Contents · 7 sections · 7 min
Core Theses
The novel became the dominant form and the conscience of the nation, exposing poverty, class and injustice.
Serial publication in monthly parts and magazines created a vast reading public and shaped the novel’s form.
Science — geology and Darwin — shook religious faith, and doubt became a great literary subject.
Duty, earnestness, respectability and progress were the official values; the best writers probed their costs.
Victorian literature is the literature of Britain during the long reign of Queen Victoria, from 1837 to 1901 — sixty-three years in which Britain became the first industrial nation, the workshop of the world and the centre of the largest empire in history, and in which its population doubled, its cities swelled with factory workers and slums, the railway and the telegraph shrank distances, and Darwin’s theory of evolution unsettled the foundations of Christian belief. Above all, it was the great age of the English novel: Charles Dickens, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, William Makepeace Thackeray, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson. Its poets, led by Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning, were national figures; its essayists — Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold — were “sages” who told the nation how to live.
The Victorian world
Victoria came to the throne at eighteen in 1837, five years after the Great Reform Act had begun the slow extension of the vote. The 1840s — the “Hungry Forties” — saw economic depression, the Irish Famine, the mass working-class movement of Chartism demanding political rights, and the revolutions of 1848 on the Continent. The Great Exhibition of 1851, in the glass Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, celebrated industrial and imperial progress. Mid-century prosperity followed, then the long agricultural depression of the 1870s, the expansion of empire in Africa and Asia, and the anxieties of the century’s end.
The official values of the age are often summed up as earnestness, duty, respectability, self-help (the title of Samuel Smiles’s 1859 bestseller), domesticity and faith in progress. The middle classes set the moral tone: evangelical piety, the sanctity of the family and the home, a strict code of sexual propriety, and an anxious concern with gentility. The “woman question” — women’s education, property, work and votes — was debated throughout. The best Victorian writers both expressed these values and exposed their hypocrisies and costs.
Faith and doubt. Geology (Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, 1830–33) had already shown that the earth was millions of years old; German biblical criticism treated the Bible as a historical document; then Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) explained the design of living things by natural selection, without a designer. Many Victorians lost their faith, or held to it painfully. Tennyson’s In Memoriam records the struggle; Arnold’s “Dover Beach” hears the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the Sea of Faith.
The novel
The Victorian novel was a mass-market form. Many novels came out first in monthly parts (a shilling for thirty-two pages and two illustrations) or as serials in magazines, then in three-volume editions for the circulating libraries such as Mudie’s, which demanded respectability. Serial publication encouraged long, many-stranded plots, cliffhangers and a close relationship between author and readers: crowds in New York, it was said, waited at the docks for the ship bringing the instalment of The Old Curiosity Shop that would reveal whether Little Nell had died.
Charles Dickens (1812–70) was the dominant figure: the most popular novelist in the world, a comic genius, a crusader against the abuses of workhouses, debtors’ prisons, schools, the law and bureaucracy, and the creator of hundreds of unforgettable characters — Mr Pickwick, Oliver Twist, Fagin, Scrooge, Mr Micawber, Uriah Heep, Miss Havisham. From The Pickwick Papers (1836) to Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations (1861), his novels became darker and more complex. See Charles Dickens.
William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–63) wrote Vanity Fair (1847–48), “a novel without a hero”, whose anti-heroine Becky Sharp climbs through society by charm and ruthlessness during the Napoleonic wars — a panoramic satire of greed and snobbery.
The Brontë sisters — Charlotte (1816–55), Emily (1818–48) and Anne (1820–49) — grew up in the parsonage at Haworth on the Yorkshire moors, writing tiny books about imaginary kingdoms. In 1847 they published, under the male pseudonyms Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, Jane Eyre (Charlotte), the first-person story of a plain, passionate orphan governess who loves her employer, Mr Rochester, and refuses to be less than his equal (“Reader, I married him”); Wuthering Heights (Emily), a wild, violent, visionary tale of the doomed love of Catherine Earnshaw and the foundling Heathcliff (“I am Heathcliff!”); and Agnes Grey (Anne), followed by Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). Within eight years all three were dead.
Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–65) wrote the “industrial” or “condition-of-England” novels Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855), about mill-workers and masters in Manchester, and the gentle comedy Cranford, as well as the Life of Charlotte Brontë. Benjamin Disraeli (Sybil, or The Two Nations) and Charles Kingsley wrote political novels of the same kind. Anthony Trollope (1815–82) wrote forty-seven novels, notably the Barsetshire chronicles of cathedral-town clergy (Barchester Towers) and the political Palliser novels, rising at 5.30 to write 250 words every quarter of an hour before going to his job at the Post Office (where he introduced the pillar box). Wilkie Collins invented the sensation novel and the detective novel (The Woman in White, The Moonstone).
George Eliot — Mary Ann Evans (1819–80) — translator of German theology, lover of the married critic G. H. Lewes, is for many the greatest Victorian novelist. Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner were followed by Middlemarch (1871–72), a study of provincial life in the years before the 1832 Reform Act, which Virginia Woolf called “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”. Its ideal is sympathy: the novel’s task is to widen our understanding of other lives.
Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) set his novels in “Wessex”, his fictional south-west England — Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891, subtitled “A Pure Woman” in defiance of convention) and Jude the Obscure (1895), whose hostile reception made him abandon fiction for poetry. His world is ruled by chance, “crass casualty”, and an indifferent universe.
The century’s end brought new forms: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), H. G. Wells’s scientific romances, Rudyard Kipling’s stories of India, and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865).
Poetry
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–92), Poet Laureate for forty-two years, was the voice of the age. His friend Arthur Hallam died suddenly at twenty-two; out of seventeen years of grief came In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850), a sequence of 133 lyrics moving from despair and doubt (“Nature, red in tooth and claw”) toward a hard-won faith (“‘Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all”). He wrote “Ulysses” (“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”), “The Lady of Shalott”, “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and the Arthurian Idylls of the King.
Robert Browning (1812–89) perfected the dramatic monologue, a poem spoken by a character who reveals more than he intends: in “My Last Duchess” a Renaissance duke, showing a portrait of his late wife, lets slip that he had her killed. Men and Women and The Ring and the Book explore psychology from the inside. His wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–61) — whom he rescued from her invalid’s room and a tyrannical father — wrote Sonnets from the Portuguese (“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”) and the verse-novel Aurora Leigh.
Matthew Arnold (1822–88), poet and critic, wrote “Dover Beach” and Culture and Anarchy (1869), defining culture as “the best which has been thought and said”. The Pre-Raphaelite poets and painters — Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his sister Christina Rossetti (Goblin Market, “Remember me when I am gone away”), William Morris, later Swinburne — sought medieval beauty and sensuousness. Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89), a Jesuit priest, wrote startling poems in “sprung rhythm” (“The world is charged with the grandeur of God”; “The Windhover”) that were published only in 1918 and seemed modernist.
The sages
Thomas Carlyle (Sartor Resartus, The French Revolution, On Heroes) thundered against materialism and “the cash nexus”. John Ruskin (Modern Painters, The Stones of Venice, Unto This Last) moved from art criticism to an attack on industrial capitalism. John Stuart Mill wrote On Liberty (1859) and The Subjection of Women (1869). John Henry Newman described his journey from Anglicanism to Rome in Apologia Pro Vita Sua. Charles Darwin’s Origin is itself a masterpiece of Victorian prose.
The end of the century
In the 1880s and 1890s the Victorian synthesis cracked. The Aesthetic Movement, inspired by Walter Pater’s call “to burn always with this hard, gem-like flame”, proclaimed “art for art’s sake”. Its emblem was Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), whose The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and comedies, culminating in The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), made wit a philosophy — until his trial and imprisonment for “gross indecency” in 1895. The “decadent” 1890s, the New Woman, the plays of Ibsen and Shaw, and Hardy’s turn from the novel announced the coming of modernism.
In conversation
- “Red in tooth and claw” — Tennyson’s phrase for nature’s violence, now a cliché for ruthless competition.
- “Victorian” — used loosely for prudishness, earnest morality and stiff respectability — though Victorian literature itself is far richer and more rebellious.
- A dramatic monologue — after Browning, a poem in the voice of a character who reveals himself unawares.
