The Early and Mid-Victorian Novel

David Skilton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317209195
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Victorian period was the age of the novel and critics at the time clearly saw the importance of prose fiction.

First published in 1993, this anthology contains over fifty original extracts from contemporary critics on the early and mid-Victorian novel. Arranged thematically, the volume covers such topics as literary form, the social responsibility of literature, issues of politics and gender, the influence of criticism, realism, plot and characterisation, imagination and creativity, and the office and social standing of the novelist. The introductions and notes draw together the large number of voices and guide the reader through the Victorian literary critical debate.

This accessible and invaluable guide will be of interest to those studying Victorian literature.

1
The age of the novel

Since the late eighteenth century the novel had been greeted with antagonism by evangelicals and Utilitarians alike, as a danger to the reader's moral and mental well-being, and with grudging acceptance by the more open-minded, as a form far inferior to poetry and drama, and fit only for ephemeral amusement. In 1848, in what is usually regarded as a most remarkably fertile period for the English novel, De Quincey put the matter unequivocally: 'All novels whatever, the best equally with the worst, have faded almost with the generation that produced them. This is a curse written as a superscription above the whole class.'¹ In general, however, as the extraordinary amount of good new fiction forced itself on the attention of all thinking people in the early and mid-Victorian period, it became apparent that the novel was the literary form most characteristic of the day, and the question arose as to whether the dominance of prose fiction represented wholescale cultural degradation. It might be true that '[a] chain of novels like Mr. Anthony Trollope's Barsetshire set is essentially a birth of our own time', as the Oresteia was of fifth-century Athens² but how did that fact reflect on the new age? By the 1860s, however, the aesthetic importance of the form was becoming accepted by many. In 1863 a culturally elitist weekly like the Saturday Review could write:

Novels have become so large a part of our literature. . . that they cannot be dismissed as so much 'light literature', nor their character be considered a matter of indifference. In the hands of some writers, they have almost risen to the dignity of the drama and the epic, and have become models of thought and style to all who come after them.³

To a critic in the North British Review in 1864 this was the age of the novel, as the Elizabethan and Jacobean period had been the age of drama, while for the Westminster Review in 1867, '[t]o say that the novel is the modern substitute for the drama is only to repeat one of the commonplaces of criticism'.⁴ In 1881, at the end of the period covered by this book, there was no incongruity in Leslie Stephen's comparison of George Eliot's death with that of Shakespeare in its potential significance for the history of English literature.⁵ The high status of prose fiction had finally been confirmed in relation to Middlemarch, a novel which gives an account of the political, social and economic foundation of mid-nineteenth-century prosperity, and hereby arguably did for the Victorians what Virgil's Aeneid did for Imperial Rome.

The dominant literary form had its admirers and detractors, but everybody agreed in attributing the success and peculiarities of each kind of novel to social and economic factors. De Quincey (1.2) puts the growth in the fiction industry down to an increase in basic literacy, and ascribes the shortcomings of the mass of novels to the fact that authors become corrupted by pandering to the debased tastes of the inadequately educated lower classes. For Bagehot (1.3) the tastes of young readers are allowed too much influence in the choice of subject-matter, while the Saturday Review (1.5) looks down on fiction which it feels to have arrived at success through the vagaries of fashion. E.S. Dallas (1.6) for his part recognises serialisation as an effective way of reaching a large readership, and finds it in turn a determining factor in the development of plot-interest in novels in the period.

The age of the novel had brought with it new methods of distributing and consuming fiction. Extracts 1.5, 1.6 and 1.7 highlight the importance of part-issue and serialisation, which were crucial in creating a wider readership at a time when a three-volume novel cost £1 11s 6d. The particular sort of continuing interest wound up by serialisation leads Jeaffreson (1.7) to ask on behalf of his readers for the further adventures of Trollope's Barsetshire characters. The other system of distribution most characteristic of the age was the large circulating library, notably the one founded in 1842 by Charles Mudie, whose fortune, the Saturday Review jokes (1.5), Trollope was born to make, and who quickly, as De Quincey notes (1.2), made use of improved communications in the age of steam to transport books to his readers all over the country, and indeed over the entire globe. (A box of books from Mudie's even accompanied Sir John Franklin on his fatal arctic expedition of 1845-7.)⁶

We know less about the individual experience of reading than we do of the workings of the literary market-place. It is unsafe to assume that original readers took in the major works of Victorian fiction in the way that we are likely to read current fiction. According to Dallas (5.4), 'a novel-reader will go on reading novels to all eternity, and sometimes even will have several in hand at once - a serial of Mr. Trollope's here, a serial of Mr. Dickens's there, and the last three-volume tale into the bargain'. Illustration was an integral part of much serial fiction from Pickwick onwards, including a majority of the works of Dickens, Thackeray and Trollope, and George Eliot's Romola, and the very fact of the inclusion of illustrations in each instalment could change the way in which the fiction was approached. The actor William Macready's records in his diary for 22 January 1841 his reaction to the issue of Master Humphrey's Clock containing the death of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop: 'I saw one print in it of the dear dead child that gave a dead chill through my blood. I dread to read it, but I must get it over.' Macready's reading was a kind of ritual, aided by the illustration.⁷

There was a widespread belief in this period that the novel could do anything, from bringing about social reform, to setting forth the entire life of the nineteenth century. According to Bagehot (1.2) it was capable of "describing the whole of human life in all its spheres, in all its aspects, with all its varied interests, aims and objects. It searches through the whole life of man; his practical pursuits, his speculative attempts, his romantic youth, and his domestic age', while for Bulwer (1.1) it drew its force from the fact that '[T]he passions of men are the most useful field for the metaphysics of the imagination, and yet the grandest and the most inexhaustible'.

Notes

1 See extract 1.2 below.

2 Review of The Last Chronicle of Barset, Examiner (20 July 1867), 452-3, reprinted in D. Smalley, Trollope: the Critical Heritage, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969, p. 297.

3 Saturday Review 15 (28 February 1863), 280, quoted in Richard Stang, The Theory of the Novel in England 1850-1870, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959, p. 47, which includes a useful discussion of the status of prose fiction in the period.

4 A.S. Kinnear (anon.) in North British Review 40 (May 1864), 369, and J.R. Wise (anon.) in Westminster Review 88 (October 1867), 593.

5 Cornhill Magazine 43 (February 1881), 152-68.

6 For the production and circulation of Victorian fiction see John A. Sutherland, Victorian Novelists and Publishers, London, Athlone Press, 1978 and N.N. Feltes, Modes of Production of Victorian Novels, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1986; and for circulating libraries see Guinevere L, Griest, Mudie's Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel, Newton Abbot, David & Charles, 1970.

7 Macready's Reminiscences, and Selections from his Diaries and Letters, ed Sir Frederick Pollock, Bart., 2 vols, London, 1871, vol. 2, p. 69. For a discussion of illustration and the reading process in Victorian fiction see David Skilton, 'The Relation between Illustration and Narrative in the Victorian Novel', in P.M. Daly, K.J. Holtgen and W. Lottes (eds), The Word and the Visual Imagination. A Symposium of Studies Relating to English Literature, Erlangen, Erlangen Forschungen, 1987.

1.1 Edward Bulwer, England and the English, 2 vols, 1833, vol. 2, pp. 109-12

This passage is taken from a survey of English life, politics and culture published four years before Victoria came to the throne. It is included here because it expresses an influential view which had currency at the opening of the period covered by the present volume. The author is the novelist Edward Bulwer (1803-73; subsequently Edward Bulwer Lytton, and still later Lord Lytton). His bestseller Pelham (1828) was a hugely popular social study of fashionable life in London, and he was equally successful with Paul Clifford (1830), which founded the 'Newgate novel', a genre of fiction dealing with criminals recorded in the Newgate Calendar. Throughout his life Bulwer wrote general statements about the novel and the nature of fiction, often in the form of prefaces to the various editions of his own novels. One of these (the preface to the 1845 edition of Night and Morning) is partly reproduced in extract 1.2, below. In an age which is uncomfortable with grand abstractions, personifications and the liberal use of capital letters, Bulwer is not now widely admired, but the intellectual respect in which he was once held can be judged from David Mas son's remark in British Novelists and Their Styles that of all novelists he had 'worked most consciously on a theory of the Novel as a form of literature'.¹ The passage reproduced follows a discussion of the popularity of novels of fashionable life, and makes a case for fiction as a major vehicle for social thought and reform - a role which many novelists were happy to adopt for the next half century or more.

