Victorian Period in English Literature(1832-1900)

1.      Introduction 

In the year 1837, Queen Victoria came to the seat of Great Britain and Ireland and succeeded William the IV. She served for a time of 64 years, till her demise in 1901 and it is perhaps the longest reign throughout the entire existence of England. The period was marked by many significant social and chronicled changes that modified the country from various perspectives. The population almost multiplied, the British Empire extended dramatically, and technological and industrial inventions helped Britain become the most remarkable nation on the planet. 

Britain was the most powerful nation with a rich culture during the Victorian period. It has a stable government, a growing state, and an expanding franchise and it also holds and controls a large empire. It was the age of industrialization and advancement, in other words, the age of Enlightenment. The Victorians were a double standard because they restrained sexuality, but by the inner self, they were full of sensual pleasures. Most authors did not talk about sex. The main principles of Victorian society were gender and class. Gender was ideologically premised on the doctrine of separate spheres. Men and women were different and meant for different things and men were considered physically strong while women were weak. 

 Characteristics of the Victorian Period

1.    For women, reproduction was central, while for men, sex was central. 

2.  There was an economic improvement, but on the other hand, poverty was increasing among the people because of exploitation.

3. The gap between the rich and the poor working class was expanding rapidly and the drive for material gain and business achievement propagated a sort of moral decline in people. 

4.  There is a remarkable difference between the two ages. The previous Romantic age focused on the landscape and the beauty of nature, but the Victorian Era focused on material progress and prosperity by running industries and factories.

5.  While poor people are abused and severely exploited for their work. The working class increased rapidly. Despite the country's rapid economic growth, the exploitation of the lower classes corrupted them.

6.   There was additionally a move from the Romantic beliefs of the past age towards a more sensible and realistic portrayal of society.

7.    One of the main factors that characterized age was its stress on morality. They focused on morality too much, but on the other hand, they exploited the poor working-class very badly. 

8.   The rules were considerably harsher for women. The roles of women were generally that of being heavenly attendants of the house and limited to homegrown limits. As a woman, they were having limited choices; they could either become a tutor or an instructor in wealthy families. They were interdependent on men for money. 

1.  Novelists of the Victorian Period 

The Victorian Era is viewed as the connection between the Romanticism of the eighteenth century and the realism of the twentieth century. Despite that, the novel as a genre rose to engage the rising working class and to portray contemporary life in an evolving society. The novel was being developed in the eighteenth century with literary works by Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Samuel Richardson, and others. It was in this period that the novel got mass acknowledgment and readership. 

The development of cities, homegrown markets, overseas colonies, an expansion in printing, advertising, and publishing houses, encouraged the development of the novel as a form. In the year 1870, an Education Act was passed, which made education easy and increased literacy rates among the population. Certain job opportunities required a specific degree of reading capacity and basic books took into account this by turning them into a gadget to work on perusing. 

1.  Charles Dickens

He is the most well-known Victorian author. He was extraordinary in his days, with his characters taking on a life of their own beyond the page. Dickens is still one of the most popular writers at this time. He wrote his first novel when he was twenty-five years old and it was his overnight success and all his later works sold well. His first comedy has a satirical edge and this spreads his writing. Dickens worked diligently and honestly to produce the entertaining content that the people wanted, but he also offered commentary on social problems and the plight of the poor and oppressed.

v  Charles Dickens's most important works include: 

 

1.      Oliver Twist (1837–1838)

2.      Dombey and Son (1846–1848)

3.      Bleak House (1852–1853)

4.      Great Expectations (1860–1861)

5.      Little Dorrit (1855–1857)

6.      and Our Mutual Friend (1864–1865)

7.      The Old Curiosity Shop.   

 

2.      William Makepeace Thackery 

He was a great rival of Charles Dickens in the reign of Queen Victoria. Having a similar style, but he has a slightly more detached, acerbic, and barbed satirical view of his characters. He also strived to depict a more middle-class society than his rival Dickens did and is best known for his novel ‘Vanity Fair', which was written in 1848. It was subtitled "A Novel without a Hero", which is an example of a form popular in Victorian literature; a historical novel that portrays history.

v  His notable works are;

 

1.      Vanity Fair (1848)

2.      The Luck of Barry Lyndon (1844)

3.      A shabby Genteel Story (1840)

4.      Men’s Wives (1852)

5.      The History of Henry Esmond (1852)

3.      Bronte Sisters Novelists 

Anne, Charlotte and Emily Bronte are commonly known as the Bronte Sisters. They created notable Victorian works, but these were not well received by the Victorians. Emily's only work "Wuthering Heights (1847)" is an example of Gothic Romanticism from a woman's point of view and examines class, myth, and gender. Emily’s sister Charlotte wrote "Jane Eyre

It is another major nineteenth-century novel with gothic themes. Emily’s sister Anne Bronte wrote her second novel, "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848)". It was written in a realistic rather than romantic style and it is mainly considered to be the first sustained feminist novel.

4.      George Eliot 

Mary Ann Evans is famous for her pen name "GEORGE ELIOT". She was a Victorian novelist. She emerged from provincial England and most of her works are set there and it is similar to Dickens and Hardy. Almost all works are known for their realism, psychological insight, sense of place, and detailed depiction of the countryside.

George Eliot's notable works are 

1.      The Mill on the Floss (1860)

2.      Silas Marner (1861)

3.      Romola (1862–1863)

4.      Middlemarch (1871–72)

5.      Daniel Deronda (1876)

6.      "Felix Holt" (1866)

7.      "Scenes of Clerical Life" (1858)

8.      "Adam Bede" (1859) 

5.      Mrs. Gaskell

Elizabeth Gaskell, prevalently called Mrs. Gaskell, had composed short stories and books that managed to introduce a social image of her public during the 1850s. While it was when questions about material advancement arriving at the real existence of the average person were beginning to be raised, Gaskell generally gave an idealistic perspective on the theme. Gaskell's North and South, for instance, looks to introduce a response to the division and contrast by introducing a type of social compromise. There is an endeavor at the compromise of numerous different streams in the novel.

Mary Barton was her first novel, released in 1848 with a caption, 'A Tale of Manchester Life', and adheres to the Victorian worry of introducing the day-by-day life of the working class. Cranford came next as a sequential and altered by Dickens for the magazine called Household Words. It was emphatically received, and Gaskell gained immediate notoriety for it. It fixated on women characters like Mary Smith, Miss Deborah, and the others. Anyway, the book was likewise evaluated for its absence of a critical storyline. She was additionally well known for her gothic style in a part of her work and this made Gaskell marginally unique to other authors of her time. Ruth, Sylvia's Lovers, Wives, and Daughters were other huge works by her.

v  Her most notable works are;

 

1.      Mary Barton (1848)

2.      The Life of Charlotte Bronte (1857)

3.      Cranford (1851–53)

4.      North and South (1854–55)

5.      and Wives and Daughters (1865)

6.      Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy was born on 2 June 1840 and died on 11 January 1928. He was an English novelist and poet and he was a Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot. He was influenced by Romanticism due to the poetry of William Wordsworth. Thomas Hardy’s novels concern tragic characters struggling against their passions and their social conditions. They are frequently set in the semi-fictional region of Wessex, which was first seen in the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom.

His most notable works include:

1.      Tess of the d'Urbervilles

2.      Far from the Madding Crowd

3.      The Mayor of Casterbridge

4.      Collected Poems

5.      Jude the Obscure

 

Major Poets of the Victorian Period

1.      Alfred Tennyson

He was born on 6 August 1809. He was a British poet, poet Laureate in the period of the Victorian era, especially in the reign of Queen Victoria. In 1829, he was awarded the Chancellor's Gold

He got a medal for one of his first literary works, "Timbuktu". He adopted the conventional religious and social views and values of his age. His later works are serious, thoughtful, and musical. His poem "The Idylls of the King" is admired by many people even today. In ‘Morte D Arthur’ he converted ‘Malory's story into poetry. He experimented with different meters in poetry. In his long poem "In Memoriam," he mourns the death of his friend Arthur Hallam. His shorter poems are better than longer ones. The poem "Ulysses" is his most controlled and perfectly written poem. It presents the heroic voice of the old hero. The Princess is a fine collection of his lyrics, which shows his best mysterious and musical quality. His verses were based on classical mythological themes.

 His most notable works include:

1.      In Memoriam

2.      The Charge of the Light Brigade

3.      Idylls of the King.

4.      Ulysses

2.      Robert Browning

He is a major Victorian poet and he voiced the mood of optimism in his poems. Browning preferred intellect as more important than music. He has great knowledge and it was the result of his self-study and travels. He was respected as the writer of dramatic monologue. One of his successful and most famous poems is "Pippa Passes". Sometimes we find his poetic style very difficult because of his unusual knowledge of words and his strange sentence structure and

"Sordello" is the perfect example of his difficult work. The Ring and the Book is a poem based on a book that he found in Florence city and "Asolando" is a collection of a poem published on the day of Browning's demise.

His most notable works include:

1.      The Pied Piper of Hamelin

2.      Men and Women

3.      The Ring and the Book

4.      Dramatis Personae

5.      Dramatic Lyrics,

6.      Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, 

7.      Orlando 

3.      Matthew Arnold

He was a great poet and critic of the Victorian age. He was a professor of poetry in Oxford and he worked there for ten years. His works truly represent his era. A sad undertone runs through all of his poems. His views about modern life, its complexity, its sick hurry are present in his poetic works.

