by Gail Cunningham
Where the Restoration and Enlightenment periods were dominated in literary terms by drama and poetry, the 19th century was indisputably the age of the novel. When Anthony Trollope noted in 1870 'that novels are in the hands of us all; from the Prime Minister down to the last appointed scullery-maid' he was drawing attention both to the pervasive cultural and social importance of fiction and, implicitly, to the immense range of novels available to what was by then a mass reading public. Not only did the novel form produce a consistent stream of major practitioners (of whom an uncontroversial listing would include Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy), it also gave expression to a huge variety of discourse from writers of less established reputation. Fiction in the 19th century could address every topic, enter every dispute, reflect every ideal of an age perceived by those who lived through it to be one of unprecedented rapid change. And, significantly, an extraordinary number and variety of 19th-century novels have currency in contemporary popular, as well as scholarly, reading habits.
This enduring popularity may in part be accounted for by the novel form itself. The novel is more immediately approachable than drama or poetry, and it addresses itself directly to 'life' without the intervening artistic medium of verse or dramatic form, and in a way which other literary genres do not. It tells stories, reworks the mundane materials of everyday life into something significant, and (most 19th-century readers would add) it teaches moral lessons. More interestingly, perhaps, it could be argued that the 19th-century novel is the first art form to deal explicitly and realistically with issues which speak directly to some of the central concerns of 20th-century consciousness.
The novels of this period sprang from a society undergoing a more massive upheaval under the influence of industrialization than in any previous era (Industrial Revolution). Not only was the population shifting irrevocably from an agricultural to an urban base, with all the profound changes in social, working and family patterns that this entailed, there were also the dramatic visible changes resulting from technological invention which altered people's perceptions and their world. The railway boom of the 1840s did not merely effect the landscape; its more profound repercussions lay in revolutionizing expectations of speed, mobility and permanence. When in Dombey and Son (1847-48) Dickens describes 'the first great shock of the earthquake' which the building of the railway brings, he is expressing a now familiar paradox inherent in such change: 'from the very core of all this dire disorder, [the railway] trailed smoothly away, upon its mighty course of civilisation and improvement'. The chaotic but human little community of Staggs's Gardens has been 'cut up root and branch' to make way for the 'crowds of people and mountains of goods' to be shifted by the railway: the individual and idiosyncratic have been sacrificed to the corporate and the homogeneous. Thomas Carlyle's famous definition of this period as 'the Mechanical Age' focused the anxieties of many of his contemporaries about the relationship of the individual to society. 'Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand,' wrote Carlyle, and the development and preservation of individuality within a society dominated by various kinds of mechanistic systems (moral, social, political, economic, even historical) formed a major theme of fiction throughout the century.
However, whereas Carlyle's mechanized individual is tacitly assumed to be a man, the novel of this period belongs in certain crucial respects to women. Not only were women the major consumers of fiction, forming as they did the majority of the readership throughout the century, they were also, to a degree never seen previously, producers as well. Women novelists take at least equal status with men both as generally acknowledged 'great writers' - four of the six major practitioners listed above are women - and also as part of the huge array of novel writers who produce everything from minor masterpieces to worthless pot-boilers. In the first two decades of the century Jane Austen was writing novels of sophisticated irony and realism, while Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1817) represented the peak of the Gothic romance form (> Gothic novel). Throughout the period writers like Charlotte Yonge, Elizabeth Gaskell, Harriet Martineau, Ouida and Margaret Oliphant were producing novels ranging from serious social comment to wild sensationalism (novel of sensation). And in the 1890s the single most popular novelist (though very far from the best) was another woman, Marie Corelli, whose The Sorrows of Satan (1895) sold more copies than any previous English novel. The subject matter of fiction, moreover, fell characteristically into a woman's sphere: even in novels whose thematic interests lie primarily elsewhere, the standard plot and setting are almost invariably domestic and family-orientated, with courtship and marriage providing a major part of the narrative thrust. As George Eliot pointed out, the novel form, more than any other, offered opportunities to women in a society which elsewhere constrained their every activity: 'No restrictions can shut women out from the materials of fiction, and there is no species of art which is so free from rigid requirements.' The 19th-century novel was the first art form in which women could take equal status with men.
For George Eliot, though, as for many others, the unusually dominant role of women as both producers and consumers of fiction was not an unequivocally good thing. Her comments are taken from an essay entitled 'Silly Novels by Lady Novelists' in which she draws attention to the self-gratifying and unreal stereotypes which lady novelists offer to an uncritical female readership. In other respects, too, this female orientation had an unfortunate influence on the sphere of the English novel. The popular picture of the Victorian pater familias reading out suitable material to his devoted family was not far from the truth, and was felt by many practising novelists to be a major restriction on their art. The 'young person', made archetypal through Dickens's Miss Podsnap in Our Mutual Friend (1864-5), placed a crippling constraint on the material thought proper for inclusion in the novel: 'The question about everything was, would it bring a blush into the cheek of the young person? And the convenience of the young person was, that, according to Mr Podsnap, she seemed liable to burst into blushes when there was no need at all.' As Thackeray lamented in his preface to Pendennis (1848-50): 'Since the author of Tom Jones was buried, no writer of fiction among us has been permitted to depict to his utmost power a MAN'; where Henry Fielding was at liberty to portray a lovable male libertine, Thackeray and his contemporaries looked constantly over their shoulders for the blushes of the young person and the pursed lips of the symbolic guardian of morality, Mrs Grundy. This provided a focus for impassioned debate throughout the century: where Trollope recorded complacently that 'no girl has risen from the reading pages less modest than she was before', other novelists, such as the popular feminist writer of the 1890s Mona Caird, chafed furiously against such artificial restraints: 'Mrs Grundy in black silk, with a sceptre in her hand, on the throne of the Ages, surrounded by an angel-choir of Young Persons! Is this to be the end of our democracy?'
