The Novel

The novel gives us some of the best writing produced during the Victorian Age. Early in the Victorian Age there was a vogue for the so called social-problem novel, which dealt more or less directly with the turmoil of the 1830s and 40s, and the 'Manchester' novels by Mrs Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-65), Charlotte Bront 's friend and biographer, are remarkable for their harsh portrait of industrial life. In a different fashion Benjamin Disraeli (1804-81), later to be prime minister, produced the Young England trilogy, including the celebrated image of two Britains: the rich and the poor. However, these early social-problem novels tend to be a little didactic in their overall effect and it was only with the advent of Dickens that a truly satisfying blend of social criticism, humour and compassion appeared.

The Bront sisters (Charlotte, Emily and Anne) are a remarkable phenomenon. Isolated from the literary life of the capital, brought up in a wild region of Yorkshire, they evolved a uniquely expressive blend of the Gothic and psychological insight in their novels. Their passionate sincerity is a rare quality in the Victorian Age.

Charles Dickens (1812-1870) stands out for his sheer energy and the comic breadth of his creations, as well as for his social conscience, and humanity, and, although some of his novels are a little patchy, his achievement remains a towering one. Critics have had extreme difficulty in putting their finger on the secret of his greatness, since his work seems to defy any rational analysis, but the continuing popularity of his novels among people from all walks of life testifies to his universal appeal, and assures him a place among the great writers of English and even world literature. George Eliot (1819-80), whose real name was Mary Ann Evans, followed on in the great tradition of women novelists (Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, the Bront sisters). Her outstanding feature was her skill in close observation; she lovingly reproduces rustic mannerisms and displays a deep insight into life in the country or in small-town England, portraying its values and social system.

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) had a long career which embraced both poetry (examined in the chapter on the twentieth century) and the novel. His masterful evocation of life in the rural South and West of England and his rather fatalistic point of view, outside the mainstream of Victorian intellectual life, combine to produce some of the most memorable novels of the age.

Other important novelists were William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-63), whose masterpiece is Vanity Fair, (1848) the tale of Becky Sharp and her adventures, a brilliant satire on fashionable society, and Anthony Trollope (1815-82), whose comic sequence of novels (known as the Barsetshire novels) are remarkable for their keen observation and humour. Minor figures include George Meredith (1828-1909) (The Egoist); and Wilkie Collins (1824-89) (who perfected the mystery story in his The Moonstone and The Woman in White).

One of the overall trends in the period was the development, under the influence of the nineteenth-century French and Russian novels, of the English novel from an episodic structure, seemingly without a plan, to a tauter construction, what Henry James called "an organized, moulded, balanced composition, gratifying the reader with a sense of design and construction". This tendency may be seen clearly in Dickens, who evolved from the rather loose collections of episodes that characterize Sketches by Boz or The Pickwick Papers to the more concentrated use of his comic and narrative gifts in the later novels, such as Hard Times, and Bleak House.