5. Realism 19th century – the victorians

Background

Victorian period in English literature

In the minds of many, Queen Victoria personified the spirit of nineteenth-century England: she was Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Empress of India, and mother of nine children; her monarchy was a model of respectability, selfrighteousness, conservatism, and the domestic virtues.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, England dominated the world. Many English people were acutely conscious of their success and self-confidently pleased by it. The essayist and historian Т. B. Macaulay spoke for them when he argued (in 1846) that the English had become “the greatest and most highly civilized people that ever the world saw, [they] have spread their dominion over every quarter of the globe... have created a maritime power which would annihilate in a quarter of an hour the navies of Tyre, Athens, Carthage, Venice, and Genoa together, have carried the science of healing, the means of locomotion and correspondence, every mechanical art, every manufacture, every thing that promotes the convenience of life, to a perfection which our ancestors would have thought magical”.

When he wrote of British «dominion» Macaulay alluded to the British empire. By the Victorian era England controlled more of the earth than had any country in history.

England's world power grew out of the critical role she played in the beginning of the century. While Napoleon kept Europe embroiled in a series of bloody wars, England, isolated by the Channel, was developing into the first modern industrial state. Ready money, a skilled work force, and a government dedicated to leaving business alone, enabled ambitious middle-class factory owners to invent and develop modern production methods. During the period from 1780 to 1840 the British perfected the factory system for mass-producing goods, the practice of making interchangeable parts, and a system of railroads to carry raw materials to the factories and finished goods to the seaports. By 1850 England had eighteen thousand cotton mills, made half the pig iron in the world, and had five thousand miles of railroad track. It was the most modern, the most powerful, and the most wealthy land on earth.

Who reaped the profits? First, the middle class. They had been a small but important segment of the population for centuries. Now their numbers ballooned and their economic power dominated England commercially. These were self-made men and women, proud of the thrift, the hard work, the strict moral discipline of their lives. Most were intensely religious, sure that their success was a result of God's favor.

For hundreds of years English politics had been the playground of the aristocrats. The newly powerful middle class now demanded a share in governing, and got it in the Reform Bill of 1832 which gave them the right to vote and hold elective office.

The working class was without any political power at all, and in times of economic hardship, particularly in the late 1830's and early 1840's, England, for all of its power and success, came perilously close to a working-class revolution A boom in the market saved the country, labor unions grew slowly but steadily, and by 1867 the British were ready, with the Second Reform Bill, to let some of the workers vote.

The tension between financial growth and social instability in Victorian England affected its literature. Prosperity brought a great number of new readers, with money to spend on books and periodicals. In a pre-electronic era, when few people went to the theater or concerts, literature functioned as a primary source of entertainment. Writers had available an audience eager to read and willing to pay. In addition, writers were respected more than at any time in English literary history. The masses knew and loved the works of the most famous, while the wealthy and titled sought their company. Major Victorian writers had the attention of political and social leaders — when they spoke, they were listened to.

The most popular, and many might say the most successful, form of writing in this era was the novel. Reading novels seems to have been an addiction for most Victorians. The most successful novelists — Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot, and Charlotte Bronte — enjoyed great fame during their lifetimes and have remained permanently popular with subsequent generations. But Victorian novels were usually long — “loose, baggy monsters” Henry James was to call them—frequently running nine-hundred pages or more. Poets faced more demanding problems than novelists. Readers frequently wanted «relevance» in what they read. The glorification of the scientific and the practical during this period made many readers and some writers skeptical about the «usefulness» of poetry.

There was, in addition, the burden of trying to continue the enormous successes of the Romantic poets. Ideas and values had shifted. Social rebellion was altogether too likely in the 1840's to make its appearance in poetry tolerable. It was less easy to praise people, now that they had become threatening industrial workers. The Romantic cult of emotion seemed dangerously excessive, and Victorian poets frequently responded with carefully balanced rationality. The Romantic love of nature remained, but frequently with a new, scientific precision of observation that replaced the old love of wildness for its own sake. Fascination with the medieval past continued, though now it was given a contemporary social significance. While in «The Eve of St. Agnes» Keats reveled in the delight of pure imagination, Tennyson in “The Passing of Arthur” saw in the trials of a medieval hero the challenges which faced the political leaders of his own era. This strong sense of public responsibility pervaded much Victorian poetry, and at times gave it an integrity missing from poetry that served only private ends.