He was also the headmaster of Rugby School and he had written poems entitled "Rugby Chapel" and "thyrsi". These are mourning poems and he wrote them for his friend, Clough. In his poem "Scholar Gipsy", he talks about an Oxford man who joins a band of gypsies and wonders with them. He wrote "Memorial Verses", which is his sad poem where he laments the deaths of many poets at home and abroad. He also wrote a critical sonnet of Shakespeare, in which he praised Shakespeare too much. His poem "Empedocles on Etna" has been highly praised because it is not altogether sad.

His notable works include; 

1.      Dover Beach

2.      The Scholar-Gipsy

3.      Thyrsis

4.      Culture and Anarchy

5.      Literature and Dogma

4.      Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Rossetti was a poet as well as a painter. His sonnets are the most musical in English literature. He faced many criticisms and was accused of writing a moral poem belonging to the Fleshy School of poetry, but he justified and argued that poetry would be based on the senses. Many of his poetic lines are written in a way like a painter’s eye who captures the beauty of the thing. Rossetti wrote about nature, but he did not feel it in his bones as Wordsworth did. He was fond of alliteration, a figure of speech.

His notable works include:

1.      A Legendary Tale in Four Parts (1843)

2.      Poems (1869)

3.      Ballads and Sonnets (1882)

 

5.      Elizabeth Barrett Browning

She was a great poetess of the Victorian period. She wrote poems and some of her poems are too long. In sonnets, she could not write too much because the form was limited to fourteen lines only. Sonnets from the Portuguese contain her best work. She pretended at first that these sonnets had been translated from Portuguese, but these were an original expression of her love for her contemporary, Robert Browning.

Prose writers of the Victorian period 

Early Victorian Prose Writers

Conservative by temperament and religion by inheritance, most of the first-generation prose writers of the Victorian period were against the new forces of industry, utilitarian morality, and political democracy. They fought for these forces.

1.      Thomas Carlyle

Carlyle was born on 4 Dec 1795. He was a dominant figure of the Victorian Age. His writing style was extravagant and violently exclamatory. Some critics said his work begs to be "shouted aloud." It was the difficulty of his prose that helped make Carlyle obscure through much of the 20th century. 

His notable works include:

1.      Sartor Resartus 

2.      The French Revolution: A History of Heroes

3.      Hero-Worship

4.      The Heroic in History 

2.      John Ruskin

He was born on 8 Feb 1819. He was the leading English art critic as well as an art patron of the Victorian age. His writings are based on different subjects such as geology, architecture, myth, literature, education, ornithology, political economy, and botany. His writing styles and literary forms were equally different from others. He also wrote essays and treatises, poetry and lectures, travel guides, and a fairy tale. He made paintings of rocks, plants, birds, architectural structures, ornamentation, and landscapes. His elaborate writing style gave way in time to plainer language designed to communicate his ideas more effectively. In his works, he focused on the connections between nature, art, and society. 

His most notable works include:

1.      Seven Lamps of Architecture, 

2.      The Stones of Venice, 

3.      Unto the Last

3.      Lord B. Macaulay

He wrote an essay on contemporary and historical Socio-political subjects. His work "The History of England" was classical and it is an example of Whig historiography. Its literary style has been admired by many people after its publication. He is famous for his works on the History of England, Essays on Milton.

Later Victorian Prose Writers

The second-generation writers were more conscious of the art of prose writing than early Victorian prose writers. Unlike their predecessors, they had awareness of their time's theological, political, and economic issues. They made writing the sole business of their lives and their slogan was "Art for Art’s Sake". They were also against applied literature and the prose of purpose, which debated current issues and preached such as moral or political philosophies. There was a return of nature in English Prose in this later period of prose.

1.      Walter Pater

He was born on 4 August 1839 and he was the most important prose writer of the later Victorian age. Like Ruskin, he was an epicurean, a worshiper of beauty, but he did not commit much importance to the moral and ethical side of it as Ruskin did. Pater's most important works are The Renaissance and Imaginary Portraits.

2.      R. L. Stevenson

He was born and educated in Edinburgh. He suffered from bronchitis disease for much of his life, but he did not give up and continued to write and travel widely in defiance despite poor health, and received encouragement from Andrew Lang, Edmund Gosse, Leslie Stephen, and W. E. Henley. He settled in Samoa in 1890, and after that, his writing turned away from romances and adventures toward a darker realism. He died in his island house in 1894.

His most notable works include:

1.      Treasure Island

2.      A Child's Garden of Verses

3.      Kidnapped

4.      The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll 

5.      Mr. Hyde

Conclusion 

The victorian age was the Age of Reason and Enlightenment. Writers of this period used the technique of Realism, which is the truthful depiction of society as it is. Moreover, they focused on morality. They restrained their sexual pleasure and focused on reason. During this age, the country's progress flourished rapidly due to the industrial revolution and scientific advancement. Due to industrial inventions, there was the exploitation of poor labor and the middle class rapidly increased. Hence, they were economically strong but morally weak.