The Victorian Period• Victorian Period is an age of

democracy, an age of popular education, an age of religious tolerance, an age of growing brotherhood, and an age of profound social unrest yet comparative peace and rapid progress in all the arts and sciences and in mechanical inventions.

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Social Background (1) 1. The Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution not only affected the economy and industries during the nineteenth century, but also spawned the rise of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie class had existed since the Middle Ages, but they were now becoming an ever more important part of society.

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It was this class which led the English revolution of the 17th century which established political rights and liberty for all free men. Yet, it was not until the nineteenth century that this class saw a huge expansion in numbers and influence.

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Social Background (2) 2. The Social Structure In this period, the society

was three-tiered. The working class's work was more visible in society. Their labor was very physical and dirty, which showed every day in their clothes and their hands. Most people of the working class were paid a daily or weekly wage.

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• Men of the middle classes did the clean work, which normally included mental, not physical work. They were usually paid a monthly or yearly salary.

• The elite included the aristocracy and the landed gentry. Their income came from inherited land or investments, and as the saying goes, “It takes money to make money.”

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Social Background (3) 3. The Influence of The

Depression of 1837 The Depression of 1837

allowed protest organizations to finally have their chance to speak. The members of this organizations designed the People's Charter, which basically wanted to change Great Britain's government to a democratic one.

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• The measure proposed universal male suffrage, equal electoral districts and secret ballots. Authors of this proposal also claimed that the standard of living would go up if this measure was put into law

The People's Charter became so popular in Britain that thousands demonstrated and signed petitions in the years of 1839, 1842 and 1848.

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Many parliamentary members did not like the Chartist's views on government and regarded the demonstrations that had turned into riots as reasons why the Chartists should be dismissed. As a consequence, the People's Charter was repeatedly denied in Parliament, and their grievances were not addressed.

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A General View of Literature in Victorian Period

In this period the romantic revival had done its work and England entered upon a new free period, in which every form of literature, from pure romance to gross realism, struggled for expression. There are certain characteristics of this age which are clearly noticeable:

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1. An age of prose Though the age produced

many poets, including two deserve to rank among the greatest, this is an age of prose. It is an age of newspapers, magazines, and modern novels, the former two being about the world's daily life, and the last being the most pleasant form of literary entertainment, and the most successful method of presenting modern problems and modern ideals.

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The novel in this age fills a place which the drama held in the days of Elizabeth; and never before in any age or language has the novel appeared in such numbers and in such perfection.

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2. An age emphasizing the moral purpose

Literature, both in prose and poetry, seems to depart from the purely artistic standard of art for art's sake and to be actuated by a definite moral purpose. Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle, Ruskin, were all teachers of England, not vaguely but definitely, with superb faith in their message, and with the conscious moral purpose to uplift and to instruct.

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Charles Dickens W. M. Thackeray George Eliot

No matter in the fun and sentiment of Dickens, the social miniatures of Thackeray, or the psychological studies of George Eliot, there is a definite purpose to sweep away error and to reveal the underlying truth of human life. So the novel seeks to find the truth and to show how it might be used to uplift humanity.

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Perhaps for this reason the Victorian Age is emphatically an age of realism rather than of romance, which strives to tell the whole truth, showing moral and physical diseases as they are, and holding up health and hope as the normal conditions of humanity.

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3. An age of doubt and pessimism

It is somewhat customary to speak of this age as an age of doubt and pessimism, following the new conception of man and of the universe, which was formulated by science under the name of Evolution.

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It is spoken of also as a prosaic age, lacking in great ideals. Both these criticisms seem to be the result of judging a large thing when we are too close to it to get its true proportions.

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Tennyson's immature work is sometimes in a doubtful or despairing strain; but his In Memoriam is like the rainbow after a storm.

Browning seems better to express the spirit of his age in the strong, manly faith of Rabbi Ben Ezra, and in the courageous optimism of all his poetry.

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And the great essayists, like Macaulay, Carlyle and Ruskin, and the great novelists, like Dickens, Thackeray and George Eliot, generally leave us with a larger charity and with a deeper faith in our humanity.

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Representative Writers 1. Chartist Writers

During the Chartist movement, there appeared some Chartist writers who published newspapers and magazines which, besides articles on political and economical issues, contained poems, short stories and essays on literature. They introduced a new theme, the struggle of the proletariat for various rights, into literature. The Chartist poetry, heroic and revolutionary, played an important role in the development of English progressive literature in connection with the working class movement.

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• The greatest of the Chartist poets is Ernest Jones (1819 ～ 1869), whose lyrics as The Song of the Lower Classes and The Song of the Wage-Salve were popular among the Chartist workers and served almost as battle hymns for the Chartists.

William James Linton (1812 ～ 1897) was another Chartist worker who fought and wrote for the workers' emancipation.

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• Thomas Cooper (1805 ～ 1892) is an outstanding figure. He came from the ranks of ordinary workers and started “Shakespeare Association of Leicester Chartists” , and is called “Shakespeare general” .

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2. Critical Realism • A new literary trend

appeared in this period of tense class struggle. Great writers described the chief traits of the English society and criticized the capitalist system from a democratic viewpoint. Marx and Engels called them critical realists. English critical realism of the 19th century flourished in the forties and in the early fifties.