Victorian Literature in two minutes
English literature in the reign of Queen Victoria (1837–1901) — the great age of the novel (Dickens, the Brontës, Thackeray, George Eliot, Trollope, Hardy), of Tennyson and Browning, of the sage-writers Carlyle, Ruskin and Mill, and of a society wrestling with industry, empire, class, faith and doubt.
- The novel became the dominant form and the conscience of the nation, exposing poverty, class and injustice.
- Serial publication in monthly parts and magazines created a vast reading public and shaped the novel’s form.
- Science — geology and Darwin — shook religious faith, and doubt became a great literary subject.
- Duty, earnestness, respectability and progress were the official values; the best writers probed their costs.
Members
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Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Poet Laureate for forty-two years and the voice of Victorian England — author of In Memoriam, “Ulysses”, “The Lady of Shalott”, “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and Idylls of the King — whose music, melancholy and struggle between faith and doubt made him the most popular poet of his age.
Charles Dickens
The great Victorian novelist — a boy who worked in a blacking factory while his father sat in a debtors’ prison, and became the most popular writer in the world, creating Oliver Twist, Scrooge, Micawber and Miss Havisham, and using comedy and melodrama to expose the cruelties of industrial England.
Charlotte Brontë
The eldest Brontë sister to survive childhood, a Yorkshire parson’s daughter who, as “Currer Bell”, published Jane Eyre (1847) — the passionate first-person story of a plain, poor governess who demands to be loved as an equal — and then Shirley and Villette.
Emily Brontë
The most mysterious of the Brontë sisters — a solitary, fierce, visionary poet of the Yorkshire moors who, as “Ellis Bell”, wrote one novel, Wuthering Heights (1847), a wild tale of love, revenge and the elemental passions of Catherine and Heathcliff, and died at thirty.
George Eliot
Mary Ann Evans — translator of German theology, editor, scandalous partner of a married man, and the most intellectual of the great Victorian novelists — whose Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner and Middlemarch made the novel an instrument of moral sympathy and philosophical depth.
Thomas Hardy
The stonemason’s son from Dorset who created “Wessex” in Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure — tragedies of chance, desire and an indifferent universe — then abandoned the novel and became one of the great poets of the twentieth century.
Oscar Wilde
The Irish wit, aesthete and dramatist of 1890s London — author of The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Importance of Being Earnest and the fairy tales — who made paradox a philosophy and art its own end, until his trial and imprisonment for “gross indecency” destroyed him, and gave us De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol.
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Bleak House
Dickens’s most ambitious novel (1852–53): fog-bound London, the endless Chancery lawsuit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, the orphan Esther Summerson, the cold Lady Dedlock and her secret, the crossing-sweeper Jo, and the first detective in English fiction — a whole society entangled in a system that ruins everyone it touches.
Middlemarch
George Eliot’s masterpiece (1871–72): in a Midlands town on the eve of the 1832 Reform Act, the idealistic Dorothea Brooke marries a dry old scholar and the ambitious doctor Tertius Lydgate marries a pretty, selfish wife — and a whole community of lives, marriages, debts and secrets is woven into “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”.
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hardy’s tragedy (1891): Tess Durbeyfield, a beautiful, poor country girl told she descends from the ancient d’Urbervilles, is seduced (or raped) by the false gentleman Alec, loses her baby, finds love with the idealistic Angel Clare, is rejected by him on their wedding night for her past — and is hanged for killing Alec.
Jane Austen
The novelist of “three or four families in a country village” — a clergyman’s daughter whose six comedies of courtship, money and moral growth (Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Persuasion) perfected the English novel with irony, free indirect style and an unerring eye for self-deception.
Tukārām
The 17th-century Marathi saint-poet, a grocer of the Śūdra caste, whose thousands of abhaṅgas to Viṭṭhal of Pandharpur — honest, anguished, joyful, scornful of hypocrisy — are the most loved poems in Marathi.
Great Expectations
Dickens’s darkest and most perfectly made novel (1860–61): the orphan Pip, raised by his sister and the blacksmith Joe, is given money by a mysterious benefactor to become a gentleman — and learns that his fortune, his love for the cold Estella and his snobbery all rest on illusions.