Thus, for a large part of the 19th century the English novel was significantly limited by the necessity to conform to a moral code which aimed to protect a predominantly female readership from exposure to sexual corruption. Extreme circumspection was required in the depiction of any sort of sexual contact, whether in or outside marriage, often with ludicrous results. Charlotte Brontë's unusually frank account of Jane Eyre's passionate feelings for Mr Rochester and of his sexual history brought accusations of coarseness from several critics. The scene in Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) in which Angel Clare carries the milkmaids across a flooded lane had to be altered to expunge the image of a man lifting a personable young lady in his arms: in the serialized version, Clare had to be equipped with a wheelbarrow. And in broader terms, too, the novel upheld middle-class morality in matters of sexual conduct. Women were to be sexually pure, and morally superior to men; marriage was a sacred and indissoluble bond; women's individual emotional needs were to be subsumed in those of husband and family. Where a novel depicted deviation from these values, the appropriate moral lesson had to be firmly underlined, so that the 'fallen woman' who features in so much fiction of the period was invariably seen to be punished. Mrs Henry Wood's melodramatic and best-selling tale of adultery, East Lynne (1861), rammed home these lessons with almost sadistic relish, warning potential adulteresses that their fate 'will be found far worse than death' and proving the point with a story of startlingly ingenious retributive suffering. More commonly, the fallen woman was brought to a lonely death (like Lady Dedlock in Bleak House) or banished (like David Copperfield's Little Em'ly). Even in a work which pleaded for the moral rights of the fallen woman, such as Elizabeth Gaskell's Ruth (1853), the ultimate redemption could be attained only through death.
This circumspection had a more profound and potentially damaging effect on the portrayal of women in the 19th-century novel than it did on the representation of men. Thackeray was to some extent right to envy Fielding his Tom Jones, but he might have done better to regret his own inability to portray a Moll Flanders. Ironically, it was Thackeray himself who, in Vanity Fair (1847-8), encapsulated the Victorian double vision of women: the conventional ideal, destructively doting, cloyingly sentimental, passive, long-suffering and ultimately parasitical persists, as in Becky Sharp he portrays a woman of wit and initiative, who uses her sexuality and intelligence to exploit a society richly deserving her machinations, but who must finally be condemned as a neglectful mother, adulteress and, possibly, a murderer. Charlotte Brontë's Shirley (1849) explicitly attacks this male polarizing of supposed female attributes: 'Men are often under an illusion about women: they do not read them in a true light: they misapprehend them both for good and evil: their good woman is a queer thing, half doll, half angel; their bad woman always a fiend.' The bad woman, as we have seen, was habitually disposed of by death; but it was the good woman, half doll, half angel, who forms the common 20th-century conception of the typical Victorian heroine. Dickens' Agnes Wakefield, who in David Copperfield's image of her is 'forever pointing upward', is a typical role model for the sort of female perfection which is morally impeccable, spiritually uplifting and a well-earned reward for the world-weary hero. It was an ideal whose falsity was under constant attack throughout the period and which was largely discredited by the end of the century: in Havelock Ellis' phrase, the stereotyped woman was 'a cross between an angel and an idiot'.
How, then, did what now appears such a patently distorted view of women retain such hold in fictional conventions? We must not dismiss out of hand the notion that Victorian portrayals of women are more reflective of their repression in reality than we would care to believe. George Gissing argued that women actually were intellectually and developmentally feebler than men, when in typically gloomy mood he stated that 'more than half the misery of life is due to the ignorance and childishness of women. The average woman pretty closely resembles... the average male idiot.' In a society which, for the greater part of the century, denied women access to higher education and the professions, encased them physically in whalebone and voluminous skirts, and imbued them with the notion that their highest function was to serve and inspire men, it is little wonder that the conformist woman of the time should appear to modern eyes an unacceptably compliant creature — or, as Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) more waspishly expressed it, 'a bundle of weak and flabby sentiments, combined with a wholly undeveloped brain'. However, there is ample evidence both from the numerous examples of independent and rebellious women of 19th-century history, and from the many original and individualized heroines of fiction, that the conventional ideal was not the whole reality. More pervasively influential on characterization, as well as on the form and content of novels, were the actual conditions under which most of them were published.
At the beginning of the 19th century, the majority of novels were published in three, or sometimes four, volumes and the 'three decker' retained its popularity until almost the end of the Victorian period. The standard cost of each volume of the novel was half a guinea, a stiff enough price for most middle-class readers, and beyond the means of the working class. However, for a subscription of one guinea a year, readers could borrow a volume at a time from one of the circulating libraries, by far the most influential of which was Charles Mudie's, opened in 1842. Mudie exercised an influence over the Victorian novel which amounted to a form of censorship, for he prided himself upon selecting his stock according to its suitability for family consumption. Just as Mudie's moral approval of an author, which could translate into mass buying of copies from the publisher and advance orders for future works, could launch a career in fiction, so his refusal to stock a novel of dubious morality might spell financial disaster. Few novelists could afford the risk of offending the circulating libraries and thus a form of guilty self-censorship constrained the creative freedom of most writers.
