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Victorian Literary Criticism

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on December 12, 2020 • ( 0 )

Victorian literary theory, sometimes dismissed as a hinterland, is a remarkably diverse and productive field. Of the four lines of theorizing identified by the philosopher of art Francis Sparshott in Theory of the Arts (1982)— the classical, expressive, oracular, and purist lines—Victorian theory has original contributions to make to all but the first. Its theological and Hegelian alignments, as well as its later doctrine of art for art’s sake, also anticipate important developments in twentieth-century hermeneutics and formalism .

The most important British critics of the 1830s are Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), a representative of the oracular line of theorizing, which venerates the poet as an involuntary channel of communication with higher powers, and three expressive critics, Arthur Hallam (1811- 33), W. J. Fox (1786-1864), and John Stuart Mill (1806- 73). In an influential theory of poetic empathy, published in 1831 in The Englishman’s Magazine , Hallam praises poets of sensation such as Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson for their remarkable ability to find in the “colors … sounds, and movements” of external nature the signature of “innumerable shades of fine emotion,” which are too subtle for conceptual language to express (850, 856). In a Westminster Review article earlier in 1831 on Tennyson’s Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830), Fox argues that the poet can best concentrate his energies by sketching his relation to a desolate landscape or to some ruined paradise, as in Tennyson’s “Mariana” or “Oenone.” Insisting that the sensory correlatives of feeling, like music, can convey complexities of meaning and subtly nuanced moods for which no dictionary words exist, Hallam is the prophet of a symbolist aesthetic later endorsed by W. B. Yeats. Fox, on the other hand, writes as a disciple of James Mill. Just as Joseph Addison is liberated by John Locke’s theory of the ideality of the secondary qualities, according to which sounds and colors are truly a poem of the perceiver’s creation, so Fox is liberated by the penetrating power conferred on the mind by the empirical psychology of James Mill’s treatise Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind , published two years earlier, in 1829. Since Fox’s poet dramatizes each interior landscape through projection, and since Hallam’s poet internalizes each picture, they tend to converge on common ground. Despite their different starting points, both critics anticipate modern psychological theories of introjection and projection, and both are agreed that poets must find in some external object the focus or medium of their truest self-expression.

Like Fox and Hallam, John Stuart Mill also subscribes to an expressive theory of art. But he is always ready to inhibit theory and quicken truth in pursuit of the wider premise, the more inclusive synthesis. His earliest articles on poetry, which he published in 1833, try to vindicate the poet against Jeremy Bentham’s charge that because poetry is fictitious and untrue, it is a dangerous enemy of utilitarianism. The failure to see that poets use language in ways beyond the scope of traditional description in order to express and refine emotion and to do things with words is also the failure to which J. L. Austin draws attention when trying to extricate from descriptive statements the kind of utterance he calls “performative”. To distinguish between poetry and rhetoric, Mill also insists that in poetic language there is no direct address: as Oscar Wilde observed of Walter Pater when he lectured, Mill’s poet is overheard rather than heard. The oracle speaks in a state of rapt self-communion.

The other most innovative theorist of the 1830s, Thomas Carlyle, holds that a great poet such as Dante Alighieri or William Shakespeare is an autonomous source of power, not reducible to anything in the world that may stimulate him. Since only the unconscious is healthy, Carlyle paradoxically concludes in “The Poet as Hero” that in writing allegory in The Divine Comedy Dante, like any sincere poet, did not, in the precise sense of the phrase, know what he was doing. Does Carlyle’s unselfconscious poet create a genuine novelty? Or does he merely manifest some higher antecedent power of which he is unconscious? If truth lies outside of consciousness, perhaps the answer does not matter. Because creative artists are a mystery, even to themselves, why should they not be willing to ascribe their creation of novelty to an equally mysterious higher source?

Carlyle also deserves to be remembered for his contribution to semiotics in his chapter on symbols in Sartor Resartus . Anticipating Charles Sanders Peirce ‘s notion of an icon and of a sign that requires a more developed sign to interpret it, Carlyle argues that only intrinsic symbols exhaust their subject and that they cannot be analyzed. Only extrinsic symbols can be analyzed, and like the ritual naming by the herald at the coronation of George IV, they tend to trivialize their subject. The life of Christ, Carlyle argues, was once authentically symbolic, and intrinsically so, just as the original Last Supper was a symbolic performance of the utmost daring and genius. But if we try too hard or selfconsciously to invent a rite or make our life an allegory, it will become instead a mere piece of theater. Like David Friedrich Strauss’s notion that myth is unconscious invention, lives that become allegories are unconsciously symbolic. When we try to invent a symbol, like the festivals in honor of a supreme being in The French Revolution , we discover that an authentic intrinsic symbol can never be legislated; it has to be believed into being, by faith and civic love. The harder Carlyle tries to explain intrinsic symbols, the less intelligible they become: all intrinsic symbols require other symbols, or what Peirce calls “interprétants,” to explain them.

One of the most original critical theorists of the late 1830s and the 1840s is John Keble (1792-1866). Though a psychological and expressive critic, Keble continues to honor the classical precept that literature is mimetic, or an imitation of nature, long after that doctrine has ceased to deserve his theoretical respect. Few passages in Victorian criticism are more revealing than the one in which Keble casually equates Aristotelian imitation with his own antithetical expressive doctrines. “It would seem,” Keble says in an 1838 review of John Gibson Lockhart’s Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott , “that the analogical applications of the word ‘poetry’ coincide well enough with Aristotle’s notion of it, as consisting chiefly in Imitation or Expression” (435). Yet in his Praelectiones Academicae (1832-41), better known in its English translation as Oxford Lectures on Poetry , as well as in his review of Scott, Keble argues, contrary to Aristotle , that all epic and dramatic genres are displacements of the poet’s lyric impulse. Thus Virgil’s epic the Aeneid is said to disguise a pastoral yearning, indulged most directly in the Georgies . Fed by unconscious sources, “Virgil’s master passion” for pastoral celebration is so artfully veiled in his epic poem that it is preserved by being disguised, by not being named directly. Keble’s originality consists in his taking a familiar theological doctrine, the Tractarian theory of reserve, and transplanting it to the psychology of poetic composition, where it anticipates Freudian theories of displacement.

In other essays, however, Keble asserts that great poetry exists only as a fallout from religion. In tract 89 of Tracts for the Times , “On the Mysticism Attributed to the Early Fathers of the Church” (1840), Keble argues as a brilliantly conservative critic, insisting that the unity of Scripture is the expressive evidence of divine power. By “mysticism” Keble means the typological interpretation of Scripture that allows a reader to discern a resemblance between Old Testament types and their New Testament antitypes. As God’s grammar or code, biblical typology is more than a mere set of “poetical associations” chosen at will by individual interpreters. But this is not to say that hermeneutics properly conceived and practiced is a univocal decoding of God’s meaning. Because every figural analogy merely approximates, like any analogy, the unnameable essence of what it tries to name, Keble uses his doctrine of reserve to keep intact the mystery of indefinition.

Benjamin Jowett’s influential essay “On the Interpretation of Scripture” (i860) develops a far more liberal theory of biblical interpretation than Keble’s. Asserting that readers should be able to recover a biblical author’s original intentions and the effects the meaning had on the “hearers or readers who first received it,” Jowett (1817- 93) assails as anachronistic and dangerous the typological methods of biblical interpretation revived by Keble and Newman. But Jowett’s appeal for unprejudiced reading, however plain and straightforward, assumes a zero degree of literacy that is illusory in theory and unattainable in critical practice. The real problem with Jowett’s hermeneutics is its attempt to assess an author’s original intention. As twentieth-century critics of the “intentional fallacy” have argued, an intention that has not already been realized and made accessible to an intelligent reader can never in practice be recovered. In what sense, then, can it qualify as an intention at all? If Jowett wants to call an unrealized intention an intention, he is free to do so. But it seems to be of doubtful authority and of no interpretive use.

Outside Keble’s writings, the most innovative critical theories of the 1840s are to be found in John Ruskin’s Modem Painters , especially in his commentaries on the imagination, which contain the most important contribution to their subject since Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ruskin (1819-1900) identifies three forms in which the imagination operates. Achieving the integritas that St. Thomas Aquinas associates with the aesthetic object, the “imagination penetrative” is the faculty most consistently displayed by Ruskin’s first and highest order of poets. In 1846 Ruskin insists upon this faculty “as the highest intellectual power of man” (4:251): he associates it with Dante and Shakespeare, whom ten years later he places in the highest rank of poets, among those who “feel strongly, think strongly, and see truly” (5:209). Their art is the product of educated innocence, an art that is “naturalist, because studied from nature,” but also “ideal, because … mentally arranged in a certain manner” (5:113).

Once Ruskin’s poet has been initiated into the mysteries of a thing’s existence, using the imagination penetrative to expose the wonder of the thing and to present it as an imaginative whole, the poet may then proceed to combine a number of such wholes into new and harmonious arrangements. Corresponding to the consonantia , or harmony, of Aquinas’s aesthetic object, the arrangement of sensory wholes is the function of Ruskin’s “imagination associative.” What is expressed in art by the imagination associative is usually something self-effacing and elusive, something just out of sight, which the artist can merely point toward or intimate. Though Ruskin is baffled to explain its operation, he takes this uncanny power of intimation (a power E. S. Dallas will later ascribe to its unconscious manner of working) to be the chief hallmark of the imagination associative.

When a poet such as John Milton or Shelley is prophetically inspired and begins to “see in a sort untruly, because what [he] see[s] is inconceivably above [him]” (5:209), he may approximate what Aquinas calls the radiance, or claritas , of oracular vision. The poet then exhibits the faculty Ruskin calls the “imagination contemplative.” But because Ruskin, as a Victorian, has more in common with Keble or Pater than with Dante or John Bunyan, he has a keener sense than his medieval and Renaissance predecessors that the mystery of life and its arts does not allow the poet to fix or assign one meaning only to each visible type of the spiritual world. The imagination contemplative of Ruskin’s poet has all the hallmarks of a true allegorical symbolism except one. Its symbols are untranslatable, because unlike the goat or wolf of conventional allegory, they lack an assigned connotation.

The 1850s mark the emergence of Matthew Arnold ‘s early criticism, which staunchly opposes the dominantly expressive criticism of contemporaries such as David Masson and Sydney Dobell. One twentiethcentury critic, R. G. Cox, argues that Arnold’s neoclassical criticism is simply the best-known example of an anti-Romantic “minority tradition” running through the first half of the Victorian period. More recently, Antony H. Harrison has tried to elucidate the “literary politics” surrounding Arnold’s preface to his Poems of 1853, which endorses an overtly Aristotelian theory of poetry that consistently misreads Aristotle by substituting an inward, psychological action for an outward, dramatic one. Arnold (1822-88) is covertly attacking his rival, Alexander Smith, a member of the so-called Spasmodic school of Byronic and Shelleyian imitators, and is trying to purge from his own poetry, partly for political reasons, all traces of Spasmodic influence. Arnold’s conservative aesthetic must be seen as a response to the political radicalism of the Spasmodic poets and, like his essays on the Romantic poets, to his own complex and changing reactions to the cockney Keats.

David Masson (1822-1907), the reviewer whom Arnold misquotes in his 1853 preface and the author of important critical pieces collected in Essays Biographical and Critical (1856), draws attention to distinctive Spasmodic features of language that help distinguish poetical ideas from scientific ones. Masson repeats Immanuel Kant’s teaching that whereas scientific understanding translates sensory facts into concepts, the poet’s imagination is effective, not in duplicating nature, but in creating a second and stronger nature. It replaces the open-ended orderliness of nature with an orderliness that is closed, repeatable, and intensive. Masson’s arresting word for this process is the imagination’s capacity to “secrete” fictitious circumstance (431).

