Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Fiction: Overview
Miscellany magazines Chapbooks (Dick Whittington and Jack and the Giants, for example; sold by pedlars) Books (fashionable for the rich to own; distributed to the middle class through small circulating libraries)
Defenders responded:
Romanticism
Continues the project of Enlightenment and Sentimental writers to redefine secular culture by redefining several important aspects of life in the image of the middle class the individual family life the community the nation nature
B. Major Novelists
Jane Austen.
Novels of manners. Sense and Sensibility (1811). Pride and Prejudice (1813). Mansfield Park (1814). Emma (1815). Persuasion (1818).
C. 1815-1830
Rejection of domestic realism in favor of the fantastic, the extravagant, the irrational. Exploration of excessive selfhood. Focus on the self can transcend social categories (as in sentimental novels), but it can also be egotism
Novels of passion.
Advocate a morality of strong feelings. Caroline Lambs Glenarvon (1816). Shelleys Frankenstein (1818).
Silver-fork novels.
Novels about the fashionable aristocratic world. Condemned for glamorizing the trivial. Disraelis Vivian Grey (1826-7). Bulwer Lyttons Pelham (1828).
Newgate novels.
Draw from the Newgate Calendar, biographies of criminals. Return to themes of 1790s Jacobin novel. Condemned for glamorizing the criminal. Bulwers Eugene Aram (1832).
Satirical novels.
Austens Northanger Abbey (1818) and Peacocks Nightmare Abbey (1818).
Prepare the way for better social problem novels by Gaskell, and Kingsley, and Dickens later in the century.
Dickens.
Pickwick Papers (1836-37). Oliver Twist (1837-39). Nicholas Nickelby (1838-39). The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41). Barnaby Rudge (1841). Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44). A Christmas Carol (1843). The Chimes (1844).
B. Mid-century (1845-1860)
Explore life of the individual in the family, courtship, and marriage. Relate change and development of the individual to social change. Attack received views of women. Critique classes connection through money only.
Religious novels.
Organized around a series of spiritual crises. Gaskells Ruth (1853), Yonges Heir of Redclyffe (1853), Froudes The Nemesis of Faith (1849), Kingsleys Hypatia (1853).
Historical novels.
Often depict other times of rapid change in history, such as 1688 (Glorious Revolution), 1848 (European revolutions). Dickens A Tale of Two Cities (1859). Kingsleys Westward Ho! (1855).
Thackeray.
Realism. Emphasizes ambivalence of human conduct in a fallen world. Satirizes aristocracy. Explores marriage market, money problems, vanity of social ambition. Vanity Fair (18478). Henry Esmond (1852), Pendennis (1848-50). Novels of 800-1000 pages or more.
Brontes.
Depth vs. Thackerays breadth. Idealist vision vs. social analysis. Intense, concentrated. Heightened emotion and spiritual experience. Significant recurring metaphor of imprisonment or enclosure. Examine nature and role of women. Gothic. Draw from Romanticism of earlier generations. Charlotte: Jane Eyre (1847), Shirley (1849), Villette (1853), The Professor (1857). Emily: Wuthering Heights (1847). Anne: Agnes Grey (1847), The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848).
Dickens
Dombey and Son (1846-48). David Copperfield (1849-50). Bleak House (1850). Little Dorrit (1855-57).
C. High (1860-1875)
Mudie opened a large new hall for his circulating library. Cheap railway reprints were available from the 50s on. Cornhill Magazine founded, 1860. Massive number of novels published. Professionalization of the novel trade. Split between low and high-brow readers (Eliot and Meredith emerge to appeal to high-brow). Novel becomes more intellectually ambitious, more complex and self-aware. Victorian values treated more skeptically.
Sensation novels.
Draw on elements of Gothic novel. Draw on Newgate novel of 1830s. Not only innovative, but also subversive. Challenge the realistic tradition and the prudishness of the time. Multiple narrators, layered narration.
Explore darker, often forbidden areas of human experience. Ambivalent plots and characters. Relativist morality. Appearance and reality are blurred and contradictory. Crimes of passion. Prophetic dreams. Madness and imprisonment. Probe human psyche under stress of heightened emotions. Collins The Woman in White(1859-60) and The Moonstone (1868). Braddons Lady Audleys Secret (1862), Lynnes East Lynne (1861), and Reades Griffith Gaunt (1865-6).
Historical novels.
Careful detail about age and country in which novel is set. Define history as a drama of violent conflicts. Reades The Cloister and the Hearth (1861). Eliots Romola (1862-3). Gaskells Sylvias Lovers (1863). Kingsley Hereward the Wake (1865).
School novels.
Often sentimentally religious. Hughes Tom Browns School Days (1857). About Rugby.
Fantasy novels.
Elements of the supernatural and interaction of mortals with the supernatural. Kingsleys Water Babies (1863). MacDonalds Phantastes (1858). At the Back of the North Wind (1871).
Religious novels.
Margaret Oliphants Carlingford series (1863-1876).
Dickens.
Moves toward exploration of split personalities and doubles. Looks into psychology of passion and crime. Great Expectations (1860-61). Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870).
Trollope.
Realistic. Shows greater concern for character than for plot. Sermon-like quality. Explores the relationship of the individual and society, the private and the public, the personal and the professional. Focuses on middle and upper classes. Examines choices between love and money. Shows respect for established codes of conduct and hostility toward rapid change and personal ambition. Most famous for novels about the small fictional community of Barchester: The Warden (1855) through The Last Chronicle of Barset (1866-7). Also satire: The Way We Live Now (1874-75). Most novels are 1000+ pages.
Eliot.
Novels of ideas. Intrusive narrator. Meditative, moral, philosophical. Explores individual development in relation to the environment. Free will co-exists with determinism; novels center on moral choices, emphasize long-term effects of actions, personal responsibility. Strongly influenced by Wordsworth; traces primary laws of human nature in events of everyday life. Considers the relation between the real and the ideal. Scenes from Clerical Life (1857), Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1862-63), Felix Holt (1866), Daniel Deronda (1876). Finest novel: Middlemarch (1871-2).
Meredith.
Attacked for difficulty, obscurity, and indecency. Equivocation and ambivalence. Suggestive, impressionistic, and intense. He was a poet as well as a novelist (Modern Love, 1862). Known for The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) and The Egoist (1879).
D. Late (1875-1890)
Censorship was an issue. Exploration of the human psyche psychology, mysticism, the paranormal. Debate over romance and realism.
Romance revival.
Robert Lewis Stevensons Treasure Island (1883), The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Kidnapped (1886). Arthur Conan Doyles A Study in Scarlet (1887).
Utopian novels.
Convey a social or political argument by means of contrasts between the real world and an impossible world. Samuel Butlers Erewhon (1872). William Morris New From Nowhere (1890).
Religious novels.
Mary Wards Robert Elsemere (1888). Samuel Butlers The Way of All Flesh (written 1873-87, published posthumously).
Gissing.
Explores physical and psychological poverty of the urban poor. Focuses on sense of hopelessness. Returns continually to theme of financial necessity and its effect on marriages. Explores the conditions of authorship. Persistent use of hell and the abyss as metaphors. Treats the New Woman. Workers in the Dawn (1880), The Nether World (1889), New Grub Street (1891).
Hardy.
Tragic novels centering on the vanity of human wishes in a universe that fluctuates between neutrality and malevolence. Careful accumulation of small events that are fateful in combination. Attempts to mix real and sensational; sensational scenes, but realistic detail. Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the dUrbervilles (1891), Jude the Obscure (18945). Also a poet: Wessex Poems (1898).