Basic HTML Version
16
U n i t
The literary scene
The early Victorian novel
The leading genre.
For the first time in literary history,
in the Victorian Age the novel became the leading genre.
The greater part of the reading public – including the
upper class and the intellectuals – read novels. The novel
reflected the practical bent of the age, the new social and
economic developments, scientific discoveries, and the
ethical problems raised by the Industrial Revolution.
Novels were commonly read aloud by well-to-do families,
especially in the evenings after dinner. Public readings
were also common among the lower class, where larger
groups – often the families in a tenement house – listened
to the best (or the only) reader in the group. The novelist
clearly had to avoid topics that could cause embarrassment
to the ladies or the children present in the audience.
The writers’ compromise.
Generally speaking, Victorian
readers expected to be
instructed
and at the same
time to be
entertained
. Novelists were conditioned –
whether consciously or unconsciously – by their readers’
expectations and so they clearly show both the desire to please and
the fear to shock. This explains why early Victorian novels present
conformity to accepted
moral standards
together with a great
liveliness
.
Charles Dickens
(
➤
p. 28)
is the most representative novelist of the
age, and England’s all-time best-loved novelist. In his great novels he
shows his consciousness of social injustice, the poverty and suffering of
the masses, political incompetence and corruption. Already in
Oliver
Twist
(1837-38) his social concerns are clear:
the comic element helps
to highlight serious issues
such as the bad treatment of orphans in
workhouses and the gangs of child-thieves in London. Dickens’ social
concerns, however, don’t make him seriously question the foundations
of Victorian society.
Hard Times
(1854) is typical of such ambiguity.
It deals with the themes of the inhumanity of the
factory system
– in
particular, the workers’ strike in a mining town – and the unnatural
teaching methods of the
utilitarian philosophy
; it treats them with
great participation and efficacy but, in the end, chooses a narrative
solution that, instead of questioning the system of social relations and
the organization of work, divides the characters into good and bad: a
typically Victorian compromise.
Novels of Romantic love.
The Romantic Age in England never
produced great novels of Romantic love: in Jane Austen, for instance,
love is always subordinated to social conventions. Novels of Romantic
Victorian literature
and visual arts
combined in giving
a portrait of family
happiness and
harmony.
A scene from
Roman Polanski’s
Oliver Twist
(2005).
001-027_The Victorians.indd 16
16/01/12