Characteristics of the Victorian period paper - 06

The Novelist of The Victorian Age

Name: Patel Krishna K.
Roll No. :- 16
Semester :- 02
Batch :- 2018 – 2020
Enrolment No. :- 2069108420190035
Email Id :- krishnadobariya08@gmail.com
Course :- M.A. English
Paper No. :- 06 The Victorian Literature
Topic :- The Novelist of The Victorian Age
Submitted to :- Smt. S. B. Gardi Department of English MKBU

Introduction:-

When Victoria became queen in 1837, English literature seemed to have entered upon a period of lean years, in marked contrast with the poetic fruitfulness of the romantic age which we have just studied. Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Byron, and Scott had passed away, and it seemed as if there were no writers in England to fill their places.  Wordsworth had written in, 1835,
   Like clouds that rake the mountain summits,
         Or waves that own no curbing hand,
How fast has brother followed brother,
         From sunshine to the sunless land!
In these lines is reflected the sorrowful spirit of a literary man of the early nineteenth century who remembered the glory that had passed away from the earth. But the leanness of these first years is more apparent than real. Keats and Shelley were dead, it is true , but already there had appeared three disciples of these poets who were destined to be far more widely read than were their masters. Tennyson had been publishing poetry since 1827, his first poems appearing almost simultaneously with the last work of Byron, Shelley, and Keats; but it was not until 1842, with the publication of his collected poems, in two volumes, that England recognized in him one of her great literary leaders. So also Elizabeth Barrett had been writing since 1820, but not till twenty years later did her poems become deservedly popular; and Browning had published his Pauline in 1833, but it was not until 1846, when he published the last of the series called Bells and Pomegranates, that the reading public began to appreciate his power and originally. Moreover, even as romanticism seemed passing away, a group of great prose writers – Dickens, Thackeryay , Carlyle, and Ruskin – had already begun to proclaim the literary glory of a new age, which now seems to rank only just below the Elizabethan and the Romantic periods.

Novelists

1. Charles Dickens (1812 – 70)

Dickens was born near Portsea,  where his father was a clerk in the Navy Pay office. Charles, the second of the eight children was a delicate child, and much of his boyhood was spent at home, where he read the novels of Smollett, Fielding, and Le Sage. The works of these writers were to influence his own novels very deeply. A an early age also he became very fond of the theatre, a fondness that remained with him all his life, and affected his novels to a great extent. In 1823 th Dickens family removed to London, where the father, an improvident man of the Micawber type, soon drew them into money difficulties. The pickwick paper was a great success; Dickens’s fame was secure, and the rest of his life was that of a busy and successful novelist. His popularity was exploited in journalism, for the edited The Daily News91846), and founded Household words (1849) and All the year Round (1859). In 1858 Dickens commenced his famous series of public readings. These were acting rather than readings, for he chose some of the most violent or effecting scenes from his novels and presented them with full- blown historionic effect. The readings brought him much money, but they wore him down physically. They were also given in America, with the greatest success. He died in his favourite hose ,God’s hill place, near Rochester, and war buried in Westminster Abbey.

His Novels

1. Sketches by Boz (1836)
2. The Pick Wick Papers (1836)
3. Oliver Twist (1837)
4. Nicholas Nickleby (1838)
5. The Old Curiosity Shop (1840)
6. Barnaby Rudge (1841)
7. American Notes (1842)
8. Martin Chuzzlewir (1843)
9. A Christmas Carol (1843)
10. Dombey and Son(1846)

Features of his Novels:-

A. Their Popularity. At the end of 26 Dickens was a popular author. This was a happy state of affairs for him, and to his books it served as an ardent stimulus. But there were attendant  disadvantages. The demand for his novels was so enormous that it often led to hasty and ill- considered work; to crudity of plot, to unreality of characters, and to looseness of style.

B. His Interest in social reform. Though Dickens’s works embody no systematic social or political theory, from the first he took himself very seriously as a social reformer. His novels aroused public interest in many of the evils of his day. In more ways than one his work suffered from his preoccupation with social problems. To it can largely be attributed the poetic justice of the conclusions of many of his novels the exaggeration of such characters are grinds and the sentimental pictures of the poorer classes.

C. His Imagination no English novelist excel Dickens in the multiplicity of his characters and situations. Pickwick papers, the first of the novels, teems with characters, some of them finely portrayed and in more numbers the supply is maintained to the very end of his life.

D. His humour and pathos. It is very likely that the reputation of Dickens will be mainted chiefly as a humorist. His humour  is broad, humane and creative.
E. His mannerism are many, and they do not make for good in his novel. It has often been pointed out that his characters are created not “in the round”, but “in the flat!” Each represents are mood, one turn of phrase.
F. In time his style became mannered also. At its best it is neither polished nor scholarly, but it is clear, rapid and workman like the style of the working journalist.
2. William Makepeace Thackeray (1811 – 1863)

Thackeray was born at Calcutta and was descended from any an ancient Yorkshire family. His father having died in 1816, the boy was sent to England for his education, and on the voyage home he had a glimpse of Napoleon, then a prisoner on St. Helena.  He contributed both prose and light verse to several periodicals, including Punch and Fraser’s  Magazine, winning his way slowly and with much difficulty, for his were gifts that do not gain ready recognition. It was not till nearly the middle of the century that Vanity Fair (1847 – 48) brought him some credit, though at first the book was grudgingly received. Before his death he had enjoined his executors not to publish any biography, so that of all the major Victorians writers we have of him the scientist biographical materials.