Alternatives to publication in three-volume form were initiated by the revival of the monthly serialization of Dickens' Pickwick Papers in 1836. Novels published in this manner were issued as slim volumes appearing at the beginning of each month, continuing, as a rule, for nineteen numbers. Clearly this form of publication deeply influenced the form of works in a way largely obscured by their subsequent appearance in a single volume. Writers who wished their readers to continue buying their work over a long period had to end each issue with some cliffhanging incentive to purchase the next volume, and needed also to ensure the memorability of characters whose last appearance could have occurred several months earlier. This may in part account for what is now sometimes taken to be a melodramatic form of plotting and exaggeration in characterization on the part of such habitual practitioners of the monthly serial as Dickens or Thackeray. On the other hand, publication in parts did allow a writer to adjust his or her work in response to readers' preferences: a popular character could boost sales (as Sam Weller did for Pickwick) and a narrative red herring could be expeditiously abandoned. As single-volume serialization gradually gave way to part publication in family and literary magazines, the questions of sales and censorship moved from the author's to the editor's domain. Hardy was one of the prime sufferers from editorial restraint in the initial serial publication of his novels, and he frequently had to wait for one-volume publication before he was able to present his work in the form intended. Both Dickens and Thackeray had experience of the business from both ends, the first as editorial instigator of the family weeklies Household Words and All the Year Round, the second as editor of the prestigious Cornhill. Amongst major Victorian novelists, only the Brontës never published in any sort of serial form.
Given the wealth and variety of 19th-century fiction, as well as the inevitable historical shifts in critical judgements, it is hardly surprising to find widely diverging assessments of how the novel developed over the period. George Saintsbury's A History of Nineteenth-century Literature, first published in 1896, gives almost as much space to Maria Edgeworth as to Jane Austen and George Eliot, and treats Walter Scott more fully than Dickens: Hardy receives no mention at all. F. R. Leavis' immensely influential The Great Tradition (1948) opens with the characteristically combative statement: 'The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad'; Charlotte Brontë is noted as having 'permanent interest of a minor kind', Dickens as being a 'great entertainer' who lacks 'sustained seriousness'. Leavis' judgements, based on a vaguely defined but insistently urged criterion of 'significant creative achievement', were of course challenged almost immediately by other critics, and both he and his wife and fellow critic Q. D. Leavis later admitted Dickens and Charlotte Brontë to their higher ranks. In more recent years, the whole notion of the canon has come under attack, perhaps most notably from feminist critics. Individual writers and sub-genres of the novels which would have been relegated to areas of minor interest by many mid-20th-century critics now attract serious study, and the reputations of many well-known novelists have notably shifted. Of those most highly regarded in the 19th century itself, Scott and George Meredith have suffered the most serious depression in critical interest; neither is now much read by the general public or widely taught on literature degree courses. Dickens, on the other hand, has been reclaimed from the realm of mere entertainer and praised as an incisive social critic of profound symbolic significance. And Hardy, ignored by Saintsbury and patronizingly dismissed by Leavis, now commands as wide a critical industry on both sides of the Atlantic as any 19th-century novelist.
There is no simple way of subdividing the mass of fictional material published during the period, nor, despite Leavis' claim for a great tradition, is there any single line of development which can easily be traced. Conventionally, the pre-Victorian period, where the major figures are Scott and Jane Austen, is seen as having a separate identity, which then gives way to the explosion of talent in the first decades of Victoria's reign, with the emergence of Dickens, Thackeray and the Brontës. The mid-Victorian novel can be seen as dominated by the later Dickens and George Eliot, and the late-19th century by Hardy. These periods will be dealt with separately in conjunction with the major authors within them. However, to identify the major practitioners of the form during the period is very far from finding a consistent train of development. While there is a sense in which James' novels can be seen as a more self-consciously artistic development of Jane Austen's fictional mode, there is no obvious way in which Hardy may be said to emerge from the same tradition. Charlotte Brontë, notoriously, found little to admire in Jane Austen, and Hardy recorded that he was unable to finish reading Wuthering Heights (1847). Arguably, the 19th century saw the emergence in the novel of a privileging of > 'realism', both in the presentation of psychological depth of characterization and in the depiction of humankind's inevitable interrelation with the newly perceived complexities of social and historical contexts. There is also a clear change, in the Victorian period at least, in the material thought permissable for inclusion in the novel. The tyranny of the circulating libraries and the family magazines was gradually eroded to allow greater frankness in the fictional portrayal of sexuality. By the 1890s outspokenness on questions of sexual behaviour particularly in women had become to some extent fashionable, and a host of popular novels which examined such questions in an overtly polemical manner enjoyed a brief vogue. Even so, the violently antagonistic reception of Hardy's Jude the Obscure (1895), which saw the novel reviled in the press and burnt by a bishop, showed how severely limited this increased tolerance could be.
More importantly, an attempt to treat 19th-century fiction as a smoothly developing series of 'great writers' severely distorts the picture of the novel as it would have been viewed by both readers and authors during the period itself. It ignores too much of what was seriously offered and received by contemporary writers and readers, and which is now the subject of increasing critical interest, both as reflections of the 19th-century consciousness and as significant and legitimate variations on the novel form. Late-20th-century taste is perhaps more open to claims of romance and fantasy, or sympathetically interested in the overt wrestling with ideas, than was the case when Leavis made high moral seriousness and mastery of form his main criteria of excellence. Minor novelists, and the sub-genres in which they frequently wrote, are an essential and illuminating part of the 19th-century fictional scene.
During the early decades of the 19th century most popular fiction grew out of the traditions of romance and Romanticism. The two terms are, of course, closely linked, but should be equated. A romance, in David Masson's definition of 1859, was 'a fictitious narrative...the interest of which turns upon marvellous and uncommon incidents', and the debate between romance and realism formed a continuous part of 19th-century thinking about the theory of fiction. The influence of the Romantic movement was most apparent in the late-18th-century Gothic novel, a form not lacking in marvellous and uncommon incidents, but which also played on the Romantic interest in the supernatural and in the dark and untapped areas of the human psyche. Jane Austen, writing novels of pragmatic realism during the height of the Romantic period, mercilessly satirized the implausibility of the Gothic through the credulous Catherine of Northanger Abbey (1818), and neatly pinned down the possible self-indulgence of the Romantic sensibility in Persuasion's Captain Brondon. Thomas Love Peacock's spoof Gothic novel Nightmare Abbey (1818), also lampooned the form as well as parodying the romantic excesses of some of that movement's major poets. But the Gothic was still kept vividly alive in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein published in the same year as Peacock's parody, and reappears, subtly transformed, in the works of Charlotte and Emily Brontë. It could also be argued that the historical novel, first popularized by Scott, and continued less successfully in the works of, for example, Harrison Ainsworth, owed much to the Romantic period and Gothic preoccupation with the past.
In many ways, though, it was romance rather than Romanticism which informed the main sub-genres of the first three decades of the 19th century. Writers of popular fiction were anxious to entertain their readers with dramatic incidents and to draw them imaginatively into worlds remote from their own. The historical novel could obviously offer limitless scope here, in terms of both high drama and (often ponderously academic) period detail. Where Ainsworth's novels catered to the contemporary taste for luridly reconstructed English history, one of the other popular practitioners of the form, Edward Bulwer, mainly remembered now for The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), took the wider sweep of Western historical movements as his subject. His historical romances tend to focus on the closing of eras and may thus be seen as signifying contemporary unease in the face of change and instability. But his writings are too clogged with the fruits of meticulous historical research, and too stilted in the rendering of dialogue to have lasted well. However, forms of the historical novel continued to be practised throughout the century by major as well as minor writers. George Eliot ventured into historical fiction, not wholly successfully, in Romola, as did Gissing in Veranilda (1904). And modern readers often overlook the fact that many familiar novels of the period announce themselves in their opening words as 'historical' while still being set in the 19th century: 'While the present century was in its teens...' (Vanity Fair); 'Thirty years ago, Marseilles lay burning in the sun...' (▷ Little Dorrit); 'One evening of late summer, before the nineteenth century had reached one-third of its span...'( The Mayor of Casterbridge).
The historical novel could be both an escape from and a comment on the profound changes which were perceived to be occurring in the contemporary social order. Of less obvious relevance were the other popular sub-genres of the early 19th century, the ▷ Newgate novel and the silver-fork school. The Newgate novel played on morbid tastes for violence and death in ways which relate it to some extent to the Gothic, and in romanticizing its criminals it removed such socially disruptive elements safely into the realm of fantasy. The silver-fork school, on the other hand, displayed the sort of high society life to which increasingly prosperous members of the middle class might hope to aspire and which they could certainly be expected to envy. Novels of this class paraded details of the food, fashions and furniture of the rich and well-bred before a readership which could now begin to dream of emulating such manners. Writers of silver-fork fiction included > Benjamin Disraeli in his early novel Vivien Grey (1826), the now largely forgotten Theodore Hook (1788-1841), and Catherine Gore. Both Dickens and Thackeray capture and to some degree satirize the mood of envious interest amongst the socially mobile on which these novels played Thackeray in his portrayal of the nouveau riches Osborne and Sedly families in Vanity Fair, and Dickens, for example, in his parody "The Lady Flabella' in Nicholas Nickleby or with the Veneerings in Our Mutual Friend. Interestingly, both the Newgate and silver-fork forms have counterparts in modern popular fiction in the bodice-ripping school of historical fiction (where sex replaces death as the focus) and the sex-and-shopping novel which caters for the emulative dreams of the upwardly mobile.
Of more immediate social relevance, however, as well as in general possessing more lasting literary merit, were the novels which addressed the 'condition of England question. These works, also known as 'social problem' novels arose out of the social and political upheavals which followed the Reform Act of 1832. The 1830s and 1840s marked the beginning of a conscious effort both by Parliament and by social commentators to address the problems caused by the rapid industrialization of the preceding decades. The first Factory Act (▷ factories) and the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 reflected the stirrings of governmental conscience and, from the other side, the rise of ▷ Chartism marked the beginnings of concerted working-class demands for reform. The economic depression of the 1840s produced deprivation amongst the industrial workers of the north on a scale which could not be ignored, and Chartist riots and marches on Westminster made poverty and disaffection visibly threatening to the comparatively untouched middle-class southerner. It was Carlyle who first drew attention to the social effects of the Industrial Revolution in his essay ▷ 'Signs of the Times' (1829) and who, in coining the phrase 'condition of England question' in Chartism (1839), provided a focus for what to many novelists of the early Victorian period seemed to be the central matter for fiction. Writers like Elizabeth Gaskell, Disraeli, ▷ Charles Kingsley and the Dickens of ▷ Hard Times (1854), addressed themselves directly to the question and produced novels which dealt realistically and sympathetically with the new problems of the industrialized working class.
Probably the major strength of the social problem novel lay in its educational rather than its polemical function. Written by and for the middle classes, these novels laid out with passionate clarity the plight of a section of the community of which most readers, for geographical and social reasons, were simply ignorant. The new cities of the north of England, where industrial workers were herded into hastily erected housing built round smoke-belching factories, were uncharted territory for large parts of the novel-reading public, and the divisive effects of such developments were repeatedly stressed by novelists. In giving his condition of England novel ▷ Sybil (1845) the subtitle 'The Two Nations', Disraeli encapsulated his perception of a country tragically and dangerously split between rich and poor, and Elizabeth Gaskell's ▷ North and South (1854-5) explores the differences in values and living conditions between the two halves of the country. The vividly realistic descriptions of working-class life provided by many social problem novels were as educative to contemporary readers as to later social historians, and the pressing issues of Chartism, trade unions, strikes and master-worker relations receive sensitive if rarely revolutionary treatment in such novels as Gaskell's ▷ Mary Barton (1848), Kingsley's ▷ Alton Locke (1850) and Disraeli's Sybil. Dickens' Hard Times, the only one of his novels to be set exclusively in the north of England, contrasts the mechanistic, and as he sees them, inhuman principles of ▷ utilitarian philosophy with the personal and warm-hearted values of imaginative sympathy, and his handling of the question of solidarity amongst the factory hands is symptomatic of the ambivalence apparently inherent in the genre. His working-class protagonist, Stephen Blackpool, is a saintly victim, his union leader a blustering agitator and the men good-hearted innocents temporarily swayed into an unworthy form of protest against a system portrayed as patently wrong. Blackpool's repeated lament in the fact of bafflingly obvious injustice, "Tis all a muddle', sums up the helplessness of worker and novelist alike in the face of the enormity of the problem.
Indeed, the one major criticism of the genre, levelled by contemporaries as well as by modern critics, was that it proffered inadequate and often sentimental solutions to questions of great social and political complexity. As Thackeray put it, 'At the conclusion of these tales...there somehow arrives a misty reconciliation between the poor and the rich; a prophecy is uttered of better times for the one, and better manners in the other...and the characters make their bow, grinning, in a group, as they do at the end of a drama when the curtain falls.' This is largely true of the novels mentioned: the symbolic handshake between master and man at the end of North and South, Mary Barton's escape to Canada with her newlywed husband, or Stephen Blackpool's martyrdom in the cause of truth and understanding - all substitute reconciliation at a personal level for long-term political solutions. However, there is no reason to expect novelists to be in possession of answers which escaped legislators, whereas in articulating and making imaginatively immediate the social problems of the time, writers of the condition of England novels not only provided a valuable information service but also produced works of significant realism and insight.
The social condition of a newly industrialized Britain was a preoccupation, of novelists during the 1840s and 1850s. During the same period the spiritual condition of the country also became of pressing concern and novels dealing with religious questions formed another recognizable sub-genre which retained its currency to the end of the century. In some sense all 19th-century novels are 'religious' in so far as they are the product of a society in which Christian observance was the norm amongst the middle classes, and thus the oral and spiritual values of Christianity are necessarily either implicit or deliberately explored by all writers of fiction. However, the crisis of faith which arose in the middle decades of the 19th century predictably gave rise to works which set out to discuss the problems explicitly, in much the same way in which the condition of England novel articulated social and political questions. The three main influences on religious thought during this time were the Oxford Movement of the 1830s and 1840s, which sought to restore High Church ideals within the Church of England, and culminated in John Newman's defection to Roman Catholicism in 1845; the new German biblical criticism, made first accessible to English readers with the publication of George Eliot's translation of Strauss's Leben Jesu in 1846; and, of course, the impact of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859). Spiritual crises and ecclesiastical quarrellings form the subject of such novels as J. A. Froude's The Nemesis of Faith (1849), Disraeli's Lothair (1870) and Mrs Humphry Ward's Robert Elsmere (1883), as well as being the basis of Trollope's Barsetshire novels and Margaret Oliphant's imitations of them, 'The Chronicles of Carlingford'.
Nineteenth-century consumers of fiction were thus very much more receptive to the exposition of ideas in fiction than are most modern readers, who tend to resent being preached at under the guise of fiction. Problem novels, or 'novels with a purpose', tackled issues of all kinds throughout the period. Again, the main beneficiaries of this discursive tendency were probably women, whose problems, lumped under the catch-all phrase 'the woman question', were repeatedly examined. The fallen woman was, as mentioned above, a particularly popular subject, featuring as a dreadful warning in works such as East Lynne or as a repentant Magdalene figure in Ruth. Charlotte Yonge's The Clever Woman of the Family (1865) cautions young women against the temptations of the intellect as memorably as Mrs Henry Wood does against the lure of the flesh. And by the last decade of the century there had arisen a distinct class of novel, the 'New Woman fiction', which dealt with the current feminist questions of sex, marriage and work. Grant Allen's succès de scandale, The Woman Who Did (1895), marked the culmination of the genre, with its hyperbolic attack on the institution of marriage (a 'temple' where 'pitiable victims languish and die in...sickening vaults'). Nor was the problem novel exclusively the province of minor writers: almost all major novelists of the period deal with these ideas in some form or other, and in the 1890s, for example, George Gissing's The Odd Woman (1893), Meredith's Lord Ormont and his Aminta (1894) and Hardy's Jude the Obscure (1895) were all taken by contemporary readers to be variations of the New Woman novel.
There is, then, continuous interaction in terms of themes, issues and genres, between different writers and between recognizable sub-groups of the novel and what is now regarded as mainstream fiction. The novelists of the period should be viewed within the artistic as well as the social and political context in which they worked.