The rhapsodic, visionary writing that Masson’s essays are best designed to analyze is also the subject of an important essay, “The Nature of Poetry” (1857), by the Spasmodic poet and critic Sydney Dobell (1824-74). Shrewdly noting that there is often a phenomenal difference between an aesthetic idea or feeling and its metaphoric equivalent, Dobell criticizes the many-breasted Hindu goddess for being too similar to the fertility she is meant to represent. By contrast, Bertel Thorwaldsen’s celebrated statue of night, which makes an observer experience a black and shapeless void, is sculpted out of white marble. To explain the paradox, Dobell develops his theory of substitution. Instead of saying “I love,” a poet will call up in his imagination some beautiful object, such as a rose, and then find for the object some equivalent in words. The poet’s metaphoric equivalents, what Dobell calls his “homotypes,” are related to each other, not in the way types are related to their biblical antitypes, and not in the way an algebraic sign is related to an unknown quantity, but in the way atoms are joined together to form the beautiful structure of a crystal.

The most ambitious work of literary theory to appear in the 1860s is E. S. Dallas’s monumental two-volume study, The Gay Science ( 1866). Arguing that only the paradox of unconscious thought can explain the difference between the imagination of a Homer and the genius of an Aristotle, Dallas (1822-79) claims that both are automatic but only the former is an involuntary or unconscious process. Dallas believes there are two tests the critic can conduct to determine whether the poet’s mind has indeed been operating imaginatively “in the dusk of unconsciousness” (1:265). A poet who has been composing imaginatively (i.e., in an involuntary or unconscious manner) will discern resemblances rather than differences. And that poet will also “assert the resemblance of wholes to wholes” (1:269). Dallas’s theory of the unconscious has important antecedents in German criticism, especially in F. W.J. Schelling. But in Victorian Britain the idea of unconscious and automatic mental processes, though applied by Carlyle in his essay “Characteristics” to mental health in general, does not assume a crucial role until Dallas offers what he takes to be a new theory of imagination, that “Proteus of the mind,” which has been identified with all the human faculties—memory, passion, reason—and which has proved as a result “the despair of metaphysics” (1:179).

Dallas’s earlier and more modest monograph, Poetics: An Essay on Poetry (1852), deserves to be known for the ingenious theory of genres it proposes. That theory, which praises the drama as the culminating genre of nineteenth-century literature, may be hard to understand until we grasp its connection with G. W. F. Hegel’s theory of an evolution of symbolic, classical, and romantic genres. When Dallas calls the lyric and visionary genres of poetry the dominant mode of Eastern, primitive art, he is alluding, like Hegel in his posthumously published Philosophy of Fine Art, to the lyric art of the Psalmist. Having used the genres of lyric poetry to describe the divine poetry of the ancients, Dallas must equate the dominantly religious art of the nineteenth century, which he finds comparably sublime, with a different genre. When he speaks of dramatic art as a religious, Romantic form, embodying hope and the impulse to worship, Dallas is thinking, not of Shakespeare or Greek drama, but of Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues and of lyrics of “saving faith” written by devotional poets such as Christina Rossetti.

One of Dallas’s most original insights is that the transformation of classical epic into Hebrew lyric and then into modern Romantic and Christian forms of art is accompanied by a corresponding change in the poet’s use of pronouns. In classical literature the poet describes persons and things: the third-person pronoun dominates. By contrast, the sublime lyric poetry of the Psalms is a poetry of first-person pronouns. Only in nineteenth century poetry, which is a literature of dramatic intimacy and empathy, does the “you” enter. Anticipating T. S. Eliot’s argument in “The Three Voices of Poetry,” Dallas distinguishes the first-person voice of lyric and the third-person voice of drama proper from “the familiar you-and-me style” of genres such as the monologue, which uses first- and second-person pronouns to dramatize a speaker’s efforts to empathize with his or her auditor.

The last three decades of the nineteenth century mark the ascendancy of a far-reaching Hegelian legacy in Victorian criticism, one that is already discernible, as we have seen, in Dallas’s theory of genres. Among major critics, Walter Pater (1839-94) shows Hegel’s influence most clearly. Pater manages to formalize Hegel in subtler but no less radical ways than he manages to formalize Plato in Plato and Platonism (1893). In the most Hegelian of his critical writings, the essay on J. J. Winckelmann (1867), Pater draws upon Hegel’s theory of a symbolic, a classical, and a romantic cycle of art, each phase aligned with a particular art form. “As the mind itself has had an historical development,” Pater observes, “one form of art, by the very limitations of its material, may be more adequate than another for the expression of any one phase of that development” (1:210). Few pronouncements could be more Hegelian. And yet there is nothing in Pater’s statement to rule out a relativism quite alien to Hegel’s theory of progressive aesthetic change. Unlike Hegel, who sees in the progress of the arts a secure evolution toward an eventual victory of Absolute Spirit, when art will perfect itself by turning into dialectic, Pater sees a progressive attenuation of spirit. He actually reverses Hegel’s strategy. Instead of freeing a spiritual content from a material form, which is the process Hegel analyzes, Pater praises art for freeing a highly refined and attenuated form from the bondage of any impure content or contaminating message . Pater keeps altering the teleological drift of Hegel’s aesthetic doctrines by assimilating life to art, subordinating the spiritual content of Romantic art to the subtleties and refinements of the art form itself.

In his essay “The Philosophy of Art” (1883), W. P. Ker (1855-1923), a more scholarly interpreter than Pater, is torn between conflicting reactions to Hegel’s theories. Should the critic use poems for their educative value, subordinating art to the claims of some absolute spirit that is asserted to be the ground of art’s efficacy? Or must each poem be studied as an end in itself? A chief tenet of Hegel’s theory is that art is an education, that it exists for the sake of something higher. Ideally, poetry is absorbed at last into philosophic vision. But Ker, like Pater, always wants to honor the integrity of each work of art. Ker criticizes Hegel for failing to see that though art is educational, it is not necessarily “an education for some end different from art” (166). Is poetry’s transformation into science or philosophy a consummation devoutly to be wished? Or does poetry educate by a nonutilitarian but valuable deployment of the cognitive faculties, in abstraction from any practical context?

The second possibility is the one preferred by Oscar Wilde (1856-1900), who allows art to occupy a spiritual territory segregated from the everyday world. The claim of purist art to be holier or more sacred than other activities is not supported by any moral or metaphysical claim. Indeed the artist as such is said to have no “ethical sympathies” (230). Purist art has its priest, rite, church, and congregation but no god. It is endotelic, never merely a means to some external end. The absence of teleology is even celebrated as a virtue: “All art is quite useless,” Wilde says in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Its value is its very pointlessness. Like later formalists, Wilde knows at first hand how a despotic moral or theological consciousness can inhibit the creative faculties. To defend the poet against a censorious superego, Wilde revels in the paradox that the “morality of art” consists wholly “in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.” “An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style” (230).

Wilde’s celebration of art’s inutility and reduced ambition remains, however, a Victorian aberration. Unlike the pursuit of virtue or a liberal education, the pursuit of literary theory in Victorian Britain is seldom regarded as its own reward. It is not the autonomous study that specialists laboring in a more Alexandrian age have tried to make it. To understand Victorian literary theory, we must study it in the context of nineteenth-century hermeneutics, for example, or philosophies of history, science, and religion. As G. B. Tennyson says in Victorian Devotional Poetry: The Tractarian Mode (1981), these disciplines do not “grow in alien soils.” In the Victorian period, “they are branches of the same tree” (61).

Bibliography Matthew Arnold, The Complete Prose Works (ed. R. H. Super, 11 vols., 1960-77); Thomas Carlyle, The Works of Thomas Carlyle (ed. H. D. Traill, 30 vols., 1898-1901); E. S. Dallas, The Gay Science (2 vols., 1866), Poetics: An Essay on Poetry (1852); W. S. Fox, Review of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830, reprint, Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Scrutinies: Reviews of Poetry, 1830-1870, 1972); Arthur Hallam, “On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry” (1831, reprint, Victorian Poetry and Poetics, ed. Walter E. Houghton and G. Robert Stange, 2d ed., 1968); G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Fine Art: Introduction (trans. Bernard Bosanquet, 1886); Benjamin Jowett, “On the Interpretation of Scripture” (Essays and Reviews, i860); John Keble, Keble’s Lectures on Poetry, 1832-1841 (trans. E. K. Francis, 2 vols., 1912), “On the Mysticism Attributed to the Early Fathers of the Church” (tract 89, Tracts for the Times, 1833-41), Review of John Gibson Lockhart, Life of Sir Walter Scott, British Critic and Quarterly Theological Review (1838); W. P. Ker, “The Philosophy of Art,” Essays in Philosophical Criticism (1883, ed. Andrew Seth and R. B. Haldane, 1971); G. H. Lewes, The Principles of Success in Literature (1865); David Masson, Review of E. S. Dallas’s Poetics and Alexander Smith’s Poems, North British Review 19 (1853); J. S. Mill, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. 1, Autobiography and Literary Essays (ed. John M. Robson and Jack Stillinger, 1981); J. H. Newman, “Poetry, with Reference to Aristotle’s Poetics” (1829, reprint, Essays Critical and Historical, 1871); Walter Pater, “Winckelmann” and “Style,” The Works of Walter Pater, vols. 1 and 5 (1910); Coventry Patmore, Principle in Art, Religio Poetae, and Other Essays (1889); John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin (ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols., 1903-12); Robert Louis Stevenson, “On Some Technical Elements of Style” (1885, reprint, English Prose of the Victorian Era, ed. C. F. Harrold and W. D. Templeman, 1938); Oscar Wilde, Literary Criticism of Oscar Wilde (ed. Stanley Weintraub, 1968). Patricia M. Ball, The Science of Aspects: The Changing Role of Fact in the Work of Coleridge, Ruskin, and Hopkins (1971); R. G. Cox, “Victorian Criticism of Poetry: The Minority Tradition,” Scrutiny 18 (1951); Antony H. Harrison, Victorian Poets and Romantic Poems: Intertextuality and Ideology (1989); George P. Landow, The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin (1971); Robert Preyer, “Sydney Dobell and the Victorian Epic,” University of Toronto Quarterly 30 (1961); Alba H. Warren, English Poetic Theory, 1825-1865 (1950). Source: Groden, Michael, and Martin Kreiswirth. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

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“The modern spirit,” Matthew Arnold observed in 1865, “is now awake.” In 1859 Charles Darwin had published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection . Historians, philosophers, and scientists were all beginning to apply the idea of evolution to new areas of study of the human experience. Traditional conceptions of man’s nature and place in the world were, as a consequence, under threat. Walter Pater summed up the process, in 1866, by stating that “Modern thought is distinguished from ancient by its cultivation of the ‘relative’ spirit in place of the ‘absolute.’ ”

The economic crisis of the 1840s was long past. But the fierce political debates that led first to the Second Reform Act of 1867 and then to the battles for the enfranchisement of women were accompanied by a deepening crisis of belief.

Late Victorian fiction may express doubts and uncertainties, but in aesthetic terms it displays a new sophistication and self-confidence. The expatriate American novelist Henry James wrote in 1884 that until recently the English novel had “had no air of having a theory, a conviction , a consciousness of itself behind it.” Its acquisition of these things was due in no small part to Mary Ann Evans, better known as George Eliot . Initially a critic and translator, she was influenced, after the loss of her Christian faith, by the ideas of Ludwig Feuerbach and Auguste Comte . Her advanced intellectual interests combined with her sophisticated sense of the novel form to shape her remarkable fiction. Her early novels— Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), and Silas Marner (1861)—are closely observed studies of English rural life that offer, at the same time, complex contemporary ideas and a subtle tracing of moral issues. Her masterpiece, Middlemarch (1871–72), is an unprecedentedly full study of the life of a provincial town, focused on the thwarted idealism of her two principal characters. George Eliot is a realist, but her realism involves a scientific analysis of the interior processes of social and personal existence.

Her fellow realist Anthony Trollope published his first novel in 1847 but only established his distinctive manner with The Warden (1855), the first of a series of six novels set in the fictional county of Barsetshire and completed in 1867. This sequence was followed by a further series, the six-volume Palliser group (1864–80), set in the world of British parliamentary politics. Trollope published an astonishing total of 47 novels, and his Autobiography (1883) is a uniquely candid account of the working life of a Victorian writer.