The Victorian compromise between public concerns and private urge did not last long. By the 1860's and 1870's a rebellious new generation of writers began to break away from the conventions of midcentury.

Early Victorian literature includes some of the greatest and most popular novels ever written. Most novelists of the period wrote long works with numerous characters. In many instances, the authors included actual events of the day in their tales.

The novels of Charles Dickens are noted for their colorful — and sometimes eccentric — characters. In «Oliver Twist» (1837— 1839) and «David Copperfield» (1849—1850), Dickens described the lives of children made miserable by cruel or thoughtless adults. He pictured the grim side of Victorian life in «Bleak House» (1852— 1853). In this novel, Dickens criticized the courts, the clergy, and the neglect of the poor.

William Makepeace Thackeray created a masterpiece of Victorian fiction in “Vanity Fair” (1847—1848). The story follows the lives of many characters at different levels of English society during the early 1800's.

The novels of the three Bronte sisters — Emily, Charlotte, and Anne — have many romantic elements. The novels are known especially for their psychologically tormented heroes and heroines. Critics rank Emily's “Wuthering Heights” (1847) and Charlotte's «Jane Eyre» (1847) among the greatest works of Victorian fiction.

Several writers wrote nonfiction that dealt with what they believed to be the ills of the time. For example, Thomas Carlyle attacked the greed and hypocrisy he saw in society in «Sartor Resartus» (1833—18341). John Stuart Mill discussed the relationship between society and the individual in his long essay “On Liberty” (1859).

Later Victorian literature

During the late 1800's, a pessimistic tone appeared in much of the best Victorian poetry and prose. Lord Tennyson discussed the intellectual and religious problems of the time in his long poem “In Memoriam” (1850). Matthew Arnold described his doubts about modern life in such short poems as “The Scholar-Gypsy” (1853) and “Dover Beach” (1867). Arnold's most important literary achievements are his critical essays on culture, literature, religion, and society. Many of these essays were collected in “Culture and Anarchy” (1869).

Robert Browning was one of the leading Victorian poets. He created finely drawn character studies in poems called dramatic monologues. In these poems, a real or imaginary character narrates the story. Browning's best-known work is “The Ring and the Book” (1868—1869). He based the poem on an Italian murder case of 1698. Twelve characters discuss the case, each from his or her own point of view. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Browning's wife, wrote a famous sequence of love poems called “Sonnets from the Portuguese” (1850).

Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote experimental religious verse. His poems were not published until 1918, almost 30 years after his death. Hopkins wrote in a style he called “sprung rhythm”, in which he tried to capture the rhythm of natural speech. Hopkins filled his poetry with rich word pictures and unusual word combinations. The «Terrible» sonnets (written in 1885) are typical of his work.

The leading late Victorian novelists were George Eliot (pen name of Mary Ann Evans) and George Meredith Eliot's stories deal with social and moral problems. Неr masterpiece is «Middlemarch» (1871—1872). Meredith's novels, as well as his poems, are noted for their sophisticated psychological treatment of character. His major works include the novels “The Ordeal of Richard Feverel” (1859) and “The Egoist” (1879) and the sonnet sequence «Modern Love» (1862).

REALISM A term first used in France in the 1850s to characterize works concerned with representing the world as it is rather than as it ought to be, with description rather than invention. Champfleury and Duranty were among its earliest exponents but the term was applied retrospectively to Balzac's La Comedie humaine, begun in 1830, because of its authentic detail, its perceptions about the function of environment in shaping character and the setting of its constituent books in the present or the very recent past. Realism observes and documents contemporary life and everyday scenes as objectively as possible in low-key, unrhetorical prose, drawing its characters from all social levels and reproducing the flavour of their colloquial speech in its dialogue. Because they seek to explore areas of life customarily ignored by the arts, realist writers frequently look to the lowest social classes and to cruelty and suffering for their subject matter.

Realism became the dominant mode of the 19th-century European novel and also of the theatre, from the late 1880s, where it initiated a revival of serious drama and led to the development, by Antoine in Paris and Stanislavski in Moscow, of less histrionic, more natural-seeming acting styles.

The great works of European realist fiction include Flaubert's Sentimental Education, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Accurate observation and attention to the structures of society make George Eliot's Middlemarch and Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton notable examples of English 19th-century realism. The chief American realists are William Dean Howells and Sinclair Lewis, while the line of English realist writing continues in the 20th century via H. G. Wells ( Tono-Bungay, 1909) and Arnold Bennett (Clayhanger, 1910) to the post-World War II evocations of English middle-class life of Angus Wilson and the Northern working-class fiction of the 1950s, best exemplified by Alan Sillitoe's The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1959).