To select Jane Austen as the single major writer of this period is at once to make a critical judgement which would not always have been accepted. For later 19th-century readers and many earlier 20th-century ones, Walter Scott would have appeared probably the more influential figure. In initiating the historical romance he popularized a form which retained its appeal throughout the century and he was read with admiration by most subsequent 19th-century novelists. Charlotte Brontë, unsurprisingly, much preferred his romantic sweep to Jane Austen's tightly controlled realism, and Henry James praised his 'responding imagination before the human scene'. Interestingly, though, it was Scott himself who was one of the first to identify and appreciate Jane Austen's particular contribution to the development of the English novel at the time. In his review of ▷ Emma (1816) he discusses at length the limitations and diminishing returns of the predominating romance form, praising her novels for 'presenting to the reader, instead of the striking representation of an imaginary world, a correct and striking representation of that which is daily taking place around him'.
Jane Austen was herself, as is widely known, acutely conscious of the self-imposed restrictions of her range. When she wrote of the 'little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush as produces little effect after much labour', she was characteristically both self-deprecating about her limitations and astute about her strengths. As a realist in an age dominated by romance, her fine brush reworked the material of fiction into tones which set standards for the investigation of the individual within a closely observed social framework for later realists to emulate if they could. For a long time her reputation was somewhat distorted by 'Janeite' critics who praised her 'gentle' irony and indulgent humour, thus creating an impression of a softly female orientation within the safe sphere of domestic concerns, untroubling to the larger issues of life. Nothing could be further from the truth. Her irony, far from being gentle, is habitually savage in its condemnation of the foolish, hypocritical and self-deceiving; her humour is razor-sharp in its exposure of human weakness in a morally flawed society. Her heroines are set painful lessons in personal knowledge and moral self-discipline which entirely deny the possibilities of sentimental or coincidental resolve to which later Victorian novelists often have recourse. If, in keeping with the comic mode, they succeed finally in securing their desirable ends, it is not through a conventional coincidence of circumstance but because moral maturity secures an appropriate partnering. Nor is Jane Austen's world as prim and restricted as is sometimes unguardedly assumed. While never condoning sexual misdemeanour, her treatment of the subject owes more to hard-headed 18th-century worldliness than to Victorian repression. Where the Victorian female innocent is habitually seduced, abandoned and condemned to a lonely fate, Lydia Bennet (▷ Pride and Prejudice) bounces exuberantly into Wickham's bed with no thoughts in her head beyond immediate gratification, and after her hastily patched up marriage is received, if coolly, by her family.
Jane Austen's values, then, are more 18th-century than Victorian, more ▷ classical than romantic. She portrays a society in which foolishness, hypocrisy and avarice abound, but where an agreed standard of moral principle may be assumed and where rationality may be invoked to counterbalance the disruptive lure of unbridled emotionalism. Her characters may suffer but they must also understand, and their understanding derives from a proper exercise of rational thought rather than from emotional or subconscious enlightenment. Through Marianne in ▷ Sense and Sensibility (1811) she attacks the idea that feeling can be a reliable guide to conduct and in ▷ Persuasion (1818) she satirizes, though with more sympathetic indulgence, romantic emotion. But perhaps no single factor marks Jane Austen off more distinctly from the Victorian novelists that followed her than her treatment of children. Amongst her heroines, only Fanny Price in ▷ Mansfield Park (1814) is portrayed in childhood, and children in general figure merely as convenient plot devices or as social distractions. By contrast, the Victorian novelist frequently makes the child, often an orphan, and the process of growth to maturity a central thematic focus. After Jane Austen, the influence of Romantic thought on ideas about childhood, innocence, imagination and feeling is everywhere apparent.
It is notable, then, that while biographers of Jane Austen find difficulty in giving dramatic interest to a life of largely uneventful calm, those of the great mid-century novelists have a wealth of misery, neglect and misunderstanding to relate in their subjects’ early years. This has the obvious effect of producing corresponding autobiographical portrayals of children in the novels, but also tends to create a sense, in marked contrast to Austen, of the fictional protagonist as alienated from or at odds with society. In the early Victorian novel the depiction of society generally expands unrecognizably from Jane Austen’s little bit of ivory to a consciously panoramic perspective in which the individual is likely to be embattled and forlorn. The figure of the innocent child, often lonely and neglected, becomes a powerful symbol of society’s guilt; the education and growth from childhood show the process of adjustment within a largely hostile social structure. While the Romantic movement discovered and articulated the moral potency of the child, it was the Victorian novel which produced the first sustained portrayals of children in literature. Of the major novelists of the period, William Makepeace Thackeray is probably least directly concerned with children, though his best novel, Vanity Fair, does make use of significant incidents from the childhood of his protagonists in order to account for their subsequent development. Though often astute and original in his perception of his characters’ psychology, his main strengths as a writer lay in his sharp eye for the particular kinds of human weakness thrown up by a newly complex society and his ability, in Vanity Fair as least, to bind all levels of the social structure into a comprehensive vision of moral and spiritual inadequacy. When Charlotte Brontë described him as ‘the first social regenerator of the day’, she was responding to qualities which were abundantly present in his early work but which faded notably in his later career. Vanity Fair, ‘A Novel without a Hero’, depicts English society in the years surrounding ▷ Waterloo as itself a battleground where money and social standing are the criteria for success and where individuals rise and fall according to their skill in playing social games as amoral and arbitrary as the Stock Exchange on which fortunes are won and lost. Though Thackeray focuses his interest on the newly emerging middle classes, his picture of society extends upwards into the metropolitan aristocracy and the landed gentry, and downwards to the working classes and ▷ Bohemia. What binds them all is the struggle for money and reputation in a cut-throat world where the clever can ‘live well on nothing a year’ and the weak go to the wall. It is mark of Thackeray’s originality that the character who most successfully exploits the possibilities of this social struggle is a woman, the intelligent and cynical Becky Sharp; and though he works hard to condemn her at the end of the novel, her wit and energy continue to contrast favourably with the vapid conventionality of other characters. The novel leaves a moral question mark over all its characters and in so doing forces its readers to engage actively in the process of questioning and judgement in a way calculated both to challenge and disturb.