The third major novelist of the 1870s was George Meredith , who also worked as a poet, a journalist, and a publisher’s reader. His prose style is eccentric and his achievement uneven. His greatest work of fiction, The Egoist (1879), however, is an incisive comic novel that embodies the distinctive theory of the corrective and therapeutic powers of laughter expressed in his lecture “The Idea of Comedy” (1877).

In the 1880s the three-volume novel, with its panoramic vistas and proliferating subplots, began to give way to more narrowly focused one-volume novels. At the same time, a gap started to open between popular fiction and the “literary” or “art” novel. The flowering of realist fiction was also accompanied, perhaps inevitably, by a revival of its opposite, the romance . The 1860s had produced a new subgenre, the sensation novel, seen at its best in the work of Wilkie Collins . Gothic novels and romances by Sheridan Le Fanu , Robert Louis Stevenson , William Morris , and Oscar Wilde ; utopian fiction by Morris and Samuel Butler ; and the early science fiction of H.G. Wells make it possible to speak of a full-scale romance revival.

Realism continued to flourish, however, sometimes encouraged by the example of European realist and naturalist novelists. Both George Moore and George Gissing were influenced by Émile Zola , though both also reacted against him. The 1890s saw intense concern with the social role of women, reflected in the New Woman fiction of Grant Allen ( The Woman Who Did , 1895), Sarah Grand ( The Heavenly Twins , 1893), and George Egerton ( Keynotes , 1893). The heroines of such texts breach conventional assumptions by supporting woman suffrage , smoking, adopting “rational” dress, and rejecting traditional double standards in sexual behavior.

The greatest novelist of this generation, however, was Thomas Hardy . His first published novel, Desperate Remedies , appeared in 1871 and was followed by 13 more before he abandoned prose to publish (in the 20th century) only poetry . His major fiction consists of the tragic novels of rural life, The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895). In these novels his brilliant evocation of the landscape and people of his fictional Wessex is combined with a sophisticated sense of the “ache of modernism.”

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood , formed in 1848 and unofficially reinforced a decade later, was founded as a group of painters but also functioned as a school of writers who linked the incipient Aestheticism of Keats and De Quincey to the Decadent movement of the fin de siècle . Dante Gabriel Rossetti collected his early writing in Poems (1870), a volume that led the critic Robert Buchanan to attack him as the leader of “The Fleshly School of Poetry.” Rossetti combined some subtle treatments of contemporary life with a new kind of medievalism, seen also in The Defence of Guenevere (1858) by William Morris . The earnest political use of the Middle Ages found in Carlyle and Ruskin did not die out—Morris himself continued it and linked it, in the 1880s, with Marxism. But these writers also used medieval settings as a context that made possible an uninhibited treatment of sex and violence. The shocking subject matter and vivid imagery of Morris’s first volume were further developed by Algernon Charles Swinburne , who, in Atalanta in Calydon (1865) and Poems and Ballads (1866), combined them with an intoxicating metrical power. His second series of Poems and Ballads (1878), with its moving elegies for Charles Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier , displays a sophisticated command of recent developments in avant-garde French verse.

The carefully wrought religious poetry of Christina Rossetti is perhaps truer to the original, pious purposes of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Her first collection, Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862), with its vivid but richly ambiguous title poem, established her status as one of the outstanding lyric poets of the century. The other outstanding religious poet of this period is Gerard Manley Hopkins , a Jesuit priest whose work was first collected as Poems in 1918, nearly 30 years after his death. Overpraised by Modernist critics, who saw him as the sole great poet of the era, he was in fact an important minor talent and an ingenious technical innovator.

Robert Browning’s experiments with the dramatic monologue were further developed in the 1860s by Augusta Webster, who used the form in Dramatic Studies (1866), A Woman Sold and Other Poems (1867), and Portraits (1870) to produce penetrating accounts of female experience. Her posthumously published sonnet sequence Mother & Daughter (1895) is a lucid and unsentimental account of that relationship.

The 1890s witnessed a flowering of lyric verse, influenced intellectually by the critic and novelist Walter Pater and formally by contemporary French practice. Such writing was widely attacked as “decadent” for its improper subject matter and its consciously amoral doctrine of “art for art’s sake.” This stress upon artifice and the freedom of art from conventional moral constraints went hand in hand, however, with an exquisite craftsmanship and a devotion to intense emotional and sensory effects. Outstanding among the numerous poets publishing in the final decade of the century were John Davidson , Arthur Symons , Francis Thompson , Ernest Dowson , Lionel Johnson , and A.E. Housman . In The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899), Symons suggested the links between this writing and European Symbolism and Impressionism . Thompson provides a vivid example of the way in which a decadent manner could, paradoxically, be combined with fierce religious enthusiasm. A rather different note was struck by Rudyard Kipling , who combined polemical force and sharp observation (particularly of colonial experience) with a remarkable metrical vigor.

Early Victorian drama was a popular art form, appealing to an uneducated audience that demanded emotional excitement rather than intellectual subtlety. Vivacious melodramas did not, however, hold exclusive possession of the stage. The mid-century saw lively comedies by Dion Boucicault and Tom Taylor . In the 1860s T.W. Robertson pioneered a new realist drama, an achievement later celebrated by Arthur Wing Pinero in his charming sentimental comedy Trelawny of the “Wells” (1898). The 1890s were, however, the outstanding decade of dramatic innovation . Oscar Wilde crowned his brief career as a playwright with one of the few great high comedies in English, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). At the same time, the influence of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen was helping to produce a new genre of serious “problem plays,” such as Pinero’s The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (1893). J.T. Grein founded the Independent Theatre in 1891 to foster such work and staged there the first plays of George Bernard Shaw and translations of Ibsen.

Victorian literature began with such humorous books as Sartor Resartus and The Pickwick Papers . Despite the crisis of faith, the “Condition of England” question, and the “ache of modernism,” this note was sustained throughout the century. The comic novels of Dickens and Thackeray, the squibs, sketches, and light verse of Thomas Hood and Douglas Jerrold , the nonsense of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll , and the humorous light fiction of Jerome K. Jerome and George Grossmith and his brother Weedon Grossmith are proof that this age, so often remembered for its gloomy rectitude, may in fact have been the greatest era of comic writing in English literature.

Victorian Poetry

Devin M. Garofalo , University of North Texas

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Devin M. Garofalo

Founding Editor, 1962–1990

 John F. Stasny

The Hopkins Press Journals Ethics and Malpractice Statement can be found at the ethics-and-malpractice  page.

See Victorian Poetry's submissions portal to submit a manuscript and for author guidelines .

Victorian Poetry has undergone a few significant transitions over the last year. The journal has a new editor, Devin M. Garofalo (University of North Texas), and a new publisher, Johns Hopkins University Press. Scholars wishing to submit their work for potential publication should do so via the new Scholastica submissions portal , which includes revised guidelines for article manuscripts, as well as information about special issues and the year’s work in review. Victorian Poetry is also pleased to announce our new early career essay prize and keyword series (more details below). Please direct any queries to the editor using the new journal email address: [email protected] .

Call for Submissions: Early Career Essay Prize

Victorian Poetry is pleased to announce a new prize recognizing exemplary essays by untenured scholars of all ranks and affiliations (including contingently employed and graduate student colleagues). Conferred on an annual basis by a committee comprised of members of the journal’s editorial board, the prize carries an award of $500 and publication in Victorian Poetry . Strong essays that do not win the award may also be considered for publication as recommended by the prize committee. Applications are due 30 June 2024. Scholars wishing to be considered should submit anonymized MS Word essays and brief CVs to [email protected] with “Early Career Essay Prize” in the subject line. Prior to submission, consult our guidelines for authors .

Winning articles will be selected according to three criteria: (1) significance of contribution to the field of Victorian poetry (including its involvement with Victorian studies and other areas of inquiry in or beyond literary studies); (2) excellence of research, interpretation, and method; and (3) efficacy of presentation. The journal continues to expand its purview to a wider compass of archives and approaches. We welcome work that capaciously (re)interprets the field's originary contexts and reconsiders Victorian poetry (broadly construed) in new, innovative, cross-disciplinary, theoretical, and / or experimental ways.

Call for Proposals: “Poetry’s Parts” Keyword Series

We invite proposals for short keyword essays (ca. 1,100 - 1,300 words) exploring Victorian poetry’s parts, whether formal (“sonnet”) or figural (“apostrophe”), cultural (“cosmopolitan”) or critical (“lyricization”). Considered and published on an ongoing basis (as opposed to appearing in a designated special issue), essays should apprehend pressing conceptual, aesthetic, historical, cultural, political, archival, and / or methodological questions and problems that shape the field (or, alternatively, that have been neglected to the field’s detriment). As warranted, authors might also consider the ways the field (as revealed by the keyword under discussion) is animated by or animates other (sub)disciplines or genealogies of thought in ways recognized or unrecognized.

Keywords need not be limited to those that fall strictly within the specialist purview of Victorian poetry. For instance, essays exploring the resonances of broad concepts such as “atmosphere” or “race” as refracted distinctively by and through Victorian poetry (broadly construed) are most welcome. Because these essays should make arguments as opposed to offering handbook-style overviews, proposals revisiting keywords explored in prior issues will eventually be welcome as the series unfolds. Pedagogical discussion may be appropriate if it serves an illustrative purpose that keeps in view the series’ focus.

Proposals are subject to editorial review (with an eye toward giving deliberate shape to the series, especially in its early stages) and keyword essays to peer review. If contemporaneous appearance in print is necessary for offering substantive insight, the editor will consider joint proposals (ideally, featuring scholars of different ranks and affiliations, on and off the tenure track), whether on the same keyword from quite distinct vantages or on different but productively entangled keywords. Joint proposals should be limited to two or three scholars, as larger groups are difficult to accommodate in print outside the confines of a special issue. Direct queries and proposals to the editor at [email protected] .

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Glossary of Poetic Terms

Poetry written in England during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901) may be referred to as Victorian poetry. Following Romanticism, Victorian poets continued many of the previous era’s main themes, such as religious skepticism and valorization of the artist as genius; but Victorian poets also developed a distinct sensibility. The writers of this period are known for their interest in verbal embellishment, mystical interrogation, brooding skepticism, and whimsical nonsense. The most prolific and well-regarded poets of the age included Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Matthew Arnold, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Oscar Wilde. Browse more Victorian poets .

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Victorian Poetry in English Literature: Characteristics & Themes

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Victorian poetry in English literature represents a significant period in English literary history, spanning the reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1901. This era witnessed a profound shift in poetic styles, themes, and societal attitudes, reflecting the rapid changes brought about by industrialization, urbanization, scientific advancements, and social reforms. Here’s a comprehensive note on Victorian poetry, highlighting its characteristics and themes:

Characteristics of Victorian Poetry

Realism and social critique.

Victorian poets often depicted the harsh realities of urban life, poverty, industrialization, and social injustices. They critiqued the moral dilemmas and societal inequalities prevalent during the era.

Formalism and Structure

Victorian poetry typically adhered to traditional poetic forms such as the sonnet, ode, and ballad. Poets like Alfred Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning experimented with these forms while maintaining formal structures.

Language and Diction

The language of Victorian poetry was often rich, dense, and elaborate. Poets employed intricate vocabulary and complex syntax to convey their ideas, emotions, and observations.

Symbolism and Imagery

Victorian poets frequently used symbolism and vivid imagery to evoke emotions and convey deeper meanings. Nature, landscapes, and everyday objects were often imbued with symbolic significance.

Narrative Poetry

Many Victorian poets explored narrative poetry, telling stories through verse. This form allowed them to delve into complex characters, plots, and themes while retaining poetic expression.

Idealism and Romanticism

Despite the prevalence of realism, Victorian poetry also retained elements of idealism and romanticism. Poets celebrated love, nature, spirituality, and the transcendent, often juxtaposed with the harsh realities of Victorian society.

Morality and Religion

Victorian poetry frequently grappled with questions of morality, faith, doubt, and religious skepticism. Poets reflected on the role of religion in an increasingly secularized society and explored existential themes related to human existence.

Themes in Victorian Poetry

Nature and the sublime.

Victorian poets often celebrated the beauty and power of nature, using it as a source of inspiration and solace amidst the tumult of industrialization. They explored the sublime aspects of nature, invoking awe and wonder.

Love and Romance

Themes of love, courtship, and romantic relationships were prominent in Victorian poetry. Poets depicted both idealized and realistic portrayals of love, exploring themes of longing, loss, and betrayal.

Social Justice and Reform

Victorian poets were keenly aware of the social inequalities and injustices prevalent in their society. They used their poetry to advocate for social reform, highlighting issues such as poverty, child labor, women’s rights, and class divisions.

Loss and Mourning

The Victorian era was marked by high mortality rates and widespread mourning rituals. Poets often reflected on themes of loss, grief, and mortality, exploring the emotional complexities of bereavement and remembrance.

Progress and Change

Industrialization and scientific advancements brought about rapid changes in Victorian society. Poets grappled with the implications of progress, questioning its impact on humanity, nature, and traditional values.

Spirituality and Faith

Despite the rise of secularism, Victorian poetry often explored themes of spirituality, faith, and religious doubt. Poets wrestled with existential questions about the nature of God, the afterlife, and the purpose of existence.

Identity and Self-Reflection

Victorian poets delved into questions of personal identity, self-discovery, and introspection. They explored the inner workings of the human psyche, probing the complexities of consciousness and self-awareness.

In summary, Victorian poetry is characterized by its realism, formalism, symbolism, and engagement with the social, political, and philosophical concerns of the era. Through a rich tapestry of themes and stylistic elements, Victorian poets left an indelible mark on English literature, shaping the literary landscape for generations to come.

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Victorian Age in English Literature

The Victorian Age, which derives its name from the reign of Queen Victoria spanning from 1837 to 1901, marked a profound shift in English literature and culture. The emphasis on emotion and imagination of the Romantic era gave way to a new emphasis on social realism, industrialization, and the intricacies of a quickly changing society during this time. With its innovations in technology and urbanization, the Industrial Revolution significantly influenced the Victorian era.

Victorian authors and thinkers were compelled to address the moral, social, and political issues of the day as the world experienced significant change. Thus, the Victorian Age is remembered as a multifaceted age that examined the conflicts between tradition and progress, religion and doubt, and social fairness and inequity, all of which had a lasting influence on English literature and culture.

Table of Contents

Cultural and Historical Background

The Victorian Age was profoundly shaped by its cultural and historical background, which was characterized by several key factors.

It was important to consider the effects of the Industrial Revolution. The effects of the Industrial Revolution were significant. The rapid mechanization of industry and the transition from rural to industrial economies changed the British landscape. This upheaval had a significant impact on the social structure, the nature of labor, and people’s living arrangements, resulting in both economic prosperity and stark inequality.

Read More: Romantic Age in English Literature

Significant social and economic changes occurred, including urbanization. Cities expanded at a rate never before seen, drawing people from the countryside to cities in search of work. New problems with overcrowding, sanitation, the expansion of slums, and the rise of a growing middle class were brought on by this urbanization.

The development of technology and the spread of literacy were key features of this time period. Transportation and communication were completely transformed by innovations like the steam engine and the expansion of the railroads. A culture of reading and intellectual discourse was also fostered by the abundance of newspapers, periodicals, and books that came about as a result of rising literacy rates.

The morality and values of the Victorian era played a significant role as well. A strong sense of decorum, responsibility, and respectability pervaded this time period, which was characterized by Queen Victoria’s personal reputation for having stringent moral standards. These moral principles influenced Victorian literature and social norms.

Literature of the Victorian Age

In contrast to the Romantic era ‘s predominantly lyrical focus, novels rose to prominence during the Victorian age and became the dominating literary form. This change reflected the time’s focus on social realism and examination of the intricacies of the human condition.

Famous novelists who wrote novels during the Victorian era included Thomas Hardy, Charlotte Bronte, and Charles Dickens . Dickens wrote novels like “Oliver Twist” and “Great Expectations,” which shed light on the harsh realities of urban life and the problems of the working class. Dickens is renowned for his vivid characters and societal satire.

Read More: Charles Dickens as a victorian poet

With her novel “Jane Eyre,” Charlotte Bronte provided a comprehensive exploration of love, class, and female freedom by delving into the emotional and psychological depths of her characters, particularly the female protagonist.

In contrast, Thomas Hardy focused on the rural setting and the misfortune of people entangled in the web of fate and circumstance in works like “Tess of the d’Urbervilles” and “Far from the Madding Crowd.” The conflicts between tradition and modernity were frequently portrayed in his novels.

Poetry and Romantic Revival

While novels became more popular during the Victorian era, poetry remained an important and significant component of the literary landscape. The Romantic Revival, which saw writers return to earlier Romantic themes of nature, spirituality, and social critique, was an important feature of Victorian poetry.

Alfred Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning, two well-known poets of the time, are prime examples of the Romantic Revival in their works. Nature served as a frequent source of inspiration for Tennyson’s poetry, and his collection “In Memoriam” examined topics such as loss, faith, and the human condition. His poem “The Lady of Shalott” is a wonderful illustration of how Victorian poetry combines nature with spirituality.

Robert Browning, who is known for his dramatic monologues, explored the complicated moral and psychological motivations of his characters. In order to examine themes of justice and human nature, his poem “The Ring and the Book” mixes together several perspectives.

Along with these poets, the Romantic Revival had a significant impact on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood , a group of artists and poets that emerged during the Victorian era. With the help of sophisticated visual art, poets like Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, and Algernon Charles Swinburne, among others, explored themes of beauty, sensuality, and spirituality.

Read More: Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

Social and Political Essays

The Victorian Era saw a flourishing of social and political essays in addition to the predominance of novels and the resurgence of Romantic themes in poetry. These essays served as a platform for the discussion of important problems pertaining to class, gender, and imperialism, which reflects the period’s intense involvement with important societal issues.

Read More: Romanticism in English Literature

During the Victorian era, authors like John Stuart Mill and Thomas Carlyle significantly influenced the field of social and political essays. Philosopher and political economist John Stuart Mill wrote notable works like “On Liberty” and “The Subjection of Women.” He defended individual freedom and promoted gender equality in these essays, pushing society to acknowledge the inherent rights and abilities of all people, regardless of gender.

On the other hand, Thomas Carlyle explored issues related to socioeconomic class and the effects of industrialization. While “Past and Present” offered a critical analysis of the effects of rapid societal change, “Chartism” addressed the frustrations of the working class and their aspirations for political reform.

These individuals were not the only ones who wrote and thought critically about social and political concerns throughout the Victorian era; there were many other authors and philosophers as well. These essays served as a platform for discussions among intellectuals and the development of concepts that would later influence the social and political atmosphere in Britain and beyond.

They contributed significantly to promoting change and bringing attention to pressing societal issues, leaving a lasting legacy in the fields of politics, literature, and social reform.

Key Themes and Characteristics

The Victorian era’s dedication to social realism and critique was a major theme and defining feature of the period. Victorian authors were deeply concerned about the social inequalities and disparities between classes that were prevalent in their rapidly evolving society. The commitment was shown in the meticulous analysis of the lives of everyday people and the portrayal of daily life.

Charles Dickens, a writer best known for his works “Oliver Twist” and “Hard Times,” applied his creative talent to demonstrate the difficult circumstances that the working class had to endure. They revealed the dark side of industrialisation, child labour, and poverty through compelling narratives and characters. Dickens, in particular, rose to prominence as a champion of social change, using his fiction to promote reform and draw attention to the condition of the oppressed.

Along with Dickens, other Victorian novelists like Thomas Hardy and Elizabeth Gaskell also practiced social realism by highlighting the difficulties and ambitions of common people. While Hardy’s writings, such as “Tess of the d’Urbervilles” and “The Mayor of Casterbridge,” explored the difficulties of rural life and the injustices experienced by women, Gaskell’s “North and South” highlighted the conflict between industrial capitalism and workers’ rights.

Exploration of Gender and Feminism

Women’s rights and their position in society were extensively explored throughout the Victorian era, reflecting the changing sentiments of the time. Victorian literature played a pivotal role in both examining women’s responsibilities and promoting more gender equality.

Authors who identified as feminists, such as Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and George Eliot, made significant contributions to this discourse. Poetry by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, notably “Sonnets from the Portuguese” and the epic poem “Aurora Leigh,” dealt with issues of love, identity, and the fight for women’s independence. Her works were distinguished by a progressive attitude on gender equality and women’s freedom of expression.

In general, the emotional lives and problems of female characters were given more attention in Victorian literature. Novels like George Eliot’s “Middlemarch” and Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre” provided complex depictions of women’s experiences, aspirations, and societal limitations.

Moral and Ethical Inquiry

The Victorian era was characterized by a profound and constant involvement with moral and ethical inquiry in its literature, which reflected the era’s intense reflection on moral conundrums and theological issues. This introspection was influenced by Religious uncertainty and the significant scientific advancements.

Victorian authors grappled with moral dilemmas that were frequently created in the context of rapidly changing social, scientific, and religious atmosphere. For instance, the theory of evolution proposed by Charles Darwin led to serious concerns regarding humanity’s moral obligations and place in the natural world. His book, “On the Origin of Species,” profoundly influenced Victorian thought and disrupted established theological conceptions of creation.

Novels like “Tess of the d’Urbervilles” and “Jude the Obscure,” written by authors like Thomas Hardy, examined themes of fate, destiny, and moral judgment. These works highlighted morally conflicted protagonists within an indifferent or even hostile setting.

Literature from the Victorian era also reflects a rise in religious skepticism and doubt. Writers like Matthew Arnold portrayed a sense of spiritual crisis and the eroding of established religious certainties in his poem “Dover Beach.” Victorian literature was known for its contemplative, frequently depressing exploration of faith and ethics.

Notable Figures of the Victorian Age

The Victorian Age was teeming with notable figures who left an indelible mark on English literature and culture, reflecting the spirit and ethos of the era.

Charles Dickens was a prolific novelist and social critic who is regarded as one of the most well-known individuals of the Victorian era. His works, including “Oliver Twist,” “Great Expectations,” and “A Tale of Two Cities,” not only pleased readers with their endearing characters and compelling stories, but also provided insight into the glaring social inequalities and class divisions that characterized Victorian society. Dickens was an advocate of social change, and his writings significantly contributed to increasing public awareness of these issues.

Read More: A Tale of Two Cities as a historical novel

Another notable figure from the Victorian era is Charlotte Bronte, the author of the well-known novel “Jane Eyre.” Her work, which is known for its examination of love, class, and female freedom, is still regarded as a timeless masterpiece. Bront’s portrayal of the bold heroine and her daring story choices subverted the expectations of her period and had a long-lasting influence on feminist literature.

Alfred Lord Tennyson, referred to as the “Poet Laureate of the Victorian Age,” was celebrated for his excellent poetry. His poems, including “The Lady of Shalott,” “In Memoriam,” and “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” perfectly captured the Victorian preference for romanticism and reflection on the natural world and human emotion. Tennyson’s poems did a wonderful job of capturing the spirit of the age.

The Victorian Age was significantly shaped by Queen Victoria herself. Her nearly seven-decade rule, which was the longest in British history up to that moment, had a significant impact on the culture’s ideals and sensibility. Her dedication to moral principles and family life set the standard for Victorian culture and society. Her status as a patron of the arts and sciences also contributed to the intellectual vitality of the time.

Conclusion:

In the history of English literature and culture, the Victorian era is recognized as a crucial and transformative time. It was distinguished by a diverse range of literary accomplishments, social consciousness, and in-depth moral and ethical inquiry. The Victorian era is still a testament to how writing has the ability to reflect, criticize, and inspire change because of its wide literary output and deep engagement with the opportunities and challenges of the time. It established the foundation for modern literature and culture, making it a period of permanent significance in the history of English literature.

