The Victorian Novel in Context

Grace Moore

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781847064899
• eBook ISBN: 9781441112675
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book introduces students to the Victorian novel and its contexts, teaching strategies for reading and researching nineteenth-century literature. Combining close reading with background information and analysis it considers the Victorian novel as a product of the industrial age by focusing on popular texts including Dickens's Oliver Twist, Gaskell's North and South and Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge. The Victorian Novel in Context examines the changing readership resulting from the growth of mass literacy and the effect that this had on the form of the novel. Taking texts from the early, mid and late Victorian period it encourages students to consider how serialization shaped the nineteenth-century novel. It highlights the importance of politics, religion and the evolutionary debate in 'classic' Victorian texts.
Addressing key concerns including realist writing, literature and imperialism, urbanization and women's writing, it introduces students to a variety of the most important critical approaches to the novels. Introducing texts, contexts and criticism, this is a lively and up-to-date resource for anyone studying the Victorian novel.

PART ONE

Contexts

CHAPTER ONE

Victorianism

The phrase ‘the Victorian period’, although a useful shorthand, does not really reflect the dynamic changes that took place in Britain between Victoria’s succession to the throne in 1837 and her death in 1901. ‘Victorianism’ is becoming an increasingly contested term as scholars argue that it obscures the many changes that British culture and society underwent during the nineteenth century. Kate Flint, writing of her uneasiness with the term ‘Victorian’, argues that to think in terms of ‘periodization’ is to restrict our understanding of the continuity between historical periods and our own connection to the nineteenth century. Flint urges us to be alert to the cultural baggage embedded in the word ‘Victorian’ and to be aware of its limitations (2005: 239). Joseph Bristow adopts a similar position asserting that – historically sandwiched between Romanticism and Modernism – Victorianism resists theorization (2004: 2) as it is an historical period rather than a philosophical or ideological movement. He also notes, importantly, that the term ‘Victorian’ did not enter broad circulation until the 1870s (3), so that in using the term to discuss the duration of Queen Victoria’s reign, we are, in fact, misappropriating it.

While I share Bristow’s and Flint’s discomfort with the general nature of the term ‘Victorian’, it has entered our common vocabulary to signify the literary works produced while Victoria was on the throne. I agree that ‘Victorianism’ needs to be scrutinized and interrogated, yet it remains a highly useful form of shorthand with which to discuss the era. As a result, although I will use the term throughout this book, I ask you to reflect upon its meaning and usefulness as you read and consider the novels, particularly when you come to the sections on Neo-Victorianism and Afterlives in Part Three.

Social and cultural context

A reforming age

The Victorian period was an era of both reform and agitation. Although it sometimes moved slowly, legislation attempted to respond to some of the challenges of industrialism and the ways in which a shift in the balance of power and wealth had reconfigured class relations. One of the first attempts to reflect the rise to power of increasingly wealthy manufacturers was the Great Reform Bill of 1832. Many historians believe that this Act of Parliament separated middle-class radicals from working-class agitators so that there was no longer an incentive for discontented members of the bourgeoisie to whip up discontent within the working classes, whose sheer numbers posed a threat when they were encouraged to take to the streets.

By today’s standards, the 1832 Reform Act does not seem at all radical, in that it only enfranchised a very limited and privileged sector of the population. Male owners of property with a value of more than ten pounds per annum were given the right to vote, although this translated into roughly only one in six men. A woman had no electoral rights and it was not until 1928 that women’s entitlement to vote was brought into line with that of men. The 1832 Act was also important because it redrew the boundaries of electoral constituencies so that they were divided more equally. So-called rotten boroughs were abolished, so that it was no longer possible for a town or village with few residents, like Old Sarum near Salisbury, to have its own Member of Parliament. Seats were redistributed so that the new metropolitan centres devoted to manufacturing, like Bradford, Leeds, Halifax or Manchester, were better represented in the House of Commons.

While 1832 is obviously not strictly a part of the Victorian period, the Reform Act is generally considered to reflect the spirit of the age and the Victorians’ impetus for improvement. The year 1832 was only the beginning in terms of widening the electorate, and the Reform Act of 1867, along with the Representation of the People Act (1884), gradually began to include working people. The 1867 Act extended the vote to include all male householders, while the 1884 Bill extended it still further. The philosopher and critic Thomas Carlyle fearfully described the Act of 1867 as ‘shooting Niagara’ (Carlyle, 1867), believing that it would open the floodgates of political anarchy and overturn the structure of society. In fact, a large number of men (estimated at as many as 40 per cent) remained disenfranchised, since both Bills continued to connect the right to vote to material wealth.

The city

The poet William Wordsworth famously complained of London in Book Seven of The Prelude (1805 and 1850) that ‘The face of every one/That passes by me is a mystery’ and this observation encapsulates the traumas associated with urban living in the Victorian age. As the most advanced industrial nation, Britain was in uncharted territory when it came to coping with the extraordinary demographic changes brought about by the rise of capitalism, and one of the real upheavals associated with industrialism was the massive movement of people from the country to the city. Raymond Williams very helpfully reminds us of just how new this way of life was with his assertion that ‘[b]y the end of the 1840s the English were the first predominantly urban people in the long history of human societies’ (1970: 9). Williams emphasizes the ‘sense of crisis’ that prevailed as society sought to come to terms with the strangeness of the industrial world and a reconfigured way of life.

Increasingly, for the Victorians, the city was ‘just over the horizon’, and a comparison of the world of Oliver Twist to that of Bram Stoker’s Dracula offers some idea of the rapid changes to urban life in the nineteenth century. With more than four million inhabitants, London was a considerably larger place in 1897 than it was at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when its population was 865,000. By the 1890s, electric trains ferried passengers across the capital on the underground, offering in the process a type of subterranean metaphor for the infernal characteristics of the more notorious areas of the capital city. Outlying suburbs were being subsumed into the metropolis, and London was transformed into a global capital. However, during Victoria’s reign London’s dominance was challenged by the rise of northern manufacturing cities to the extent that, as Richard D. Altick has commented, by 1891 there were 23 cities with populations above 100,000, compared with just one (London) at the beginning of the century (76).

Metropolitan life was certainly beginning to impinge upon communities like Thomas Hardy’s Casterbridge and George Eliot’s St. Ogg’s, where the type of impersonal capitalism represented by the ruthless Lawyer Wakem was displacing business transactions conducted on trust between friends. Indeed, even in an early novel like Oliver Twist the characters are notably mobile, with Fagin appearing suddenly to terrorize Oliver in his country idyll at the end of chapter 34 and Bill Sikes walking to and from London in his bid to escape apprehension for Nancy’s murder.

The fact that the majority of British subjects now lived in urban conglomerations (by 1914 more than 70 per cent of the population had migrated to towns or cities) meant that the realist novel was largely focused on metropolitan life. Novels representing the countryside often did so from a position of nostalgia for a way of life that was lost or, as in the case of Eliot and Hardy, they demonstrated the expansionism of city life and values. The industrial novel in particular was concerned with the struggles of urban inhabitants, at the same time introducing the reader to the unfamiliar world of the factory town with its discomforting convergence of dazzling success stories and extraordinary misery.

Poverty

Thomas Carlyle famously described poverty as ‘the Hell of which most modern Englishmen are most afraid’ (in Bourke, 2005: 27) and in a world without the types of welfare systems we know today, poverty was a truly terrifying prospect. The fear of poverty and its consequences haunts the Victorian novel and is a spectre on the horizon for many characters, just as it was for people in the real world. Realist writers sought to highlight the vast gulf between the wealthy and the destitute and a new form of novel emerged, which we know today as the ‘social problem novel’ because it drew attention to areas in need of reform. Charles Dickens was one of the pioneers of the social reform novel, which sought to make readers aware of the enormous chasm between the lives of the wealthy and of those in poverty. Benjamin Disraeli famously wrote of the ‘two nations’ in Britain, the rich and the poor, in his 1841 novel Sybil, and his representation of the poor as completely and utterly ‘other’ is a helpful way of thinking about the divisions between classes and the mutual distrust that resulted from industrialism (1845: 66).

One of the most striking aspects of the nineteenth-century realist novel is its graphic depiction of urban poverty. While the growth of an industrial economy created unprecedented national prosperity and enabled middle-class factory owners to rise to social and economic dominance, Britain’s success did not extend to every sector of society. Indeed, in 1842 nearly one and a half million of the sixteen million inhabitants of England and Wales were classed as ‘paupers’ (Smith, 1980: 5). While the middle class became increasingly prosperous, the working classes lived in fear of the effects of the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act, which effectively criminalized poverty and hindered those who had slipped into poverty from re-establishing themselves.

The Act abolished ‘outdoor relief’ whereby those who had fallen on hard times would apply to their local parish for assistance and would be helped to stay in their own homes and to get themselves back on their feet. Embodying the principles of the Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, the Poor Law Amendment Act aimed to centralize aid and to make sure that people would only seek help as a last resort. Workhouses were established as a means of grouping the poor together and administering charity efficiently and cheaply. These institutions became notorious for the appalling conditions in which the poor were housed; families were separated from one another and inmates were subjected to a regime of hard work and a subsistence diet. The workhouses quickly became a source of great terror to working people, and so great was their resemblance to jails, that they were nicknamed ‘Bastilles’ after the notorious French prison. The historian Gertrude Himmelfarb has explained that the changes brought about by the Poor Law Amendment Act created a distinction between those who were simply poor and those who were classified as ‘paupers’ (1984: 147). To become a ‘pauper’ and to surrender to the workhouse involved great social stigma, whereas to be simply ‘poor’ was regarded as acceptable, and the ‘poor’ were often celebrated for their hard work and virtuous thrift. Charles Dickens encapsulated the working-class fear of the workhouse in his last completed novel Our Mutual Friend (1865), in which the character Betty Higden endures terrible poverty and hardship but stubbornly refuses to enter a workhouse. She eventually dies far from home, having decided that it would be better to run away than to risk spending her final days imprisoned in the dreaded ‘House’. Indeed, as the chronicler of the ‘real Oliver Twist’, John Waller has noted, ‘Pride kept many out’ (2005: 33), thus reminding readers that Betty was not alone in her refusal to accept the state’s severe brand of charity.

The film director David Lean attempted to translate the horror of the workhouse into modern terms with the opening scenes of his 1948 adaptation of Oliver Twist. Drawing upon recent events in Europe, Lean’s eerie first shots of the workhouse in a storm – viewed through brambles that look like barbed wire – stress its resemblance to a concentration camp, drawing subtle parallels between the starved orphans who were thrown on the mercy of the parish and the victims of the atrocities of the Holocaust. Lean’s decision emphasizes just how hungry and poorly treated many of the children in Oliver’s position would have been, and it’s important for us, as well-fed readers, to understand the degree of abuse that Dickens was exposing.

Chartism

The 1832 Reform Act succeeded in easing tensions between the manufacturing classes and those who had traditionally wielded political power, namely the landed gentry. However, it did nothing to appease the working classes, and the early years of Queen Victoria’s reign were troubled by hunger, disease and political unrest. One of the most influential movements to emerge from this turbulent climate was the Chartist Movement, described by Asa Briggs as ‘the greatest movement of popular protest in British history’ (1998: 1). The Chartists reacted angrily to the 1832 Reform Act’s neglect of the working man and put together a ‘people’s charter’, demanding parliamentary reform, which was published and presented to Parliament in May 1838. The Chartists themselves were skilled artisans and working-class radicals, and the six points they demanded were:

• A vote for each man over the age of 20 (note that votes for women did not form part of the agenda)

• Secret ballots

• Abolition of the property qualification to vote

• Payment of Members of Parliament

• Equal size of parliamentary constituencies

• Annual parliaments

The Charter was rejected by Parliament (only 46 MPs voted in its favour, the other 235 were opposed to it), even though it had been signed by well over a million people. The Chartist leaders had threatened to call a general strike if the document was turned down, so they were rounded up and arrested during the marches that followed the presentation. Violence ensued, including the so-called Newport Rising in which Chartist demonstrators marched on Newport Prison to demand the release of their leaders – troops were called in and 24 people were killed, while another 40 were injured. Nevertheless, the Charter was presented again in 1842 and for a final time in 1848.

The Chartists’ activities were facilitated by a campaign for a ‘Cheap and Honest Press’ in the early 1830s, demanding the reduction in taxes on the so-called pauper press. Briggs suggests that when the Whig government reduced stamp duty on newspapers to a penny in March 1836, it triumphed in its ongoing efforts to drive a wedge between working- and middle-class radicals by reducing the prices of middle-class publications, while at the same time raising the cost of the working man’s newspaper (27–8). The energies surrounding this campaign were then subsumed into the Chartist Movement, knitting concerns about freedom of expression together with working-class social and political demands.

While the idea of a Chartist Movement points to unity and solidarity, the Chartists were a very diverse group of people, representing different regional concerns and priorities, but as Briggs has noted, they were brought together by ‘the stimulus of economic distress’ (52). Some Chartists were committed to establishing freedom of the press, while in the 1840s others were deeply concerned with repealing the bread tax, which stemmed from the despised Corn Laws. These laws were a protective measure designed to reduce the importation of grain from overseas. It was prohibited to import grain until the price per quarter reached four pounds. While the law was of benefit to growers, it penalized the poorest people, for whom bread was a staple food. The plot of The Mayor of Casterbridge takes place prior to the abolition of the Corn Laws, showing through the characters Michael Henchard and Donald Farfrae how a fortune could be made or lost through speculating on harvests and the price of grain.

The Chartists believed that under a democracy it would be impossible for unjust legislation to be carried and while many feared the more violent, militant wings of the group, others were afraid of what would happen if the Chartists gained political power. Thomas Carlyle captured some of the sheer terror the Chartists inspired when he commented,

Chartism means the bitter discontent grown fierce and mad, the wrong condition therefore of the wrong disposition of the Working Classes of England. It is a new name for a thing which has had many names, which will yet have many. The matter of Chartism is weighty, deep-rooted, far-extending: did not begin yesterday; will by no means end this day or tomorrow. (1980: 151–2)

Carlyle here recognizes that Chartism is certainly not a new phenomenon and that it will not disappear suddenly. The movement went into decline after 1848, when the Charter was presented to Parliament for the last time, although this was partly because of a government commission that discredited a number of the group’s leaders. The energies behind Chartism were gradually channelled into other causes, including trade unionism.

The Chartists appealed to a number of writers, particularly those involved in depicting the conditions of the working classes. Although there are no Chartists in Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens represented them with a mixture of fear and sensitivity in The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41), while Elizabeth Gaskell had first-hand experience of them, as a Manchester resident. Gaskell’s novel Mary Barton appeared in 1848, and amidst its graphic representations of starving factory workers, it included representations of trade unionists as well as depicting the character John Barton’s hopelessness when the Chartist delegation, of which he is a member, fails to obtain the sympathies of Westminster politicians. Gaskell also transcribed Chartist poems and songs into Mary Barton in a bid to help her middle-class rea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Introduction
• PART ONE   Contexts
• PART TWO   Texts    
• PART THREE   Wider contexts    
• Bibliography
• Index