Charles Dickens, Thackeray's more successful rival for the affections of the novel-reading public, rarely leaves such moral openness, but develops more consistently towards a bleak view of society in which monolithic institutions (money and commerce in Dombey and Son, the law in Bleak House, the civil service in Little Dorrit) are potentially crushing to the strongly realized goodness of individuals. It was Dickens more than any other Victorian novelist who exploited the possibilities of the child as symbol of innocence amidst corruption, and this is one major factor which has led to accusations of sentimentality in his works. A catalogue of his maltreated but morally reformative children ▷ Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Paul and Florence Dombey, Jo the crossing sweeper, Little Nell, Sissy Jupe (from Hard Times), Little Dorrit (amongst many others) suggests a preoccupation with the innocence of childhood which could add weight to such an accusation, and it is largely true that Dickens' children are exempt from the barbs of humorous exposure with which he mercilessly illuminates the grotesque flaws in most of his characters. But his best portrayals of childhood—those in which the child ceases to be a simple symbolic force—uniquely capture the guilts and fears as well as the pathetic helplessness of juvenile innocence.
Much modern criticism bases its praise for Dickens on a perception of the development in his later novels of a thematically coherent critique of his society which works through imagery and symbolism rather than through the creation of psychologically convincing characters. One can point, for example, to the recurrent images of imprisonment in Little Dorrit or to the sustained exploration of legal ramifications in Bleak House. Dickens' world is so richly animated, his descriptive powers so invigoratingly original as to invest the inanimate objects of his world with a vitality and significance often assumed to compensate for the lack of realism in the people which inhabit it. His women are prime targets for criticism here, since it is generally female characters who, for obvious reasons, carry the sometimes crippling weight of his moral approval. Dickens, while anatomizing the evils of his society with unique imaginative power, had a characteristically Victorian belief in the possibility of unsullied goodness and it is generally the heroines of his novels who provide examples of its morally regenerative force. Sissy Jupe in Hard Times works a change in the harshly utilitarian Gradgrind household 'by mere love and gratitude' and it is her 'wisdom of the Heart' which effectively counteracts the mechanistic values that the novel attacks. Her passive goodness and sweetly self-sacrificing nature exemplify the qualities often taken to be regrettably typical of Dickens' portrayal of women. However, it could also be argued that the 20th century's automatic suspicion of pure virtue blinds the modern reader to more subtle qualities in Dickens' heroines. His skill in depicting the psychological results of guilt and repression, often noted in his male characters, is present also in his portrayal of many of the women. For characters such as Florence Dombey, Esther Summerson or Little Dorrit 'becoming good' is a psychologically plausible reaction to rejection and alienation, though the modern critical eye has habitually been too prejudiced against the stereotype of the virtuous woman to note this.
Whatever may be reclaimed for Dickens' reputation in the portrayal of women, though, he can never hope to rival the Brontës in this area. Anne Brontë, less talented and original than her sisters, still writes movingly and perceptively about the loneliness of the governess in Agnes Grey (1847), and adds new dimensions to the depiction of marital misery in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). Emily Brontë's only novel, Wuthering Heights, is generally recognized to transcend normal moral and spiritual expectations. Though Charlotte Brontë felt it necessary in her Preface to her sister's novel to apologize for what she felt 'must appear a rude and strange production', the novel is meticulously planned and structured. Its strangeness derives partly from its unaccustomed settings, more perhaps from its extremities of violence and passion, and the central portrayal in Cathy and Heathcliff of a relationship which cannot be assimilated into any conventional framework or concept of character. That Emily Brontë was aware of the difficulties of this structure is shown by the care with which she draws her readers into the story through narrators of familiar social and psychological backgrounds; as their limitations are exposed, so their conventional judgements are progressively rejected and the reader is invited to accept an entirely unfamiliar scheme of values. At the end of the novel, Lockwood's inability to imagine 'unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth' seems more a reflection of his own limitations than an an assurance that the grave will provide a final peace for the spirits of Cathy and Heathcliff.
However, the radical nature of Emily Bronte's vision makes her less influenced by social realities. Her main characters, being largely outside convention, make no direct comment upon it. Charlotte Brontë, on the other hand, working more within the bounds of recognizable society, produces original depictions of women which are overtly hostile to contemporary ideas. The autobiographical elements in her work create repeated images of women struggling against a world whose expectations they are unable and, indeed, unwilling to fulfil. Jane Eyre, 'poor, plain and little', and Lucy Snow (in Villette, 1853), wracked with the pain of unrequited love, obviously call upon Charlotte Brontë's own experiences. Her heroines all struggle in a world whose standards of female behaviour are alien to their own, and their achievements are wrenched painfully from the creation of a personal morality which is frequently at odds with the conventions of their society. Though Lucy Snow, who in Villette's slightly ambiguous ending is shown as independent mistress of her own school, may seem the most obvious candidate for modern feminist approval, it is really Jane Eyre who summarizes Brontë's sustained plea for a morality in which the heroine has the right and the duty to realize her individuality independent of expectations from moral systems. Both Charlotte and Emily Brontë participate in the Romantic's championing of the unique individual, the first within, the second largely outside contemporary social realities. The poetic intensity of their writing, together with the patent influences of the Gothic and Byronic traditions, make their works the most striking inheritors of Romanticism in the fiction of the period.