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• Justify the title Pride and Prejudice

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The Victorian Age of English Literature

Victorian Era

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In this paper, the main literary branches of Victorian literature, alongside the social, moral and political environment of this epoch will be explained. Throughout these pages, the needs of an era greatly affected by the arriving of the Industrial Revolution will be portrayed through the explanation of how the writers of the most influential literary genres of their time attempted to show their criticism towards the consequences of Industrialism, thus making a previous contextualization of this epoch imperative, so the reader may be able to picture the decadence of a period overcome by extreme poverty and an overwhelming working class prejudiced by an aristocratic minority, through the exemplification of the social and moral environment in works from writers like Oscar Wilde and Charles Dickens. The main method conducted for the creation of this paper was the consultation of secondary and tertiary sources such as Internet articles and literary analysis from academics of Higher Education institutions. Throughout this research, it became evident that all three movements (Aestheticism, Realism and Romanticism) shared the common goal of functioning as counter-movements of the Industrial Revolution and of the consequences it brought to British society, therefore making the present analysis necessary to contextualize a period where technology, rational thought and social decadence became a rule.

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Victorian Age (1837-1901) • 1837-1860: Industrial Revolution • 1860-1901: Colonial Expansion The Victorian age took its name from Queen Victoria. She was a symbol for the country, a perfect Constitutional Monarch. Britain avoided revolutions and supported many causes of independence abroad. It was involved in the Opium War against China: England gained access to five Chinese harbours and got control on Hong Kong. In addition, England wanted to reduce the power of Russia in the Crimean War. The Victorian era was the age of a great scientific progress, stability and important social reforms but at the same time was characterized by poverty, injustice and social unrest. Reforms • 1832: the first reform act (the vote was given to the large industrial towns) • 1833: the factory act (children couldn’t work more than 48 hours a week) • 1834: the poor law amendment act (in the workhouses the poor received board and education in return for work). • 1846: abolition of corn laws (as a consequence of the Irish famine). • 1847: ten hours’ act (it limited working hours to ten) Queen Victoria’s reign (1837-1901) was the longest in the history of England. The merits of this positive period belonged to the Queen, who, in marked contrast with the other European monarchs, reigned constitutionally. She was a mediator between the two parties (Liberals and Conservatives) and never overruled Parliament. The Government had to face two major problems such as a strong campaign for liberal trade that led to the abolition of the Corn Laws and the Chartist: a working-class movement who called for social reforms and the extension of the right to vote. Values The Victorians were great moralisers. They promoted a code of values based on personal duty, hard work, optimism, respectability, conformity to social standards and charity. These values were of equal application to all the classes of society, but were given their essential Victorian form by the upper or middle classes. The idea of respectability distinguished the middle from the lower class. Respectability was a mixture of morality, hypocrisy and conformity to social standards. It meant: • The possession of good manners; • The ownership of a comfortable house with servants and a carriage; • Regular attendance at church; • Charitable activity: • Philanthropy, which was a wide phenomenon that absorbed the energies of thousands of Victorians. Bourgeois ideals also dominated Victorian family life: • The family was a patriarchal unit; • The man represented the authority; • The women had the key role regarding the education of children and the managing of the house. The category of “fallen women”, adulteresses or unmarried mothers or prostitutes, was condemned and marginalized. Sexuality was generally repressed and prudery in its most extreme manifestations led to the denunciation of nudity in art and the rejection of words with sexual connotation from everyday vocabulary. VICTORIAN COMPROMISE: prosperity and progress coexisted with poverty, ugliness and injustice. Ethical conformism was opposed to corruption, philanthropy was in contrast with capitalistic greediness, private life was opposed to public behaviour. Patriotism Civil pride and national fervour were frequent among the British. Patriotism was deeply influenced by ideas of racial superiority. The British had the certainty that the races of the world were divided by physical and intellectual differences, that some were destined to be led by others. The concept of “the white man’s burden” was exalted by the colonial writers, like Kipling, and the expansion of the empire was regarded as a mission. EVANGELICALISM The religious movement known as Evangelism, inspired by Wesley the founder of Methodism, exerted an important influence on Victorian code of values. The Evangelicals indeed believed in: • Obedience to a strict code of morality; • Dedication to humanitarian causes and social reform. • Literal truth of the Bible Utilitarianism The 19th-century social thinking was influenced also by the philosophical movement of utilitarianism, based on Bentham’s principles. According to this movement an action is morally right if it brings to happiness and wrong if it produces the opposite Utilitarianism contributed to the Victorian conviction that any problem could be overcome through reason. The key-words of this philosophy were: usefulness, happiness and avoidance of pain. Empiricism Utilitarian indifference to human and cultural values was attacked by many intellectuals including Charles Dickens and John Stuart Mill, a major figure of empiricism. He thought: • Legislation could help men develop their natural talents and personalities; • Progress came from mental energy and therefore he accorded great importance to education and art. • Happiness is a state of the mind and spirit, it doesn’t coincide with material and selfish pleasure. He promoted a series of reforms: popular education, trade union organization, emancipation of women, the development of cooperatives, etc. Darwinism The scientific discovery began to overturn the belief in a stable universe. There was a new view of the universe, perceived as an incessantly changing being. Charles Darwin in his famous work “On the origin of species” argued that man is the result of a process of evolution and that in the fight for life only the strongest species survived. Darwin’s theory discarded the version of creation given by the Bible. The great exhibition The great exhibition of 1851, held in Crystal Palace in London, celebrated British advances in science, technology and the Empire. In the meantime, workers had begun to come together in Trade Unions. After strong opposition from the Government, the Trade Unions were legalized in 1882 and in 1906 the Labour Party was born. The urban habitat The poor lived in slums appalling quarters characterized by squalor, disease and crime. The conditions of life were very bad: there was a high death rate and terrible working conditions. The atmosphere was polluted and that caused a disastrous effect especially on children’s health. The Government promoted a campaign against national ill health through: - cleaning up of the towns; - foundation of professional organizations to control medical education and research; - building of modern hospitals. A lot of services, such as water, gas, lighting, parks, stadiums, were introduced. Even new Victorian institutions like prisons, police stations, boarding schools, town halls were built. The building of the London’s Underground in 1860 and the more efficient railways transformed people’s lives. People could live in the suburbs instead of the crowded areas and could travel for work and leisure. The Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel founded the Metropolitan Police, known as “bobbies” from the name of their founder. The British empire The British Empire extended its power all over the world: into Asia (Ceylon, India), Africa (Egypt, Kenya, Sudan, Rhodesia), Central America and Oceania. Most British citizens were extremely proud of their empire and regarded colonial expansion as a mission. This attitude came to be known as “jingoism” (sciovinismo). The American civil war In America, the political situation was tense because of the growing split between the North and the South. While the North was industrialized and the population was especially white (the immigrants from Europe settled in the North), the economy of the South was based on the vast plantations of tobaccos and cotton, and on the slavery North was abolitionists and gave pressure on Southern states to abolish slavery. The civil war lasted four years (from 1861 to 1865) and ended with the abolition of slavery. However, the abolition of slavery did not grant the blacks equality and economic security. The blacks were free but penniless, they were discriminated in schools, hospitals and transport were frightened and persecuted by the racists (Ku Klux Klan). During the war many possession disappeared, especially, in the South, but in the North big fortunes were made and financial empire was created by men who rose from nothing: Rockefeller and embodied the American dream: the myth of the self-made man. Other important events were: the discovery of gold in California, the relevant technological developments and the railroad that joined Atlantic to the Pacific. The America become the richest and most modern country in the world. The Victorian novel During the Victorian Age the novel became the most popular form of literature and the main way of entertainment as it was read aloud and in community within the families. Novels were first published in instalments in the pages of periodicals. The novelists described society as they saw it in their works. They thus denounced the evils of their society, without a radical criticism. A great number of novels were written by women but some of them used a male pseudonym because it wasn’t easy for a woman to publish her writings. The women’s novel was a realistic exploration of the daily lives and values of women within the family and the community. most readers were women because they had more time than men to spend at home.

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SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1600-1900 , 2014

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Victorian Poetry, 2004

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Victorian Poetry in English Literature: Characteristics & Themes

Back to: History of English Literature All Ages – Summary & Notes

Table of Contents

Introduction

There were a drastic change and development in the form of literature, art and music. Although Victorian Poetry was quite different from that of the preceding era , yet there were some similarities that existed between the two periods.

Characteristics

Focus on masses.

Romantic Poetry mainly focused on rural and rustic life. It is no way related to city life. On the other hand, Victorian poets used language as well as themes common to city life and thus wrote about the masses and for the masses.

Thus, Victorian Poetry which focused on the pains and sufferings of commoners had a note of pessimism.

Science and Technology

The advancement in science and inventions was welcomed by the Victorian poets. It made them believe that a man can find all solutions to his problems and sufferings. They made their readers believe that they should use science for their betterment.

Questioning to God

Sense of responsibility.

The Romantics believed in “return in nature”. A number of the Romantics did not like the city life and instead of giving voice to the victims of industrialisation, they left the city life. On the other hand, Victoria poets took the responsibility of social reform and gave voice to the commoners by living with them.

Though morality saw a steep decline in the Victorian Era , a number of poets tried to retain it by encouraging the people to be honest and noble.

Interest in Medieval Myths & Folklore

Use of sensory devices & imagery.

The poets of the preceding era used imagery vividly. However, the Victorians also used sensory devices to describe the abstract scenes of chaos between Religion and Science.

Sentimentality

Dramatic monologue, presentation.

Victorian Literature

Victorian literature is the body of poetry , fiction , essays, and letters produced during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837–1901) and during the era which bears her name. It forms a link and transition between the writers of the romantic period and the modernist literature of the twentieth century.

• 1 Novelists
• 2 The style of the Victorian novel
• 3.1 Children's literature
• 3.3 The influence of Empire
• 3.4 Science, philosophy and discovery
• 3.5 Supernatural and fantastic literature
• 4 The influence of Victorian literature
• 5 References
• 6 External links

During the nineteenth century the novel become the leading form of literature in English. The works by pre-Victorian writers such as Jane Austen and Walter Scott had perfected both closely observed social satire and historical fiction. Serialized popular novels won unprecedented readership and led to increasing artistic sophistication. The nineteenth century is often regarded as a high point in European literature and Victorian literature, including the works of Emily and Charlotte Brontë ), Robert Browning , Elizabeth Barrett Browning , Lewis Carroll , Wilkie Collins , Charles Dickens , George Eliot , Thomas Hardy , A. E. Housman , Rudyard Kipling , Robert Louis Stevenson , Bram Stoker , Alfred Lord Tennyson , William Makepeace Thackeray , Anthony Trollope , and Oscar Wilde remain widely popular and part of the core curricula in most universities and secondary schools.

Charles Dickens exemplifies the Victorian novelist better than any other writer. Extraordinarily popular in his day with his characters taking on a life of their own beyond the page, Dickens is still the most popular and read author of the time. The nineteenth century saw the rise of numerous literary journals that carried serial installments that were eagerly anticipated and widely read. His first real novel, The Pickwick Papers , written when he was only 25, was an overnight success, and all his subsequent works sold extremely well. He was in effect a self-made man who worked diligently and prolifically to produce exactly what the public wanted; often reacting to the public taste and changing the plot direction of his stories between monthly installments. The comedy of his first novel has a satirical edge which pervades his writings. These deal with the plight of the poor and oppressed and end with a ghost story cut short by his death. The slow trend in his fiction towards darker themes is mirrored in much of the writing of the century, and literature after his death in 1870 is notably different from that at the start of the era.

William Makepeace Thackeray was Dickens' great rival at the time. With a similar style but a slightly more detached, acerbic and barbed satirical view of his characters, he also tended to depict situations of a more middle class flavor than Dickens. He is best known for his novel Vanity Fair , subtitled A Novel without a Hero , which is also an example of a form popular in Victorian literature: the historical novel, in which very recent history is depicted. Anthony Trollope tended to write about a slightly different part of the structure, namely the landowning and professional classes.

Away from the big cities and the literary society, Haworth in West Yorkshire was the site of some of the era's most important novel writing: the home of the Brontë family. Anne , Charlotte and Emily Brontë had time in their short lives to produce masterpieces of fiction although these were not immediately appreciated by Victorian critics. Wuthering Heights , Emily's only work, in particular has violence, passion, the supernatural, heightened emotion, and emotional distance, an unusual mix for any novel but particularly at this time. It is a prime example of Gothic Romanticism from a woman's point of view during this period of time, examining class, myth, and gender. Another important writer of the period was George Eliot , a pseudonym which concealed a woman, Mary Ann Evans, who wished to write novels which would be taken seriously rather than the silly romances which all women of the time were supposed to write.

The style of the Victorian novel

Virginia Woolf in her series of essays The Common Reader called George Eliot 's Middlemarch "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people." This criticism, although rather broadly covering as it does all English literature, is rather a fair comment on much of the fiction of the Victorian Era. Influenced as they were by the large sprawling novels of sensibility of the preceding age they tended to be idealized portraits of difficult lives in which hard work, perseverance, love and luck win out in the end; virtue would be rewarded and wrong-doers are suitably punished. They tended to be of an improving nature with a central moral lesson at heart, informing the reader how to be a good Victorian. This formula was the basis for much of earlier Victorian fiction but as the century progressed the tone grew darker.

Eliot in particular strove for realism in her fiction and tried to banish the picturesque and the burlesque from her work. Another woman writer Elizabeth Gaskell wrote even grimmer, grittier books about the poor in the north of England but even these usually had happy endings. After the death of Dickens in 1870 happy endings became less common. Such a major literary figure as Charles Dickens tended to dictate the direction of all literature of the era, not least because he edited All the Year Round a literary journal of the time. His fondness for a happy ending with all the loose ends neatly tied up is clear and although he is well known for writing about the lives of the poor they are sentimentalized portraits, made acceptable for people of character to read; to be shocked but not disgusted. The more unpleasant underworld of Victorian city life was revealed by Henry Mayhew in his articles and book London Labour and the London Poor .

This change in style in Victorian fiction was slow coming but clear by the end of the century, with the books in the 1880s and 1890s having a more realistic and often grimmer cast. Even writers of the high Victorian age were censured for their plots attacking the conventions of the day; Adam Bede was called "the vile outpourings of a lewd woman's mind" and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall "utterly unfit to be put into the hands of girls." The disgust of the reading audience perhaps reached a peak with Thomas Hardy 's Jude the Obscure which was reportedly burnt by an outraged Bishop of Wakefield. The cause of such fury was Hardy's frank treatment of sex, religion and his disregard for the subject of marriage; a subject close to the Victorians' heart. The prevailing plot of the Victorian novel is sometimes described as a search for a correct marriage.

Hardy had started his career as seemingly a rather safe novelist writing bucolic scenes of rural life but his disaffection with some of the institutions of Victorian Britain was present as well as an underlying sorrow for the changing nature of the English countryside. He responded to the hostile reception to Jude in 1895 by giving up his novel writing, but he continued writing poetry into the mid 1920s. Other authors such as Samuel Butler and George Gissing confronted their antipathies to certain aspects of marriage, religion or Victorian morality and peppered their fiction with controversial anti-heros. Butler's Erewhon , for one, is a utopian novel satirizing many aspects of Victorian society with Butler's particular dislike of the religious hypocrisy the focus of his greatest scorn in the depiction of "Musical Banks."

While many great writers were at work at the time, the large numbers of voracious but uncritical readers meant that poor writers, producing salacious and lurid novels or accounts, found eager audiences. Many of the faults common to much better writers were used abundantly by writers now mostly forgotten: over-sentimentality, unrealistic plots and moralizing that obscured the story. Although immensely popular in his day, Edward Bulwer-Lytton is now held up as an example of the very worst of Victorian literature with his sensationalist story-lines and his over-boiled style of prose. Other writers popular at the time but largely forgotten now are: Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charlotte Mary Yonge, Charles Kingsley , R. D. Blackmore , and even Benjamin Disraeli , a future Prime Minister.

Other Literature

Children's literature.

The Victorians are sometimes credited with 'inventing childhood', partly via their efforts to stop child labor and the introduction of compulsory education. As children began to be able to read, literature for young people became a growth industry with, not only, adult novelists producing works for children such as Dickens' A Child's History of England but also dedicated children's authors. Writers like Lewis Carroll , R. M. Ballantyne, and Anna Sewell wrote mainly for children, although they had an adult following, and nonsense verse, poetry which required a child-like interest, was produced by Edward Lear among others. The subject of school also became a rich area for books with Thomas Hughes' Tom Brown's Schooldays just one of the most popular examples.

Poetry in a sense settled down from the upheavals of the romantic era and much of the work of the time is seen as a bridge between this earlier era and the modernist poetry of the next century. Alfred Lord Tennyson held the poet laureateship for over 40 years and his verse became rather stale by the end but his early work is rightly praised. Some of the poetry highly regarded at the time such as Invictus and If—  are now seen as jingoistic and bombastic but Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade was a fierce criticism of a famous military blunder; a pillar of the establishment not failing to attack the establishment.

It seems wrong to classify Oscar Wilde as a Victorian writer as his plays and poems seem to belong to the later age of Edwardian literature, but as he died in 1900, he was most definitely Victorian. His plays stand apart from the many now forgotten plays of Victorian times and have a much closer relationship to those of George Bernard Shaw 's, many of whose most important works were written in the twentieth century.

The husband and wife poetry team of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning conducted their love affair through verse and produced many tender and passionate poems. Both Matthew Arnold and Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote poems which sit somewhere in between the exultation of nature of the romantic Poetry and the Georgian Poetry of the early twentieth century. Arnold's works harks forward to some of the themes of these later poets while Hopkins drew for inspiration on verse forms from Old English poetry such as Beowulf .

The reclaiming of the past was a major part of Victorian literature with an interest in both classical literature but also the medieval literature of England. The Victorians loved the heroic, chivalrous stories of knights of old and they hoped to regain some of that noble, courtly behavior and impress it upon the people both at home and in the wider empire . The best example of this is Alfred Tennyson's Idylls of the King which blended the stories of King Arthur , particularly those by Thomas Malory , with contemporary concerns and ideas. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood also drew on myth and folklore for their art with Dante Gabriel Rossetti contemperaneously regarded as the chief poet amongst them, although his sister Christina is now held by scholars to be a stronger poet.

The influence of Empire

The interest in older works of literature led the Victorians much further afield to find new old works with a great interest in translating of literature from the farthest flung corners of their new empire and beyond. Arabic and Sanskrit literature were some of the richest bodies of work to be discovered and translated for popular consumption. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is one of the best of these works, translated by Edward FitzGerald who introduced much of his own poetic skill into a rather free adaptation of the eleventh century work. The explorer Richard Francis Burton also translated many exotic works from beyond Europe including The Perfumed Garden , The Arabian Nights and the Kama Sutra .

Science, philosophy and discovery

The Victorian era was an important time for the development of science and the Victorians had a mission to describe and classify the entire natural world. Much of this writing does not rise to the level of being regarded as literature but one book in particular, Charles Darwin 's On the Origin of Species , remains famous. The theory of evolution contained within the work shook many of the ideas the Victorians had about themselves and their place in the world and although it took a long time to be widely accepted it would change, dramatically, subsequent thought and literature.

Other important non-fiction works of the time are the philosophical writings of John Stuart Mill covering logic , economics, liberty , and utilitarianism . The large and influential histories of Thomas Carlyle : The French Revolution, A History , On Heroes and Hero Worship and Thomas Babington Macaulay : The History of England from the Accession of James II . The greater number of novels that contained overt criticism of religion did not stifle a vigorous list of publications on the subject of religion. Two of the most important of these are John Henry Newman and Henry Edward Cardinal Manning who both wished to revitalize Anglicanism with a return to the Roman Catholic Church . In a somewhat opposite direction, the ideas of socialism were permeating political thought at the time with Friedrich Engels writing his Condition of the Working Classes in England and William Morris writing the early socialist utopian novel News from Nowhere . One other important and monumental work begun in this era was the Oxford English Dictionary which would eventually become the most important historical dictionary of the English language .

Supernatural and fantastic literature

A new form of supernatural, mystery and fantastic literature during this period, often centered on larger-than-life characters such as Sherlock Holmes famous detective of the times, Barry Lee big time gang leader of the Victorian Times, Sexton Blakes, Phileas Foggs, Frankenstein fictional characters of the era, Dracula, Edward Hyde, The Invisible Man, and many other fictional characters who often had exotic enemies to foil.

The influence of Victorian literature

Writers from the former colony of The United States of America and the remaining colonies of Australia , New Zealand , and Canada could not avoid being influenced by the literature of Britain and they are often classed as a part of Victorian literature although they were gradually developing their own distinctive voices. Victorian writers of Canadian literature include Grant Allen, Susanna Moodie, and Catherine Parr Traill. Australian literature has the poets Adam Lindsay Gordon and Banjo Paterson, who wrote Waltzing Matilda and New Zealand literature includes Thomas Bracken and Frederick Edward Maning From the sphere of literature of the United States during this time are some of the country's greats including: Emily Dickinson , Ralph Waldo Emerson , Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. , Henry James , Herman Melville , Harriet Beecher Stowe , Henry David Thoreau , Mark Twain , and Walt Whitman .

The problem with the classification of Victorian literature is great difference between the early works of the period and the later works which had more in common with the writers of the Edwardian period and many writers straddle this divide. People such as Arthur Conan Doyle , Rudyard Kipling , H. G. Wells , Bram Stoker , H. Rider Haggard, Jerome K. Jerome, and Joseph Conrad all wrote some of their important works during Victoria's reign but the sensibility of their writing is frequently regarded as Edwardian.

References ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Chesteron, G. K. The Victorian Age in Literature . Harleston: Edgeways, 2001. ISBN 9780907839651
• Kumar, Shiv Kumar. British Victorian literature; recent revaluations . New York University Press, 1969. OCLC 46407
• Tillotson, Geoffrey. A View of Victorian Literature . Clarendon Press, 1978. ISBN 9780198120445

External links

All links retrieved May 3, 2023.

• The Victorian Web .

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• > Journals
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• > Volume 46 Issue 3-4
• > Affect

Article contents

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 August 2018

“Affect” gives us a way to talk about a description of the sound of  bluebells agitating one another on a heath; to evoke a barely registered discomfiture in a marriage plot, the consequences of which won't emerge for several hundred pages; or, to explain why certain oddball literary characters don't quite feel like people. Critics use the term, broadly, to mark a minimal subjectivity that evades standard procedures for knowing the self and the social. Fugitive and impersonal, affective states are said to circulate outside of the individual, irreducible to the more conceptual thoughts or even emotions an individual might have about them. Neither active nor passive, they preclude a unitary vision of the self-willing subject, and instead point to the subtle processes by which the self is an “intimate public” absorbing what is outside it. Footnote 1 Therefore, the term is also metacritical: it offers a way to acknowledge a critical culture that overvalues exemplary individual acts of producing what counts as disciplinary knowledge, and to analyze the shifts in critical atmosphere that occur collectively, including the significant one brought about by affectively-oriented criticism itself.