His Novels:-

1. The Yellowplush Correspondence
2. The book of Snobs
3. The snob of England
4. The History of Samuel Titmarsh and the great Hoggarty Diamond
5. The Fitzboodle paper
6. The memories of Barry Lyndon
7. Vanity Fair
8. The history of Pendennis
9. The History of Henry Esmond
10. The New Comes
11. The Verginians
12. The Cornhill Magazine
13. Lovel the widower
14. The Roundabout Papers

His Poetry:-

1. The White Squall
2. The Ballad of Bouillabaisse
Features of his works:-
A) Their Reputation. While Dickens was in the full tide of his success Thackeray was struggling through neglect and contempt to recognition. Thackeray’s genius blossomed slowly, just as Fielding’s did; for that reason the fruit is more mellow and matured.
B) His method. “Since the author of Tom Jones was buried”, says Thackeray in his preface to Pendennis, “no  writer of fiction amongst us has been permitted to depict to his utmost power a Man . We must drape him and give him a certain conventional simper”. Thackeray’s novels are a protest against this convention. Reacting against the popular novel of his day, and particularly against its romanticizing of rouges.
C) The Humour of Pathos. Much has been made of the sneering cynisim of Thackeray’s humour, and a good deal of the criticism is true. It was his desire to reveal the truth, and satire is one of his most potent methods of revelation.
D) His style is very near to the ideal for a novelist.  It is effortless, and is therefore unobtrusive, detracting in no wise from the interest in the story. It is also flexible to an extraordinary degree.

3. The Brontes:-

Their Lives:-
Charlotte, Emily, and Anne were the daughters of an Irish clergyman, Patrick Bronte,  who held a living in Yorkshire. Financial difficulties compelled Charlotte to become a school teacher and then a governess. Along with Emily she visited Brussels 1842 and then returned home, where family cares kept her closely tied.

Heir works

• Charlotte Bronte. 

Charlotte ‘s first novel, The Profesor, failed to find a publisher and only appeared in 1857 after her death.Following the experiences of her own life in an uninspired manner,  the story lacks interest,  and the characters are not created with the passionate insight which distinguish her later portraits.
Jane Eyre
Shirley
Villette
The truth and intensity of Charlotte ‘s work are unquestioned; she can see and judge with the eye of a genius.  But these merits have their disadvantages.

• Emily Bronte :- Though she wrote less than Charlotte, Emily Bronte is in some ways the greatest of the three a sisters. Her one novel,  Wuthering Heights,  is unique in English literature. It breathes the very spirit of the wild, desolate moors. 

No Coward Soul is Mine
Cold in the earth, and the deep snow piled above thee.
• Their Importance in the history of the novel.
With the Brontes the forces which had transformed English poetry at the beginning of the century were first felt in the novel. They were the pioneer in fiction of that aspect of the romantic movement which concerned itself with the baring of the romantic movement which concerned itself with the baring of the human soul. The following extract is taken from Wuthering Heights. In the heroine ‘s declaration of the intensity of her passion for Heathcliff we see the heart of a woman laid bare with a startling frankness and depth of understanding.


4. George Eliot (1819 – 1880)
Her life:-
Mary Ann Evans,  who wrote under the pen-name of George Eliot,  was the daughter of a Warwickshire land-agent. Her mind was well above the ordinary in its bent for religious and philosophical speculation.
Her works:-
George Eliot only discovered her bent for fiction when will into the middle years of her life.
1. Blackwood’s Magazine
2. Adam Bede
3. The Mill on the Floss
4. Silas Marner: the Weaver of Raveloe
5. Middle March
6. A study of Provincial life
7. Daniel Deronda
Features of her Novels
A) Her Choice of Subject. George Eliot carries still further that preoccupation with the individual personality which we have seen to be the prime concern of the Bronties. For her the development of the human soul, or the study of its relationship to the great things beyond itself, is the all-important theme. Her preoccupation with this theme gives to her later work some of the features of the moral treatise.
B) Her characters are usually drawn from the lower classes of society, and her studies of the English countryman show great understanding and sight. An adept at the development of characters, she excels in the deep and minute analysis of the motives and reaction of ordinary folk.
C) The tone of the novels is one of moral earnestness, and at times in her later work of an austere grimness. But almost always it is lightened by her humour.
D) George Eliot ‘s style is lucid,  and, to being with, simple but later in reflective passages, it is often overweighted with abstractions. The Mill on the Floss, are full of fine descriptions of the English countryside, and her faculty for natural descriptions she never lost entirely.

5. George Meredith (1828 -  1909)
His life:-
The known details of Meredith’s earlier life are still rather scanty,  and he himself gives us littleenlightenment. For some considerable time he was reader to a London publishing house; then as his own books slowly won their way he was enabled to give more time to their composition.
His Novels
1. The Ordeal of Richard Feverel.
2. Evan Harrington
3. Emilia in England
4. Sandra Belloni
5. Rhoda Fleming
6. The tragic Comedians
7. The amazing Marriage

Other Novelists
1. Benjamin Disraeli
2. Edward Bulwer Lytton
3. Charles Reade
4. Anthony Trollope
5. Wilkie Collins
6. Charles Kingsley
7. Walter Besant
8. George Borrow
9. Nathaniel Hawthorne
10. Richard D. Blackmore
11. Robert Louis Stevenson
12. Francis Bret Harte
13. Mark Twain
14. Mrs Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell