Victorian Literature

Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837. Around that time, Carlyle, Dickens and Thackeray were publishing some of their earliest writings, Wordsworth was still putting out new poems, and Lockhart was bringing out his life of Scott who had died in 1832. Tennyson and Browning had been heard of in a minor way, and Elizabeth Barrett was about to make her reputation. Around the mid-point of the reign, the Brontes had been and gone, Thackeray was dead, and Dickens died about this time, but Trollope and George Eliot were in full flow. Tennyson was Poet Laureate, and Browning had just brought out his masterpiece. Arnold had virtually stopped writing poetry and moved on to criticism. At Victoria's death in 1901, the poets now most regarded were Hardy and Yeats. The Poet Laureate was Alfred Austin. There were no dominant novelists, but many different trends, with the short story beginning to assert itself. The era was tinged with what was termed fin-de-siècle decadence. The literary scene had changed greatly and was continuing to change.

As the middle class expanded and education was extended to all, so the readership grew. Books were expensive but there was an extensive readership for the magazines in which novels were serialised, and other forms of writing appeared. Circulating libraries also put books within reach of a wide audience.

Novels

Themes

Thackeray and the Brontes were the last major novelists who did not deal with social issues in some way. Dickens, George Eliot, Trollope, Elizabeth Gaskell, Hardy and even Disraeli, together with others, all tackled them in their own particular fashion.. Storylines were mainly domestic at the start of the reign, but never exclusively so, and as time passed there was a broader outlook.

Plotting and style

The practice of serialising novels in magazines, or sometimes of issuing them in part-works, had an effect on the author's control over the plot and characters. Trollope boasted (prematurely) that the public never saw the start of one of his works until he himself had seen the end of it, but he was an exception. Others rushed to meet deadlines, and they could not go back and change an incident or character trait which later proved inconvenient. Likewise there might be an inconsistency of style, or of viewpoint, with the author moving between the omniscient observer and other possible stances, or even starting off with a first person narrative and then cheerfully abandoning it. However, the effect was modified the readers also getting the story in instalments, and some inconsistencies could be ironed out in the book version, which was usually in three volumes. If the authors could deliver the goods in the form of villainy, pathos, determination, incident and colourful description, they could maintain their popularity.

Development of genre

Whereas the mainstream novelists mainly continued in the British tradition, in fantasy George MacDonald was influenced by E.T.A. Hoffmann, and William Morris by Norse/Germanic myth. In 1895 H.G. Wells published the first of his science fiction stories.

In detective stories, Wilkie Collins dominated the first part of the reign, and by the end Conan Doyle had launched Sherlock Holmes upon the scene.

Poetry

Themes

The male poets, unlike the novelists, paid little attention to social issues. Although they did deal with whatever they conceived to be the malaise of the age, there was little interest in Victorian squalor. That was mostly left to the women poets, such as L.E. Landon, Caroline Norton and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Victorian prudery had its effects on literature. In 1866 Swinburne's publisher decided to withdraw his Poems and Ballads because of the uproar over its supposed licentiousness, and he never again wrote anything so good. Later, Michael Field withdrew a poem from the notorious magazine The Yellow Book when they realised the sensuality of some of the other contributions. But there were also protests against hypocrisy, as in Augusta Webster's The Castaway.

Striving for the epic

At this time, anyone who wanted to be thought of as a major poet felt it necessary to write an epic, or at least a substantial narrative poem which would stand comparison with the Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost. Tennyson, Browning, Arnold and Hardy all made attempts in this direction. Tennyson had minor successes with The Princess, Maud, Enoch Arden and the Arthurian stories collected in Idylls of the King. Arnold's longest poem, Balder Dead probably convinced him that the form was not for him. Hardy worked for 30 years on The Dynasts, published in 1904, but it is not considered to be among his best work. Only Browning, having had a disaster with Sordello, achieved undoubted success with The Ring and the Book. The other great poem of the century, The Prelude, though not published till after Wordsworth's death in 1850, really belonged to the previous generation.

What was before the public

At the opening of the period, the best-selling poets were Felicia Hemans, who had just died, and John Keble. Felicia Hemans was in fact the best-selling poet of the century, a position achieved by her publishing a book of poems nearly every year for a quarter of a century and her large following in America.