “the dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a more impersonal manner. His greatest work "Switzerland," "Dover Beach," "The Scholar-Gipsy" is, however, always elegiac in tone. Other Victorian poets, include James Thomson, noted for The City of Dreadful Night, Edward Fitzgerald well celebrated for his free poetic adaptation from the Persian, Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Arnold's friend Arthur Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three highly original poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the full-scale verse novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published posthumously in 1865 but not available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable closet drama that debates issues of belief and morality with frankness, and a metrical liveliness, unequaled in Victorian verse. Of the women poet of the Victorian era, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the wife of Robert Browning, is, perhaps the most significant name along with Christina Georgina Rossetti. In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora Leigh (1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Her Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is a subtle reflection on her experience of Italian politics, and "A Musical Instrument" (1862) is one of the century's most memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet's role.
➦ Victorian Novel: The novel gradually became the dominant form in literature during the Victorian Age. A fairly constant accompaniment of this development was the yielding of romanticism to literary realism, the accurate observation of individual problems and social relationships. The huge bulk of Victorian literature is mainly made of the novels of the age. Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, George Elliot, Mrs. Gaskell and the Brontes are the great names in the fictional literature of the great Victorian age. They reign as the lawful and undisputed monarchs of Victorian literature. It was only in the Victorian novelists Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray that the new spirit of realism came to the fore. The Victorian novel certainly constitutes a golden phase in the history of English literature. But it is nothing absolutely new or unconnected with the great tradition of the past. As a matter of fact, the Victorian novel is a continuance of the tradition of novel-writing set up by the four wheels of the English literature, by Richardson, Fielding, Smollett and Sterne.
Dickens's novels of contemporary life (Oliver Twist, 1838; David Copperfield, 1849-1850; Great Expectations, 1861; Our Mutual Friend, 1865) exhibit an astonishing ability to create living characters; his graphic exposures of social evils and his powers of caricature and humor have won him a vast readership. Thackeray, on the other hand, indulged less in the sentimentality sometimes found in Dickens's works. He was also capable of greater subtlety of characterization, as his Vanity Fair (1847-1848) shows. Nevertheless, the restriction of concern in Thackeray's novels to middle- and upper class life, and his lesser creative power, render him second to Dickens in many readers' minds. Charles Dickens first attracted attention with the descriptive essays and tales originally written for newspapers, beginning in 1833, and collected as Sketches by “Boz” (1836). On the strength of this volume, Dickens contracted to write a historical novel in the tradition of Scott (eventually published as Barnaby Rudge in 1841). By chance his gifts were turned into a more distinctive channel. In February 1836 he agreed to write the text for a series of comic engravings. The unexpected result was The Pickwick Papers (1836–37), one of the funniest novels in English literature. By July 1837, sales of the monthly installments exceeded 40,000 copies. Part dramatist, part journalist, part mythmaker, and part wit, Dickens took the picaresque tradition of Smollett and Fielding and gave it a Shakespearean vigour and variety. His early novels have been attacked at times for sentimentality, melodrama, or shapelessness. They are now increasingly appreciated for their comic or macabre zest and their poetic fertility. Dombey and Son (1846–48) marks the beginning of Dickens's later period. He thenceforth combined his gift for vivid caricature with a stronger sense of personality, designed his plots more carefully, and used symbolism to give his books greater thematic coherence. Of the masterpieces of the next decade, David Copperfield (1849–50) uses the form of a fictional autobiography to explore the great Romantic theme of the growth and comprehension of the self. Bleak House (1852–53) addresses itself to law and litigiousness; Hard Times (1854) is a Carlylean defense of art in an age of mechanism; and Little Dorrit (1855–57) dramatizes the idea of imprisonment, both literal and spiritual. Two great novels, both involved with issues of social class and human worth, appeared in the 1860s: Great Expectations (1860–61) and Our Mutual Friend (1864–65). His final book, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (published posthumously, 1870), was left tantalizingly uncompleted at the time of his death. Unlike Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated background. The loss of his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. Thackeray stands as a contrast to Dickens. He is the novelist of the upper classes of people, as Dickens of the lower depths. He is found to be a powerful and penetrative analyst of both the upper middle class and the aristocratic community of his time. For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens's procedure of publication in monthly parts. Thackeray's satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad narrative sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and an ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the years between the Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never match this sharpness. Vanity Fair was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.” Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more sentimental Thackeray wrote novels without villains. Of his social novels, with moral notes, Vanity Fair, Pendennis and The Newcomes are vigorous works. His historical novels Henry Esmond and the Virginians present historical facts with finely fictional flavours. Elizabeth Gaskell began her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the 1840s, responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to the economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853) are both novels about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55), although, like her later work—Sylvia's Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters (1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis (1864)—this book also has a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot's novels of provincial life. In many ways, however, the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than simply superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of the Brontë sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in Yorkshire, they, as children, invented the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal. Anne Brontë wrote of the painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her novels have cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working life of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture of the heroine's marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her sisters, appears at first sight to have been writing a literal fiction of provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example, the heroine's choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to the mode of moral realism. Emily Brontë united these diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel, Wuthering Heights (1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery and an extravagantly Gothic theme. Other important figures in the mainstream of the Victorian novel were notable for a variety of reasons. Anthony Trollope was distinguished for his gently ironic surveys of English ecclesiastical and political circles. George Eliot, for her responsible idealism; George Meredith, for a sophisticated, detached, and ironical view of human nature; and Thomas Hardy, for a profoundly pessimistic sense of human subjection to fate and circumstance.
➦ Victorian Prose: From the literary point of view, Victorian literature appears to be a continuation of romanticism, but has its own distinctive literary features which are particularly more defined and pronounced in the prose literature of the age. Of the masters of Victorian non-fictional prose writers, the first name certainly be Thomas Carlyle. This is not merely because of his earlier emergence but rather because of his profound literary influence on his age. Carlyle is admitted as much a literary dictator of his age, as Dr. Johnson of the English literature of the eighteenth century. Thomas Carlyle advanced a heroic philosophy of work, courage, and the cultivation of the godlike in human beings, by means of which life might recover its true worth and nobility. This view, borrowed in part from German idealist philosophy, Carlyle expressed in a vehement, idiosyncratic style in such works as Sartor Resartus (The Tailor Retailored, 1833-1834) and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) The French Revolution and so on, are animated with a spirit of faith and idealism and mark him distinctly as a prophet too, of his age. His two later works— Letter and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell and The Biography of Frederick the Great are quite massive and moralistic. The historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, in his History of England (5 volumes, 1848-1861) and even more in his Critical and Historical Essays (1843), expressed the complacency of the English middle classes over their new prosperity and growing political power. Other answers to social problems were presented by one fine Victorian prose writer of a different stamp. The social criticism of the art critic John Ruskin looked to the curing of the ills of industrial society and capitalism as the only path to beauty and vitality in the national life. Ruskin’s literature is essentially of an artist. His Modern Painters devoted to painting, is of a kind almost new to his country. Ruskin’s other works include some masterpieces, such as Unto the Last and Sesame and Lillies. Other Victorian prose writers include Arnold for his Essays on Criticism, Culture And Anarchy and Literature and Dogma. These works are the monumental additions to the non-fictional prose literature in English. Arnold who is more noted as a poet. Yet, Arnold, the prose writer remains more prominent in English literature than Arnold, the poet. And William Morris, noted as a poet has eminence too, in Victorian prose. Like Arnold and Ruskin, he is found opposed to modern industrialism too. His optimistic socialism is well expressed in his News from Nowhere, which is really an attractive piece of prose writing. A Dream of John Bull and Hopes and Fears in Arts also contribute to his writings.
➦ Victorian Essays: The affluence of English literature is manifested in different spheres, including the essay, as a literary exercise. The English essay has a long history and a steady march through several centuries to achieve today a level of perfection as well as diversity. The first real essays in English came from Francis Bacon in 1597, but truly speaking, there were certain anticipations of essay before the publication of Bacon’s work. The history of English essay has a further development in the eighteenth century. The coming of the periodical press seems to have opened a new feature in essay writing, and in the works of Steele and Addison, in The Tatler and The Spectator, the English essay is found to stride forward distinctly and rapidly. Daniel Defoe, Swift and Pope, great names in the eighteenth century prose, are found to have all contributed to different periodicals with different views. They are also the essayists of note in the great eighteenth century. In this connection Dr. Johnson, the literary dictator of the 18th century, also deserves a rank among the English essayist for his The Rambler and The Idler, both of which contain quite serious periodical essays. Lord Chesterfield and Oliver Goldsmith are also to be mentioned here as essayist. Goldsmith is a great master on the art of essay writing. His Citizen of the World is a memorable work and places him among the best essayist between Addison and Lamb. In Charles Lamb is found the prince of the English essayists. None but Bacon deserves to have a place by his side among the English essayists. The full flowering of the romantic essay is evident in Lamb’s Essays of Elia, and Last Essay of Elia, in which fancy, humour, wit, humanity and pathos are all perfectly intermingled. Of the historical essayists, Thomas Carlyle is by far the richest and profoundest. Of course, his essays have been overshadowed by his greater works, but whatever he has written as essays, like Shooting Niagara, German Romance, Science of the Times and so on. Next to Carlyle must be mentioned the name of Macaulay, his volume of essays Historical Essays forms a grand collection of some brilliant, though full of exaggerations, essays. Among other essayists, Coleridge, Wordsworth, De Quincey are worth mentioning.