It is gratifying to reflect that the first intellectual amongst major English novelists was a woman. In an age when female education was largely limited to the acquisition of 'accomplishments', George Eliot could read French, Italian, German, Latin and Greek. Deeply involved in and influenced by the philosophical and scientific movements of the time, she lost her religious faith in early womanhood but retained a profound sense of moral imperatives in a secular context. In common with many of her counterparts, her interests focused on history and on modern attempts to arrive at systematic descriptions of social, religious and intellectual evolution. Her novels continually show her interest in the relationship between individual and historical change: as the individual is the product of social and historical forces, so society is formed and changed by the apparently inconsiderable lives of the individuals who compose it. Dorothea, who sets out at the beginning of Middlemarch (1871-2) in the view of the narrator as a 'modern Saint Theresa', may be defeated in her youthful objectives of effecting visible or dramatic change in her society, but is convincingly displayed at the end as having an effect 'incalculably diffusive' on 'the growing good of the world'. The portrayal of the individual within a complex network of social and historical relationships forms a major part of George Eliot's fictional vision.
The past, and the extent to which Eliot's characters are determined by forces contained within it form a continual theme in her fiction. 'Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds,' she wrote in Adam Bede (1859), and her novels repeatedly display what in Middlemarch she described as 'the slow preparation of effects from one life on another'. Seeing her characters as largely determined by a meticulously charted individual past, and a socially and historically realized present, she nevertheless insists upon the stern exercise of personal responsibility in moral decision-making. Her characters or, more particularly, her narrators, are among the first in English fiction to be consistently portrayed in the process of rigorous thought, whether about personal choices or larger intellectual systems. However, George Eliot as narrator remains firmly in control of both her structures and her readers' responses. When in Middlemarch she comments on the unknowable significance of future developments in individual lives 'destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personae folded in her hand' she could have legitimately substituted herself for destiny. George Eliot's authorial voice, omniscient, magisterial and tolerant, constantly controls our reactions and, to some extent, raises her readers to a level close to her own lofty overview. When Virginia Woolf described Middlemarch as 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people', she was deftly defining the degree to which George Eliot's fiction makes demands of serious moral response in a readership which could previously have rested happily within the safe bounds of entertaining diversion.
Some contemporary reviews of Thomas Hardy's early, anonymously published work speculated that it might be by George Eliot. Presumably they were misled by the superficial similarities in the portrayal of rural communities and perhaps by Hardy's youthful pretensions to a command of contemporary intellectual issues, imperfectly assimilated. Indeed, an ability to judge his readers' tolerance of progressive moral and intellectual views was a continuing, and to modern eyes endearing, quality of Hardy's fiction, deriving as it did from his unusual combination of a countryman's pragmatism with a self-educated intellectualism. As the creator of the semi-fictional world of Wessex, Hardy became the most significant regional novelist of the age and, with his unrivalled knowledge of the local customs and accents of his native land, was in better position than any other writer to chart the changes in agricultural communities under the various dramatic shocks of 19th-century change. Hardy has, moreover, an eye for nature which is at once entirely unsentimental and supremely observant. When in A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873) Henry Knight clings desperately to a cliff with a fatal drop beneath him, Hardy notes that his torments are increased by the fact that rain driven against such an obstacle moves upwards not down: and, mechanically staring death in the face, Knight's eyes actually meet the fossilized gaze of a trilobite embedded for millions of years in the rock before him. The vulnerable human in his extremity meets the indifferent but infinitely varied forces of nature, yet has contact over a gap of several million years with a fellow creature who has similarly suffered the pangs of life and death.
Such an incident is typical of the way in which Hardy's immense imaginative range and habitual preoccupation with the ironies of time are given solidity by observation of the precisely natural. It is also characteristic in that Knight's eventual rescue is effected by an incident at once stimulating and shocking to Victorian sexual tastes. The novel's heroine, Elfride, strips herself of all her undergarments in order to make a rope and, clad merely in a 'diaphanous exterior robe', hauls him to safety. Throughout his career Hardy found himself embroiled in battles against the prudish sensibilities of his readership and, as his later novels began to engage more directly with contemporary questions of sexual morality, he was drawn, apparently protestingly, into fervent debates about women, sex and marriage. His views of the human condition, though, are more comprehensively tragic than would be suggested by confining him to immediate social criticism. Frequently accused of being irredeemably pessimistic, he described himself as a meliorist who portrayed the worst in order to point towards the better. But, despite the sharpness of their social criticism, there is little in his last novels in Tess of the D'Urbervilles or Jude the Obscure to suggest that possible future change could effectively alleviate what a recent biographer has termed his 'obstinate intonations of doomed morality'.
Hardy was in many senses the last of the great Victorian novelists. During the final years of the century it was his reputation, together with the more warily expressed admiration for Meredith, which dominated English fiction. Amongst other novelists, though, the debate about the relationship between romance and realism continued to be waged, with Gissing and George Moore as the prime realists vying with the exotic romances of, for example, Robert Louis Stevenson and H. Rider Haggard. The vitality of the novel form was undiminished both in its challenge to social and moral convention and in its sheer inventiveness in entertainment. In literary terms, though, it was Henry James, with his infinitely sophisticated narrative and Joseph Conrad's modernism, which pointed the way forwards into 20th-century developments of the novel as a form of art.