Few writers ever produced so great an effect on the political spirit of their generation as some of these novelists, who, without any other merit, unconsciously exposed the falsehood, the hypocrisy, the arrogant and vulgar insolence of patrician life. Read by all classes, in every town, in every village, these works, as I have before stated, could not but engender a mingled indignation and disgust at the parade of frivolity, the ridiculous disdain of truth, nature, and mankind, the self-consequence and absurdity, which, falsely or truly, these novels exhibited as a picture of aristocratic society. The Utilitarians railed against them, and they were effecting with unspeakable rapidity the very purposes the Utilitarians desired.

While these light works were converting the multitude, graver writers were soberly confirming their effect, society itself knew not the change in feeling which had crept over it; till a sudden flash, as it were, revealed the change electrically to itself. Just at the time when with George the Fourth an old era expired, the excitement of a popular election at home concurred with the three days of July in France, to give a decisive tone to the new. The question of Reform came on, and, to the astonishment of the nation itself, it was hailed at once by the national heart. From that moment, the intellectual spirit hitherto partially directed to, became wholly absorbed in, politics; and whatever lighter works have since obtained a warm and general hearing, have either developed the errors of the social system, or the vices of the legislative. Of the first, I refrain from giving an example; of the last, I instance as a sign of the times, the searching fictions of Miss Martineau, and the wide reputation they have acquired.³

A description of the mere frivolities of fashion is no longer coveted; for the public mind, once settled towards an examination of the aristocracy, has pierced from the surface to the depth; it has probed the wound, and it now desires to cure.

It is in this state that the Intellectual Spirit of the age rests, demanding the Useful, but prepared to receive it through familiar shapes; a state at present favourable to ordinary knowledge, to narrow views, or to mediocre genius; but adapted to prepare the way and to found the success for the coming triumphs of a bold philosophy, or a profound and subtle imagination. Some cause, indeed, there is of fear, lest the desire for immediate and palpable utility should stint the capacities of genius to the trite and familiar truths. But as Criticism takes a more wide and liberal view of the true and unbounded sphere of the Beneficial, we may trust that this cause of fear will be removed. The passions of men are the most useful field for the metaphysics of the imagination, and yet the grandest and the most inexhaustible. Let us take care that we do not, as in the old Greek fable, cut the wings of our bees and set flowers before them, as the most sensible mode of filling the Hives of Truth!

But the great prevailing characteristic of the present intellectual spirit is one most encouraging to human hopes; it is Benevolence. There has grown up among us a sympathy with the great mass of mankind. For this we are indebted in no small measure to the philosophers (with whom Benevolence is, in all times, the foundation of philosophy); and that more decided and emphatic expression of the sentiment which was common, despite their errors, to the French moralists of the last century, has been kept alive and applied to immediate legislation by the English moralists of the present. We owe also the popularity of the growing principle to the writings of Miss Edgeworth and of Scott,⁴ who sought their characters among the people, and who interested us by a picture of (and not a declamation upon) their life and its humble vicissitudes, their errors and their virtues.

Notes

1 David Masson, British Novelists and Their Styles: Being a Critical Sketch of the History of British Prose Fiction, Cambridge, 1859, pp. 228-9.

2 The 'popular election' was dominated by the issue of parliamentary reform, and followed the succession of William IV on George IV's death on 26 June 1830. The 'days of July', or 'les journées de juillet', in the same year saw the exiling of Charles X and the installation in France of the so-called 'July monarchy' of Louis-Philippe.

3 As an example of the first category he is presumably thinking of his own Paul Clifford (1830), which was a highly successful novel attacking the law's excessive reliance on capital punishment. It is not clear to which of the writings of Harriet Martineau (1802-76) he is alluding. She was best known at the time for her Illustrations of Poli...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The age of the novel
• 2 Fiction with a purpose
• 3 Social, moral and religious judgements
• 4 Realism and idealism: the imitation of life
• 5 Plot and character: realism and sensationalism
• 6 The imagination and the creative process
• 7 The office of novelist
• Further reading