Atmosphere and mood might be the most flexible and significant affective terms right now. Rita Felski, building on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's groundbreaking Touching Feeling , notes that critics are newly receptive to “delving into the eddies and flows of affective engagement, trying to capture something of the quality and the sheer intensity of attachments and orientations rather than rushing to explain them, judge them, or wish them away”; her recent The Limits of Critique attempts to steer critical mood away from a dominant, corrosive suspiciousness. Footnote 2 As Felski's recent respondents in PMLA have established, such “delving” cannot constitute the full work of literary criticism; the V21 Manifesto, moreover, approaches the question of critical mood from the opposite standpoint—suspicion is absent, whereas the “primary affective mode” of Victorian studies is said to be “the amused chuckle.” Footnote 3 Whether we recognize either, both, or neither characterizations of the field's mood, it seems ineluctable that in our shared spaces, whether live, paper, or electronic, some shift has undoubtedly taken place, even just insofar as mood has become a prominent term for metacritique. Mood is said—like affect more generally—to lack a telos; Jonathan Flatley defines it as an atmospheric precondition “in which intentions are formed, projects pursued, and particular affects can attach to particular objects.” Footnote 4 The term thus provides a way of thinking about the many scales of our critical project. It points to broad questions of the overall, sometimes far from conscious, tenor of academic discourse. Perhaps more importantly, it captures the work of reading in the classroom and beyond—the textures of a local, close reading, professional or not, alone or in a group, once or many times over many years.

What we do with “mood” points to the value as well as limitations of “affect” more generally. Affect theory offers an especially provocative critical vocabulary and approach for Victorian studies because it offers an alternative to painting the Victorians as constitutively anxious and self-willed, or ourselves as suspicious, bemused, or somehow both. Yet it is attended by two significant questions, recently posed with particular force: to what extent affect theory needs to rely on the findings of experimental science; and, whether its politics are necessarily progressive or even radical. If affect is “a process that is social in origin but biological and physical in effect,” according to Teresa Brennan, some theorists substantiate the distinction between affect and emotion by appeals to clinical studies. Footnote 5 Ruth Leys, however, has devastated these scientific claims by carefully taking apart the implications of studies and paradigms frequently cited by humanists, especially the line on affect derived not from Benedict Spinoza, Alfred North Whitehead, and Gilles Deleuze, but the more partitioned accounts of feeling that come from Sylvan Tompkins, Paul Ekman, and Antonio Damasio. Moreover, affect theory's alliance with the non-conceptual (despite its affiliation with these more structured theories) tends to elicit utopian statements about the immanent possibility of political transformation. Footnote 6 For instance, Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth, introducing the Affect Theory Reader , recommend “casting a line along the hopeful (though also fearful) cusp of an emergent futurity, casting its lot with the infinitely connectable, impersonal, and contagious belongings to this world.” Footnote 7 But with Steven Goldsmith, I would ask why there is any reason to believe that “critical emotion is the precondition of a future agency to come,” especially if, pace Leys, that feeling is imagined as utterly anti-conceptual and anti-intentional: the belief in affect's transformative power might merely invert hierarchies of value, privileging affect over reason, in order to redeem feelings often coded as far from positive (pain, self-loss, slow violence). Footnote 8 A kindred disenchantment of affect's politics appears in Amanda Anderson's account of the Kleinian psychoanalytic framework underpinning Sedgwick's work. For Anderson, this account, based upon extra-literary claims about mind, suggests a fundamental investment in psychic conflict that remains continuous with the relatively more cynical politics of the hermeneutics of suspicion. Footnote 9

These critiques must be taken seriously. Still, it does not make sense to view them as entirely foreclosing affectively oriented methods , nor does it fully explain why we might want a vocabulary for talking about non-intentionality or non-conceptuality, as slippery as the idea of a non-conceptual concept might be. A not-particularly-politicized concept of affect has been exceptionally productive for scholars of Victorian literature, notably Rachel Ablow, Jesse Oak Taylor, and Benjamin Morgan, whose recent monographs concern the intersection of aesthetic forms with scientific concepts—pain, atmosphere, physiology—that put pressure on the culturally enshrined but newly problematized concept of consciousness in the nineteenth century. Ablow, for instance, attends to affect theory's optimism historically, arguing that Charles Darwin's account of both pain and emotion “demand an affective registration that is discomfiting at least in part because of its incompatibility with concrete ameliorative intervention.” Footnote 10 Given many Victorians’ interest in theorizing the physical basis of mind both scientifically and in the arts themselves, it makes sense to see Victorian literature as theorizing what recognizably looks like affect's precursor. Particularly so because they were sometimes explicitly working in a recuperated Spinozist vein or in response to Darwin's account of emotion's evolution (both part of affect's dual genealogy). A historicized version of affect is more compelling than a purely theoretical one, perhaps, because these critics have at most a weak investment in affirming Victorian approaches to body-mind through the lens of our own currents in neuroscience. But given the emphasis in recent affect theory on affect's fugitive dimensions, it becomes more than a tool of intellectual history's documentation of changing approaches to thinking about how the self is constituted by, and shot through, with non-self. It also offers a way to consider how literary style and form register these shifting beliefs in terms that somewhat diverge from what Caroline Levine, in her major Forms , identifies as structures that forge social intelligibility, both like but also unlike the way mood is supposed to subtend intellection. “Atmosphere” and “tone”—which have little role to play in Levine's account—are formal terms that evoke a negative or inscrutable relation to the social structures that emerge from form in her sense. Footnote 11 And while they depend upon subtle formal features that benefit from the application of a technical literary critical vocabulary, they are perceptible and influential for many kinds of readers and readings. Affect, then, seems likely to continue to be productive as a way of thinking about how form, and various approaches to formal analysis, work.

Moreover, the fact that so much theoretical work oriented toward affect (for, against, or somewhere in between) comes from critics whose careers began with Victorian literature (Sedgwick, Felski, Anderson, Isobel Armstrong) is instructive, suggesting that Victorian literature has something distinctive to teach us about the relation between feeling and concept. Although Victorian novels and poems are filled with the phenomenological intensities and social contagions affect theory evokes, they also—according to Anderson and Armstrong—tend to feature a doubled, far more analytical and diagnostic project very much associated with, and directly related to, “criticism's” projects of “explaining” and “judging.” Footnote 12 How we position ourselves in relation to the knowledge we make is a major question of so many Victorian novels and poems. It's affect's question too.

1. Berlant , Lauren , The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship ( Durham : Duke University Press , 1997 ), 4 Google Scholar .

2. Felski , Rita , The Uses of Literature ( London : Blackwell , 2009 ), 19 Google Scholar .

3. “Manifesto of the V21 Collective,” V21 Collective, http://v21collective.org/manifesto-of-the-v21-collective-ten-theses/ (accessed December 28, 2017). Amanda Anderson notes the odd absence of the hermeneutics of suspicion in the V21 Manifesto, which offers an almost entirely contrasting image of collective critical mood from Felski's, though in a sense it might not have been possible without the attention to mood Sedgwick initiated and Felski elaborated ( “ Therapeutic Criticism ,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 50 , no. 3 ( 2017 ): 321 –28 CrossRef Google Scholar , 321). In PMLA ’s March 2017 forum on Felski's , The Limits of Critique ( Chicago : University of Chicago Press , 2015 ) CrossRef Google Scholar , see especially Fuss , Diana , “But What About Love?” PMLA 132 , no. 2 ( 2017 ): 352 –55 CrossRef Google Scholar .

4. Flatley , Jonathan , Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism ( Cambridge : Harvard University Press , 2008 ), 19 CrossRef Google Scholar .

5. Brennan , Teresa , The Transmission of Affect ( Ithaca : Cornell University Press , 2004 ), 3 Google Scholar .

6. See Leys , Ruth , The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique ( Chicago : University of Chicago Press , 2017 ) CrossRef Google Scholar , especially 18.

7. Gregg , Melissa and Seigworth , Gregory J. , “ An Inventory of Shimmers ,” in The Affect Theory Reader , ed. and , Gregg Seigworth ( Durham : Duke University Press , 2010 ), 4 Google Scholar (emphasis original).

8. Goldsmith , Steven , Blake's Agitation: Criticism and the Emotions ( Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press , 2013 ), 310 Google Scholar . As Sianne Ngai and Lauren Berlant suggest, the reconfiguration of agency by affective shifts can serve to diagnose the social situations that engender affects without offering transformative potential. See Ngai , , Ugly Feelings ( Cambridge : Harvard University Press , 2005 ) Google Scholar ; and Berlant. Even for Kathleen Stewart, who evokes with great nuance an “ordinary affect” that constitutes “a surging, a rubbing, a connection of some kind” that makes “the world … still tentative, charged, overwhelming, and alive,” nonetheless, “ this is not a good thing or a bad thing ” ( Ordinary Affects [ Durham : Duke University Press , 2007 ], 128 Google Scholar ).

9. See Anderson, “Therapeutic Criticism,” 323.

10. Ablow , Rachel , Victorian Pain ( Princeton : Princeton University Press , 2017 ), 116 Google Scholar . See also Morgan , Benjamin , The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature ( Chicago : University of Chicago Press , 2017 ) Google Scholar ; and Taylor , Jesse Oak , The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf ( Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press , 2016 ) Google Scholar .

11. See Levine , Caroline , Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network ( Princeton : Princeton University Press , 2015 ) CrossRef Google Scholar .

12. See Anderson , Amanda , Bleak Liberalism ( Chicago : University of Chicago Press , 2016 ) CrossRef Google Scholar , which makes an argument about the Victorian realist novel that resonates with Isobel Armstrong's account of the double poem in her Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, and Politics ( London : Routledge , 1996 ) Google Scholar .

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• Volume 46, Issue 3-4
• Elisha Cohn
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150318000244

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Classical Antiquity

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Classical Antiquity by Isobel Hurst LAST MODIFIED: 21 June 2024 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199799558-0212

References to ancient Greece and Rome abound in Victorian literature and culture. Although classical studies are often associated with the elite, there is evidence in sources from textbooks to periodicals to the popular stage that Greek epic and tragedy, Roman history, and artifacts and accounts of archaeological discoveries reached a wide audience. Fascination with Greek culture developed in the Romantic period as a reaction against Augustanism and remained strong throughout the century, with cultural critics such as Matthew Arnold insisting on the relevance of Hellenism to the concerns of the present day. Victorian authors also found new significance in the Roman inheritance. Writers such as Matthew Arnold, W. M. Thackeray, Alfred Tennyson, A. H. Clough, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and A. C. Swinburne, among others, studied Latin and Greek for years at school or university and reworked their classical learning in poetry and fiction. A distinctive feature of the Oxford Greats syllabus was that it encouraged students to compare Greek and Roman literature, philosophy, and history with the work of modern thinkers, and to comment on parallels between the ancient and modern worlds. The classical curriculum shaped public life: politicians and imperial administrators interpreted the challenges facing modern Britain in terms of Athenian or Roman examples. Largely self-taught Hellenists such as Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and George Eliot achieved a remarkable degree of proficiency in Greek with little assistance, since Greek literature, philosophy, and history seemed to offer them tantalizing access to unparalleled sources of truth and knowledge. A wider readership also shared in the richness of the classical inheritance through translations and adaptations of classical literature, history, and myth. Greek epics and tragedy were appropriated by the authors of dramatic monologues, novels, and theatrical burlesques to engage with contemporary concerns about marriage and divorce, the role of women, and the idea of heroism in the modern world. The predominance of Latin and Greek in formal education was beginning to be questioned toward the end of the century, as debates about issues such as the applicability of Greek culture to education in an industrialized society stimulated controversy; in the late Victorian period classical culture was increasingly scrutinized using new approaches based on anthropology, archaeology, and sociology, which broadened the disciplinary base of classics and informed transgressive tendencies in the Hellenism of aesthetic and decadent writers.

Vance 2007 is an excellent starting point for a study of responses to classical antiquity in the Victorian period. Three pioneering book-length studies— Jenkyns 1980 , Turner 1981 , and Vance 1997 —offer wide-ranging assessments of the reception of Greek and Roman antiquity by Victorian readers and writers. Goldhill 2002 focuses on moments of conflict and debate about the value of classical learning in the Victorian period, while Goldhill 2011 aims to unsettle the conservatism of earlier accounts of the classical tradition and restore a more radical understanding of classics as a discipline. Clarke 1989 includes essays on Greek influences in art, education, and culture; Edwards 1999 includes a similar range of essays relating to the influence of Rome. Hurst 2021 examines Greek and Roman influences on Victorian culture and surveys classical reception scholarship on the period.