Realism played an important part in the revival of the English theatre in the first decade of this century (Granville-Barker, St John Ervine, Galsworthy, Stanley Houghton) and, again, in the 1950s (Osborne, Wesker, Shelagh Delaney). In Ireland O'Casey recreated the texture of tenement life in the setting and language of his early Dublin plays, Juno and the Paycock (1925) and The Plough and the Stars (1926), while in America O'Neill and Arthur Miller developed native versions of the dramatic realism of Ibsen and Strindberg. See also naturalism.

The major English exponents:

Charles Dickens

William Makepeace Thackeray

Elizabeth Gaskell

Charlotte Bronte

George Eliot

Jane Austen

Charles Dickens (1812 – 1870)

“Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club” (1836-1837) – the story with Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller as Anglicized Quixote and Sancho Panza, based on the unpredictable adventures of a journey made in the last days of the stage-coach through pre-industrial England, the last major novel of the pre-railway age.

“Nickolas Nickleby” (1839) – the book deals with the problem of education of children in English private schools for poor children.

“Oliver Twist” (1838) – Dickens’s first social novel. It pictures the life of the workhouses, the London’s slums, poverty and crime there.

“The Old Curiosity Shop” (1841)

“Dombey and Son” (1848) – the main subject is money and the things that go with money – power, position, wealth.

“David Copperfield” (1850) –Dickens’s autobiographical novel. Its author attacks oppression of all kinds and raises his voice in defense of the poor.

“A Tale of Two Cities” (1859)

“Great Expectations” (1861)

“Our Mutual Friend” (1865)

William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863)

“The Book of Snobs” (1847) – a snob is a person who has exaggerated respect for social position and wealth, he is ashamed of socially inferior connections. He is despotic to his inferiors and servile to his superiors.

“Vanity Fair” (1848) – Thackeray considered vanity the main force that moved his contemporary society. The novelist called that society “Vanity Fair” where everything could be sold and bought. He his satire against the vanity of the upper classes, the baseness of their aspirations, the power of money, ranks and titles.

Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865)

“Ruth” (1853)

“North a nd South” (1855)

“Wives and Daughters” (1866)

“Mary Barton” (1848) – a pathetic picture of working-class life in Manchester in hungry years 1839-1841. Mrs Gaskell was horrified by the bad conditions in which the poor lived. She filled pages of her book with the description of ragged and starving workers and their families and showed their struggle with pitiless employers.

The Bronte Sisters: Charlotte, Emily, Anne

Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855)

“The Professor” (1857)

“Shirley” (1849)

“Villette” (1853)

“Jane Eyre” (1847) – depicts a poor girl’s rebellion against cruelty, injustice, the division of people into the poor and the rich, the inhuman educational system in English charity schools and her struggle for Woman’s emancipation.

Emily Bronte (1818-1848)

“Wuthering Heights” (1847) – a prose-poem. The novel’s stern power, which disturbed and shocked contemporaries but has impressed later generations of readers, owes much to the deliberately enigmatic portrait of Heathcliff, precisely realized Yorkshire locations and subtlety of the shifting narrative viewpoints.

George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) (1819-1881)

“The Mill on the Floss” (1860) – is an original study of English provincial life and the story of a brother and sister – Maggie and Tom Tulliver.

“Romola” (1863)

“Spanish Gipsy” (1868)

“Daniel Deronda” (1876)

6. THE TURN OF THE CENTURY –

the period that marked the passage from Victorian world to that of Modernism

During this period several different movements and trends appeared in English Literature, among them:

Naturalism

Symbolism

Aesthetic movement

Psychological realism

Neoromanticism

Early Modernism

Literary works (mostly novels) tend to be more intellectual and psychological in their nature. Dramatic representation with both tragic and ironical emphasis within its content becomes the gist of the modern texture.

Dramatic genres acquire the highest status. English literature being strongly influenced by the Russian literary traditions cultivates the following features: never-ending seeking for truth, objectivity, humanism of the content, truthfulness of the human characters. The focus is made on the originality of the plot and composition.

Some writers concentrated on crime, slum conditions, and the lowest aspects of society. They showed their characters as victims of social conditions.