VICTORIAN NOVEL

Chiara Del Bianco 5^B

CONTEXT

• 1837: Queen Victoria became Queen of the United Kingdom.

• Social changes: Industrial Revolution, the struggle for democracy, growth of towns, birth of the middle class and of the working class, the clash between classes.

• Novels start to have an impact on people’s opinions and on common thought.

FEATURES NARRATIVE TECHNIQUES

- Grotesque: The narrator deforms what he is writing to obtain caricatures or to parody and ridicule somebody. The grotesque works on sizes.

“(…) inflated like a balloon (…). A man who was the Bully of humility.” (Hard Times, C. Dickens)“The board were sitting in solemn conclave” (Oliver Twist, C. Dickens)

- Pathos: It is used to make the reader feel pity because he identifies himself with the characters. Children are often used to achieve this effect.

“He could not but observe how silent and sad the boys all seemed to be(…)The children sat crouching and shivering together, and seemed to lack the spirit to move about.” (Nicholas Nickelby, C. Dickens)

FEATURES FIGURES OF SPEECH

- Metaphors: “(…) interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever” (Hard Times, C. Dickens) Serpent = tentor, symbol of sin

- Similies: “Unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage”, “The piston of the steam engine worked monotously like an elephant in a state on melancholy madness”, “Four short pinnacles like florid wooden legs” (Hard Times, C. Dickens)

- Repetition: “It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another.” (Hard Times, C. Dickens)

THEMES

Justaposition of classes and the contrast between the rich and the poor.

Middle class family lifeEducationSituation of childrenFactory workFight for democracy Exploitation of women and children

SETTING

• Cities and towns because of the Industrial Revolution and the consequently urbanization (Hard Times, C. Dickens)

• New Factories• Schools (Nicholas Nickelby, C. Dickens

; Vanity Fair, W.M. Thackeray)• Workhouses (Oliver Twist, C. Dickens)

THE ANTI VICTIORIAN NOVEL

Main novelists: Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde Jude the Obscure is an example of this

new literary flow.- The plot is different from the traditional Victorian novels: it is about a couple who is not married and this was scandalous at the time- Characters are not too good or too evil: they are more realistic- T. Hardy doesn’t use irony or the grotesque to entertain the reader