Clarke, G. W., ed. Rediscovering Hellenism: The Hellenic Inheritance and the English Imagination . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Essay collection with useful introductions to Hellenism in the Victorian period, including topics such as the turn to Greece and away from Rome, Victorian painting, Hebraism and Hellenism, classical education, and cast-collecting.

Edwards, Catharine, ed. Roman Presences: Receptions of Rome in European Culture, 1789–1945 . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Essays on the reception of ancient Roman culture after the French Revolution, questioning the idea that Greece was more important than Rome in shaping modern culture. Includes essays on Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome , comparisons between ancient Rome and the British empire with reference to India, decadence and the subversion of empire, Simeon Solomon’s paintings, and historical novels set in the Roman empire.

Goldhill, Simon. Who Needs Greek? Contests in the Cultural History of Hellenism . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Challenges the model of the classical tradition with an interdisciplinary study of the conflicted significance of Greek culture at specific historical moments. Chapter 4 poses the question “Who knows Greek?” in the context of the development of Victorian Hellenism, political attacks on classical studies at the time of the 1867 Reform Act, and the professionalization of the discipline toward the end of the century.

Goldhill, Simon. Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction, and the Proclamation of Modernity . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011.

DOI: 10.23943/princeton/9780691149844.001.0001

Argues that earlier accounts of classics as a discipline in the nineteenth century have misrepresented the subject as intrinsically conservative, obscuring more radical and revolutionary elements of classicism. Examines themes of sexuality, revolution, and democracy in art, music, and historical fiction.

Hurst, Isobel. “ The Reception of Ancient Greece and Rome in the Victorian Period .” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature . Edited by Paula Rabinowitz. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021.

Essay surveying Greek and Roman influences on Victorian life and literature, including classical education, universities, translation and adaptation, poetry, and the reception of tragedy.

Jenkyns, Richard. The Victorians and Ancient Greece . Oxford: Blackwell, 1980.

A wide-ranging account of the Victorian reception of Greek literature, culture, and history. Unlike more recent studies, Jenkyns’s book focuses mainly on canonical texts. Examines classical education, poetry, sculpture, and art; the reception of tragedy; Homer and Plato; and George Eliot’s fiction.

Turner, Frank M. The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981.

An influential study of the reception of Greek literature, mythology and religion, and political thought and philosophy in the Victorian period. Examines religion and mythology; the Hellenism of Matthew Arnold; the reception of Homer, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; and competing discourses of Athenian democracy in the context of Parliamentary reforms.

Vance, Norman. “Victorian.” In A Companion to the Classical Tradition . Edited by Craig Kallendorf, 87–100. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007.

A concise and perceptive introduction to the reception of Greece and Rome in the Victorian period. Usefully points out that such receptions are often selective or idealized interpretations of the classical past which writers and artists, statesmen, and the wider public applied to contemporaneous literature and art, politics, and the British Empire.

Vance, Norman. The Victorians and Ancient Rome . Oxford: Blackwell, 1997.

An invaluable study of the persistent Roman presence in Victorian culture. Examines the reception of Roman authors such as Lucretius, Catullus, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid; the influence of Rome on 19th-century historiography; imperialism; and decadence.

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A Three-Bedroom Victorian to Kill For

“House Hunting,” a fiction debut by Mary Heitkamp

House Hunting

It’s Saturday, which means Greg and I are house hunting. We’ve done this every weekend for the past four years and it’s a miracle we’ve lasted this long. Of the other couples we know, only a few have managed to get an offer on the table; fewer have had them accepted. The rest—those who are still together—have decided no house is worth the physical and emotional toll the buying process takes. We were ready to give up, too, but then our dream house came on the market, so we’re giving it one last shot.

We’re dressed in our best house-hunting attire: smart khakis and crisp button-downs, comfortable sneakers and Kevlar vests—something that says “serious homebuyer” while also keeping us safe. Once, all you needed was an offer over asking and a thoughtful letter to the seller. Now you need good reflexes and great aim.

New places hit the market on Thursdays, so on Fridays we pick a few we’re interested in and study the photos and digital walkthroughs so we know what to expect—the size of the bathrooms and state of the kitchen, best rooms to attack from and places to hide. 

Today, we’re only viewing the dream house: a blue Victorian on Magazine Street that’s been in same family for a century. The most recent owners, a childless couple in their sixties, died trying to get a winter condo in Florida. Lucky us. We’ve been renting a one-bedroom around the corner for eight years and often stop to peek through the hedges imagining walk-in closets, his-and-hers sinks, an office for each of us and space for children, should we decide to have them. Once, we spotted the couple on the front porch sipping dark cocktails from crystal glasses and wondered if they’d ever had to work for anything, feeling, even then, we deserved their home more than they did.

I like to get to these things early so I can feel out the competition, but Greg forgot to iron his shirt last night and made us late leaving the apartment. Now we’re walking up that same porch with less than five minutes to spare, and I’m trying not to be annoyed. But when I push through the front door and see the height of the ceilings—the listing didn’t do them justice—all is forgiven. I grab Greg’s hand and squeeze it three times. This. Is. It.

We enter the living room, still hand-in-hand. There are twenty-odd people gathered in front of a bay window where, every December, we see a glowing Christmas tree from the street. The realtor, a middle-aged blonde in a white linen suit—bold choice—welcomes us with a smile and glass of prosecco and tells us to sign in, select a weapon, let her know if we have any questions. She means about the house, but one woman, who’s holding a lance like it’s a walking stick asks how, exactly, it all works, and the seasoned among us cringe. First-timer, surely. Doubtful she’ll make it out of the room before she’s eliminated.

The realtor explains: Tour at your leisure; only target people inside the house; those still standing at the end of the hour will have the opportunity to make an offer. And keep it civil, she says.

I’ve missed out on the crossbow, my usual weapon of choice, so I go for the stave sling while Greg grabs a club, then we step back to sip our drinks and take stock of our competitors. Most are couples like us: mid-thirties professionals; the kind of people, under different circumstances, we might invite over for drinks. Then there’s a sweet-looking older gentleman, a redheaded woman we’ve seen before, and a couple in camouflage I rule out immediately. Even if they make it to the end, it’s unlikely the estate managers will accept their offer. Their attire does not scream, “We care about maintaining the historical integrity of the property.”

A clock strikes noon, and the open house begins. While the others hesitate, Greg and I seize the opportunity to slip away from the crowd and up the stairs. Primary bedroom, first door on the left. It’s as big as our current living room and kitchen combined, with parquet flooring, built-in wardrobes, and a four-poster bed we hope comes with the house. In the corner, there’s a window seat where Greg says he expects to find me every morning. I take the uncracked copy of Don Quixote from the bedside table and pose on the yellow cushion. Greg snaps a picture and hands me the phone. This house is your perfect lighting, he says, and we laugh.

We’re admiring the chrome fixtures in the adjoining bathroom when we hear the first scream. I run back to the window to see a dozen people fleeing the house, the last of them bleeding from his head. You can always count on half the prospective homebuyers to give up at the first sight of blood. Greg darts to the bedroom doorway and I crouch behind him, gripping my weapon in both hands, the stone in its sling bouncing against my back. 

There’s a creak on the stairs, the flash of a camouflage arm. Greg takes the man out at the knees; I nail the woman in the right shoulder. They tumble down the stairs and I run after to check for a pulse—we never kill—and am satisfied they’ll recover for the next open house.

End of the hall, the library. Greg narrowly misses a swinging battle axe and takes out the redhead. She joins five others bleeding into the plush carpet—maroon, thank God. The room smells of polished oak, metal, and must, and has floor-to-ceiling cabinets stacked with leather-bound books. I run my fingers along the spines imagining nightcaps by the fire, sex on the desk.

At the sound of a tightening bowstring, I whip around to see the tip of an arrow slide between the door and the frame, and launch a stone just as Greg raises his club, knocking my arm. The stone sails past the door, hitting the bookcase to the right of it. I wince as glass shatters and falls to the floor. When I look up again, the archer is gone and the arrow is resting at my feet. I inhale deeply, trying to forgive, again, Greg’s wrinkled shirt, our late arrival, getting stuck with a weapon I don’t know how to use.

Two doors down, the dining room. Here, we find the realtor lying on a velvet chaise lounge with a spike in her calf, red blooming on her white suit. We ask her if she’s okay, then how many are left. Not sure, she groans, but the person who did this won’t be buying a house anytime soon. My money’s on the first-timer. Anyone else would know to use extra caution around realtors, who are there only to answer questions and prevent people from stealing. I note the size of the table we’ll need, thank the realtor, and leave.

We always save the kitchen, our favorite room in any house, for last. Here, it’s the central room, the heart of the home. Though renovated two years ago, it hasn’t lost its late-1800s charm. The floor is original checkerboard terra cotta, and a wide chimney serves as the backsplash to a polished brass La Cornue oven. There are arrows stuck in the solid oak cabinets, dents in the Subzero fridge. A shame, really, but you can’t buy a house these days without expecting to do a little work.

The only other people in the room are heaped at the base of an island, an arrow in each of their backs. It’s the woman with the lance and her partner, who made it further than I thought they would. Greg scans the room, gives a thumbs-up. All clear. Quietly, I test the weight of the cupboard doors, feel the gentle pull of soft-close drawers, take a hanging copper pot from its hook and see that it’s never been used. I wonder if we could negotiate those into the price, offer an extra thousand for the pots, the knives, the bone-white place settings.

I’m inspecting a second oven—Thermador—when I see movement in its glass door, hear an oomph, and turn to see Greg drop to the floor, his shirt still perfectly crisp. An arrow that should have been mine to shoot flies from a butler pantry and hits me in the left breast. I feel the blunt edge of Carrera marble split my head open as I fall back.

It’s over, I think, but then Greg’s face appears, haloed by a Tiffany chandelier. He’s taken off his shirt and ripped it in two. He ties one half around my head and the other around his thigh. We’re so close, he whispers, pointing to the time on the Thermador—12:58. He props me up against the island.

In darker moments, when it’s felt like we’d be renters forever, I’ve tried to visualize getting the house, like my therapist taught me. I’ve pictured receiving the call that our offer was accepted, the realtor handing us a set of keys, me and Greg walking through the front door of our new home for the very first time. What I’ve never dared picture is what it would actually take to own.

Now, I’m watching it all unfold in the reflection of the oven door: the older gentleman emerging from the pantry, crossbow raised in victory, a minute too soon. Greg leaping out from behind the island and clubbing him hard, again and again, until the clock strikes one and the realtor limps through the swinging door. She asks if we’re the only ones left. Greg, panting, nods. Makes my job easy, she says, slapping a thick stack of paperwork onto the island and sliding onto a stool. Greg sits beside her and signs his name everywhere she points.

The paramedics arrive. I hear their stretchers rumbling across the hardwood floors as I close my eyes. Already, the carnage of the last hour is fading, and the only thing I see is coffee brewing in the mornings, the Christmas dinners we’ll cook in here, the wine Greg will pour while we make his grandmother’s Bolognese—something tannic and ashy, dark red as blood seeping through terra cotta cracks.

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GCSE English Literature Paper 2 (specification 8702)

Wednesday 1 May 2024

The question papers for GCSE English Literature Paper 2 (specification 8702), timetabled for 9.00am on Monday 20 May 2024, have the code 8702/2 R . This also includes the modified large print and Braille papers if you have requested any of those. These papers also do not have a date on the front page, and they refer to June 2023 in the footer. This is because it is a paper originally produced and printed for use in summer 2023. As you’d expect, to protect the integrity of our exam system, we occasionally produce back-up papers to use if we need them. This was one of those occasions. Fortunately, we did not need to use this back up paper, and as part of our commitment to sustainability, we try to reuse these papers where we can – this is why we did not print a date on the front page. Please store these papers securely as you would usually do when you receive them, which will be by Friday 3 May. You do not need to do anything else differently, but please make sure that your invigilators and students are aware of this on the day of the exam to make sure there is no confusion.