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• Among the critical realists, Charles Dickens is the greatest, who creates pictures of bourgeois civilization, describing the misery and sufferings of the common people.

• William Makepeace Thackeray, is only second to Dickens in severe exposition of contemporary society. Thackeray's novels are mainly a satirical portrayal of the upper strata of society.

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• Critical realism can be found in some other writers as Charlotte and Emily Bronte, and Elizabeth Gaskell.

• In the fifties and sixties the realistic novel entered a stage of decline. George Eliot describes the life of the laboring people and criticizes the privileged classes, but the power of exposure becomes much weaker in her work. The significance of her work lies rather in the portrayal of the pettiness and stagnancy of English provincial life.

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• Realism is a literary term so widely used as to be more or less meaningless except when used in contradistinction to some other movements, e.g. Naturalism, Expressionism, Surrealism. Sir P. Harvey's original definition was “a loosely used term meaning truth to the observed facts of life (especially when they are gloomy),” which would seem to indicate that he had in mind such post-French-realist works, most of which have proletarian or lower-middle-class settings.

• The French realist school of the mid-19th century stressed “sincerity” as opposed to “the liberty” proclaimed by the Romantics.

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• It insisted on accurate documentation, sociological insight, an accumulation of the details of material fact, an avoidance of poetic diction, idealization, exaggeration, melodrama, etc.; and that subjects were to be taken from everyday life, preferably from lower-class life. This emphasis clearly reflected the interests of an increasingly positivist and scientific age.

• The following part briefly deals with the life and works of Lady Gaskell and George Eliot, without selected readings. The other writers' works will be read and analyzed in detail later.

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Lady Gaskell• Lady Gaskell (1810 ～ 65) was the daughter of a Unitarian

clergyman who was a civil servant and journalist. Gaskell was brought up after her mother's death by her aunt in Knutsford, a small village that served as the prototype not only for Cranford but also for Hollingford in Wives and Daughters and the settings of numerous short stories and novellas.

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• When reporting her death, the Athenaeum rated her as “if not the most popular, with small question, the most powerful and finished female novelist of an epoch singularly rich in female novelists.”

• In 1832 she married William Gaskell, a Unitarian clergyman in Manchester in whose ministry she actively participated and with whom she collaborated to write the poem Sketches Among the Poor in 1837.

• Today she is generally considered a lesser figure in English letters remembered chiefly for her minor classics Cranford and Wives and Daughters: An Everyday Story.

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Her early fame as a social novelist began with the 1848 publication of Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life, in which she pricks the conscience of industrial England through her depiction and analysis of the working classes.

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• Many critics were hostile to the novel because of its open sympathy for the workers in their relations with their masters, but the high quality of writing and characterization are undeniable, and critics have compared Mary Barton to the work of Friedrich Engels and other contemporaries in terms of its accuracy in social observation.

• The later publication of North and South, also dealing with the relationship of workers and masters, strengthened Lady Gaskell's status as a leader in social fiction.

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George Eliot

• George Eliot (Mary Ann, later Marian, Evans) (1819 ～ 80), was the youngest surviving child of Robert Evans, agent for an estate in Warwickshire.

• At school she became a convert to Evangelicalism; she was freed from this by the influence of Charles Bray, a free-thinking Coventry manufacturer, but remained strongly influenced by religious concepts of love and duty; her works contain many affectionate portraits of Dissenters and clergymen.

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• She pursued her education rigorously, reading widely. In 1850 she became a contributor to the Westminster Review; and became assistant editor to the Westminster Review in 1851. • In 1854 she published a

translation of Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity; she endorsed his view that religious belief is an imaginative necessity for man.

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• He was to be a constant supporter throughout her working life and their relationship, although its irregularity caused her much anxiety, was gradually accepted by their friends.

• And a projection of his interest in his own species, a heterodoxy of which the readers of her novels only gradually became aware.

• At about the same time she joined G. H. Lewes in a union without legal form (he was already married) that lasted until his death. They travelled to the Continent and set up house together on their return.

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• “The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton” , the first of the Scenes of Clerical Life, appeared in Blackwood's Magazine in 1857, followed by “Mr Gilfil's Love-Story” and “Janet's Repentance”.

• These at once attracted praise for their domestic realism, pathos, and humour, and speculation about the identity of “George Eliot” , who was supposed to be a clergyman or a clergyman's wife.

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• She began Adam Bede (1859) in 1858; it was received with great enthusiasm and at once established her as a leading novelist.

• The Mill on the Floss appeared in 1860 and Silas Mamer in 1861. In 1860 she visited Florence, where she conceived the idea of Romola, and returned to do further research in 1861; it was published in the Cornhill 1862 ～ 3.

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• John Blackwood, son of William Blackwood, was unable to meet her terms; by this time she was earning a considerable income from her work. Felix Holt, The Radical appeared in 1866. • She travelled in Spain in 1867, and her

dramatic poem The Spanish Gypsy appeared in 1868. Middlemarch was published in instalments in 1871 ～ 2 and Daniel Deronda, her last great novel, in the same way in 1874 ～ 6.

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• She was now at the height of her fame, and widely recognized as the greatest living English novelist. In 1878 Lewes died. Her Impressions of Theophrastus Such appeared in 1879 and in 1880 she married the 40-year-old John Walter Cross. The marriage distressed many of her friends. She died seven months after her marriage.

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