English Fiction of the Victorian Period

Michael Wheeler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138837331
• eBook ISBN: 9781317896081
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Professor Wheeler's widely-acclaimed survey of the nineteenth-century fiction covers both the major writers and their works and encompasses the genres and "minor" fiction of the period. This excellent introduction and reference source has been revised for this second edition to include new material on lesser-known writers and a comprehensively updated bibliography.

Chapter 1

Pre-Victorian and Early Victorian Fiction

Fads and fashions: the sub-genres

Social and political historians of Britain, like historians of English literature, find the 1830s difficult to place. A decade of invention and reform, the 1830s mark the transition between the end of the Industrial Revolution and the beginning of the Victorian Age. Signs of the times – the title of Carlyle’s prophetic essay of 1829 – included Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle (1832–36), the beginning of the Oxford Movement (1833), Fox Talbot’s early experiments in photography (1835) and Brunei’s Great Western crossing the Atlantic (1838). Yet those who lived in the early 1830s, immediately before the railway boom which was to change the face of Britain, were still dependent upon old modes of transport; manners and fashions were still variations upon Regency themes; and many of the great changes which later generations were to see in their daily lives were as yet only in embryo. The Reform Act of 1832 was only the most important of several pieces of legislation which set out to attack the Old Corruption’ of eighteenth-century structures – in this case systems of patronage and franchise. The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 and the creation of a modern police force (first in London in 1829) reflected an attempt to control an urbanized and industrialized society, thus doing away with the ramshackle ways of the old rural order while protecting the property of the emergent self-made men whose energy and entrepreneurship are reflected not only in Dickens’s writing, but also in his own rise to fame as a novelist. Yet after the reforms and social changes of the early 1830s many of the old ways survived alongside the new. The process of reform proved to be a lengthy one.

British cultural life was also in a transitional state in the 1830s and early 1840s. Turner was still at the height of his powers as a Romantic artist when David Wilkie and William Mulready were developing what was later to be a flourishing ‘genre’ tradition of Victorian narrative painting, in which everyday life was realistically depicted. In architecture, the opposing forces in the so-called Battle of the Styles, which was to rage between Gothic and Classical schools throughout the mid-nineteenth century, were being drawn up. The early experimental work of the two greatest mid-Victorian poets, Tennyson and Browning, was strongly influenced by Keats and Shelley, and the early careers of Carlyle, J. S. Mill, Sterling and F. D. Maurice were shaped partly by their different responses to the ideas of Coleridge. But there were also discontinuities. Although Scott’s influence on Victorian fiction was profound, no Victorian successor was to approach him as a historical novelist. Jane Austen’s influence upon early Victorian fiction was minimal. Indeed, the early work of Dickens represents a new start in nineteenth-century fiction. The re-emergence, however, of the monthly part novel, with Pickwick Papers, was not the only innovation in a period of experiment. Some of the most interesting experiments in prose narrative, for example, were published in Fraser’s Magazine (founded 1830), including Thackeray’s early stories and parodies and Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1833–34), a work which profoundly influenced the development of Victorian fiction. The Life and Opinions of Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, a German professor, are mediated through a form of fragmented spiritual autobiography, arranged in some sort of order by the Editor. Sartor Resartus explores themes which many later novelists take up, such as education, the idea of pilgrimage, the alienation of the individual in a modern society and the plight of the poor. Ironically, Carlyle himself tried to persuade every novelist of any merit with whom he came in contact to give up writing fiction and concentrate on history and biography.

Carlyle can perhaps be forgiven for dismissing most of the fiction of the 1830s and early 1840s as inferior stuff, for, apart from the work of Dickens and Thackeray, this was a period of fads and fashions rather than of major developments in the novel. The variety of sub-genres of fiction in vogue – historical, silver-fork, Newgate and social-problem, marine, sporting and Irish rogue novels – puts one in mind of Polonius’s generic divisions and sub-divisions in Hamlet: ‘tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral’ and so on. The pedigrees of these sub-genres, however, were very short indeed when compared to those of Polonius’s list of classical forms. Significantly, much of Thackeray’s early fiction was revisionary in purpose and parodic in method, and his position vis-à-vis at least five of the sub-genres mentioned above is encapsulated in the famous burlesques published as ‘Punch’s Prize Novelists’ (1847) at the end of this first phase of pre-Victorian and early Victorian fiction. On the whole one would rather take the burlesques to a desert island than the novels he parodies – a sad reflection of the quality of the minor fiction produced over the previous fifteen or twenty years.

One of Thackeray’s burlesques, entitled ‘“Barbazure”, by G. P. R. Jeames, Esq., Etc.’, parodies the hugely popular historical romances of the prolific G. P. R. James, whose works were read and indeed imitated by Marian Evans, later ‘George Eliot’, as a schoolgirl. Several features of James’s romances, such as his ponderous archaisms and intense interest in costume detail, neatly captured by Thackeray in ‘a surcoat of peach-coloured samite and a purfled doublet of vair bespoke him noble’, and his predilection for executions by the axe (Thackeray: ‘the hideous minister of vengeance, masked and in black, with the flaming glaive in his hand, was ready’), are shared by the equally popular historical romances of William Harrison Ainsworth. In The Tower of London (1840), for example, whose central figure is Lady Jane Grey, Ainsworth catered for the English history cult of the time.¹ His lurid tale of intrigue, rackings and beheadings unfolds in the precisely documented setting of the Tower, whose history down to the nineteenth century is a major theme of the work. Although Ainsworth’s fast-moving stories are tempered with this curious obsession for antiquarian detail, he is probably best remembered for the striking set pieces in the early works, such as Dick Turpin’s ride to York on Black Bess in Rookwood (1834), a Newgate historical romance, or the descriptions of the plague pits and the Great Fire in Old St. Paul’s (1841). A master of hyperbolic description and racy narrative, Ainsworth had no ear for spoken English, and the dialogue in his novels is stilted.

Although much more impressive than Ainsworth in his scope and intellectual range, Edward Bulwer (later Bulwer–Lytton) is often as weak in the rendering of direct speech, which is infected by the inflated mannerism and encyclopaedic allusiveness of his narrative style. Bulwer’s research into the periods in which his romances are set was intended to improve on Scott in the matter of historical accuracy, but the documentary density of his work is achieved at the expense of clarity in the development of plot and character. Like his contributions to other sub-genres, Bulwer’s historical romances are more significant as literary-historical documents than as living fiction. Under the influence of Carlyle, Bulwer specifically focuses on the tragic sacrifice of individuals in the broad scheme of the progress of Western civilization and, at a time when the old order was changing in England, emphasizes the ending of historical eras. Consider, for example, The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), The Last of the Barons (1843), and the final words of Rienzi (1835): ‘THE LAST OF THE ROMAN TRIBUNES’.²

Bulwer also played an important role in the development of the fashionable or ‘silver-fork’ novel, a sub-genre which flourished in the second quarter of the century. The other main exponents were Disraeli, whose Vivian Grey appeared in 1826–27, Theodore Hook, Lady Blessington and Mrs Gore. Their common theme was high-society manners, a subject of great interest in a period of social mobility.³ At a time when new speculative money was in circulation among the rapidly expanding middle-class nouveaux riches (also the subject of much of Thackeray’s early fiction), Bulwer believed that the interest in this most popular sub-genre of the 1830s was based on a combination of emulation and envy:

In proportion as the aristocracy had become social, and fashion allowed the members of the more mediocre classes a hope to outstep the boundaries of fortune, and be quasi-aristocrats themselves, people eagerly sought for representations of the manners which they aspired to imitate, and the circles to which it was not impossible to belong. But as with emulation discontent also was mixed, as many hoped to be called and few found themselves chosen, so a satire on the follies and vices of the great gave additional piquancy to the description of their lives.

England and the English (1833; iv. 2)

The elaborate discussions on the cultivation of ton, the detailed exactness of the descriptions of furnishings, food and fashions as guides to people’s position in high society, and the superficiality of the characters portrayed in the silver-fork novel made it an easy target for critics and novelists who had higher ambitions for English fiction. Bulwer’s Pelham (1828) – chiefly remembered as the novel which was said to have initiated the fashion of black evening dress for men – was the butt of Carlyle’s mockery in Sartor Resartus. Missing both the irony of the novel and the earnestness of its hero, Carlyle wrote a stinging parody entitled ‘The Dandiacal Body’ as part of his treatment of the Philosophy of Clothes – Professor Teufelsdröckh’s theory that all external forms are merely clothes and thus temporary and ultimately irrelevant. Again, parodies of the silver-fork novel, such as Thackeray’s burlesque on Mrs Gore (“‘Lords and Liveries”, by the Authoress of Dukes and Déjeuners”, “Hearts and Diamonds”, “Marchionesses and Milliners”, Etc. Etc.’) and Dickens’s extract from the fictitious ‘The Lady Flabella’, read to Mrs Wititterly by Kate Nickleby (Nicholas Nickleby, 1838–39; 28), are more enduring than the sub-genre itself. This brittle, artificial fiction of the beau monde did, however, provide material with which later novelists could work. One thinks, for example, of Dickens’s portrayal of the ‘brilliant and distinguished circle’ that assembles at Chesney Wold, where ‘all the mirrors in the house are brought into action’ (Bleak House, 1852–53; 12), and of his recurrent assaults on snobbery and the development of a highly polished ‘surface’ as a symptom of Victorian hypocrisy. Later, Meredith’s Sir Willoughby Patterne, the statuesque, dandified master of Patterne Hall in The Egoist (1879), is a living, or partly living example of that particular breed of the English male which emerged most prominently in the Restoration and the Regency, and in the silver-fork novel and Wildean drawing-room comedy, in which civilization is reduced to matters of taste and style.

Bulwer and Ainsworth also explored romance possibilities offered by the criminal classes at the other end of the social scale in their ‘Newgate’ novels, originally a term of critical abuse.⁴ The romanticized criminal, particularly the highwayman (an anti-establishment loner who did the city-dweller no harm), captured the imagination of readers brought up on the Gothic novel, while the dark shadow of the gallows in the background added a frisson for the morbidly curious. The sub-genre marks a revival of interest in the exploits of those who figured in the popular Newgate Calendar, such as Dick Turpin and Jack Sheppard (both subjects of Ainsworth’s novels), and of criminals like the eighteenth-century scholar-murderer Eugene Aram and the famous poisoner Wainewright, the subjects of Bulwer’s novels Eugene Aram (1832) and Lucretia (1846).

Although Bulwer’s novels have not stood the test of time, the fact that he strongly influenced several different sub-genres of fiction in the 1830s is certainly impressive. His Paul Clifford (1830) was both the first Newgate novel and the first influential novel of our period with a social reforming purpose. Brought up in a low drinking house in London, the illegitimate Paul is wrongly imprisoned for picking the pocket of a barrister, William Brandon, who later turns out to be his father. Having made his escape from the Bridewell, our hero spends seven years as a highwayman, passes himself off as a member of high society, and wins the heart of Lucy Brandon, a young lady who proves to be his cousin. When finally arrested, Paul is sentenced to death by his father, now a judge, who dies soon after the trial having learnt the identity of the criminal. All ends happily and improbably with Paul’s sentence commuted to transportation and his marriage to Lucy in America. In later life Paul is wont to say: ‘Circumstances make guilt,… let us endeavour to correct the circumstances, before we rail against the guilt!’ (36). Far more noble than the ‘gentlemen’ whose watches he steals, he epitomizes Bulwer’s moral that ‘there is nothing essentially different between vulgar vice and fashionable vice’ (1840 Preface).

As a polemic against what Bulwer calls ‘a vicious prison-discipline, and a sanguinary criminal code’, the novel is limited, making its Godwinian point about circumstances only in the broadest way and scarcely documenting low life or imaginatively entering the criminal mind at all. Although the mannered style of the narrative often registers class divisions with a wittiness which is sorely lacking in the heavyweight social-problem novels published twenty years later, its overall effect works against any sense of a serious engagement with the theme of crime and punishment. As in so many of Bulwer’s novels, the leading ideas which prompted the writing of the book are in practice subordinated to romance plotting.

Bulwer’s next Newgate novel, the popular Eugene Aram, became the main focus of the controversy surrounding the sub-genre, for its hero was a real murderer. The main assault on Bulwer came from Fraser’s Magazine, initially in the hostile criticism of his work by the editor, William Maginn, and then in Thackeray’s first long serialized work of fiction, Catherine (1839–40), written to shame his readers into recognizing the folly of romanticizing crime and the criminal by presenting them with the sordid reality. (Although Oliver Twist (1837–39) was later claimed to be similarly concerned with the ‘miserable reality’ of the life of thieves (1841 Preface), Thackeray considered that Dickens, like Ainsworth, had made his criminals too attractive.) Bulwer was still Thackeray’s target in his Punch burlesque entitled “‘George de Barnwell”, by Sir E. L. B. L. Bart.’. Interestingly, however, as the idealist Bulwer himself looked back over the period in which the realist Thackeray had attacked him, he wrote: ‘The true movement of the last fifteen years has been the progress of one idea, – Social Reform’ (Preface to 1848 edition of Paul Clifford). This movement is reflected in the fourth important sub-genre of the period, the ‘social-problem’ novel.

The reformist measures which followed the first Reform Act of 1832, such as the Factory Act or ‘Children’s Charter’ (1833) and the Poor Law Amendment Act (1834), were launched on a sea of paper: parliamentary reports, or ‘blue books’, political tracts, newspaper articles and social-reform literature which pressed for reform and lamented the inadequacy of legislation actually brought in. The stock themes and conventions of the social-problem novel were adumbrated in the reformist poetry of the 1830s and 1840s by Caroline Bowles, Lady Caroline Norton and Thomas Hood: the yawning gulf between rich and poor, the inhumanity of the new factories and workhouses and the scandal of pauper burials; the abandoned ‘fallen woman’, the worn-out sempstress and the beggar dying in the snow. Harriet Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy (1832–34) are, as their title suggests, tales whose literary pretensions were subordinate to their author’s main aim of instruction. It is, however, significant that Harriet Martineau is the third female writer of reformist literature mentioned s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Editors’ Preface
• Longman Literature in English Series
• Author’s Preface to the First Edition
• Author’s Preface to the Second Edition
• Dedication
• Introduction
• 1. Pre-Victorian and Early Victorian Fiction
• 2. Mid-Century Fiction
• 3. High Victorian Fiction
• 4. Late Victorian Fiction
• Chronology
• General Bibliographies
• Individual Authors
• Index