The Victorian period shares the characteristics that mark other cultural periods. It lasts about fifty years, in its case from the accession of Victoria to the throne in 1840 to the performance in London in 1893 of Oscar Wilde’s “Salome”, so different in texture from the melodrama and sanctimonious morality of Pinero’s “The Second Mrs. Tanqueray”, which had appeared earlier in the year, and so illustrates another characteristic of periods, which is that periods come to abrupt ends and beginnings. (Queen Victoria herself lingered on until 1901.) A cultural period also has a set of themes that are unifying among the various arts of literature and painting and drama, which in the case of the Victorian means the fate of the individual in the complex world of the city and in the midst of an industrialized landscape, every person both ambitious to make their own way and also alienated from what seems emotionally unsatisfying about generally accepted customs and overly rigorous laws, as that is exemplified by both Oliver Twist and Jean Valjean. A cultural period is also international in scope in that all the nations of Europe and North America are part of it even if it is known in France as the era of Pre-Impressionism and Impressionism in honor of the central role of painting in French culture during those years. A cultural period is also dominated by certain cultural forms, and in the Victorian that means the novel and grand opera, both of which are sprawling affairs, employing plots and subplots wherein often outrageously individual characters play out their lives against the background of a richly imagined society. Think of “Great Expectations”, “The Count of Monte Cristo”, and “Rigoletto”.
And yet the Victorian is a period more difficult to understand than most because it contains within it two separate periods, the High Victorian, which succeeds the Romantic Period and lasts until the death of Dickens in 1870, and then begins that other period or “semi” period, the Late Victorian, which is succeeded by the Edwardian. While the entire Victorian Age is indeed devoted to the novel and to grand opera, each of the two “semi” periods also has its own themes and forms within the larger one, and so making it a single period is problematic. For example, the novel, which achieves its great scope as a realistic epic of the intersection between an individual and his or her society, does change its themes and even its form. The High Victorian novel is a grand, sweeping thing, filled with plots that last for decades, subplots and characters that may or may not be central to the main story, a vast inquiry into the workings of a society into which the stories of its main protagonists are fit.
The High Victorian novel is concerned with industrialism, class conflict, and the fate of the individual in the cosmopolitan city, while the Late Victorian novel, for its part, makes its themes the pathos of the poor; the way passion, whether sexual or otherwise, can ruin a person’s life; and the ongoing struggle between the idealistic and the practical, as is perhaps best exemplified by Huck Finn, whose experiences on the river prepare him to know that Tom Sawyer’s plan to free Jim are born out of fancy, which is imagining how a rescue should proceed, rather than out of the actual circumstances in which the would be rescuers find themselves. Moreover, the sprawling novels of George Eliot and Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins give way to the more dramatically concise novels of Robert Louis Stevenson who achieves his effects with powerful images of pirates appearing at the Benbow Tavern and of Jim Hawkins afloat on a cockle shell boat off Treasure Island The High Victorian novel prevailed from Thackery through Bulwer-Lytton, and the departure into the shorter, more exquisite novel of E. M. Forster is foretold by Robert Louis Stevenson. Joseph Conrad falls under the later dispensation in that his is always the straightforward story of a personal drama, of how a soul becomes ravaged, however much that is set within the scene of a ship that travels the waters of imperialism.
The High Victorian novel, for its part, had replaced Jane Austen, that Augustan living in the Romantic Age, who borrowed from Shakespeare her sense that the structure of her novels would be the drama of dialogue and that the purpose of her novels would be the endless unravelling of the emotions of her characters, something that still sustains movies that invoke Austen by asking what Darcy was really up to. The woman who rises above herself is there in “Pamela”, from the Eighteenth Century, and in “Mansfield Park” in the Romantic Age and in Wilkie Collins’ “Armadale” during the High Victorian, though Austen stands alone in enquiring into whether ambition is worth it and can be sufficiently enquired into on a small stage. The same epic ambitions of the Victorian novel are also to be found in the other European literature of the time: in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and in Stendahl and Dumas.
From beginning to end, what is generally described as the Victorian, as that includes both the High Victorian and the Late Victorian, there is a taste for the melodramatic rather than for the tragic, whether in the novel, in opera, or in poetry. The exaggeration of emotions to the point of making people who feel sorry for themselves seem heroic on that account is displayed in Tennyson elegies, in the novels of Dickens and Eliot, and even more so in the less able novelists such as Gaitskell and Kingsley, as well as in the operas of Verdi and Massenet. The various aesthetic forms also evoke a serious engagement in the psychology of their characters rather than simply portray the emotions of their protagonists, as the Romantics did, with a boldness appropriate to the adventurer and the soldier, so that even the young Werther is driven by his passion more than by his understanding of his passion.
The essay form changes during the overall Victorian period from what it had been in the Romantic Age, where it was a dexterous and highly aestheticized vehicle for the statement of odd viewpoints on the world related with humor, grace, and a good deal of terseness, as was masterfully displayed by William Hazlitt, and as would be reinvented in the European feuillon tradition at the end of the century. Instead, the Victorian essay does heavy duty service as a vehicle for musings about history and philosophy and the meaning of life without abandoning its situation as an essay in that this literary form, unlike the form of the treatise, so beloved by Hume and Locke, can meander among its topics, making every exercise in reasoning a personal journey about how you got there rather than about the certainty of the conclusions. That is the way Ruskin, Arnold and Carlyle construct their essays.
The pace of Victorian discursive writing is leisurely rather than terse. Sentences are elaborated and so is unlike the unadorned prose of the Twentieth Century or the balanced prose of the Augustan Age. The logic of the Victorian essay is also distinctive in that it becomes a bit convoluted so as to serve the idea that what is prudential is really moral. That allows the life of society to be seen from the point of view of the smug who can look down on the barbarians and the philistines who know not what they do. Newman, in his essays, makes faith plausible if you are already credulous, and so accept as an argument what is only an intimation; Arnold makes you believe that literature is another Bible rather than a substitute for it and one which operates on very different principles, ones that are aesthetic rather than revelatory.
All of the Victorian is concerned with the relation between the social classes, but the Late Victorian switches emphasis from capitalism to what is supposed one of its consequences: imperialism. Marx in 1866 publishes “Capital”, a detailed consideration of the dynamics of the economic system and includes in it a picture of the factory floor as an epitome and representation of the fact that capitalism is both an extremely productive system and an extremely exploitative one. By 1870, supposedly because of his despair over the Franco-Prussian War, Marx is concerned about the persistence of capitalism, and is now blaming the shortcomings of capitalism on its lack of flexibility rather than on its inventiveness. In short order, Marx had changed from being a High Victorian to being a Late Victorian. Moreover, Marx may have early on thought that India was an example of where British rule could be successful at modernizing the country, ridding it of its “rural idiocy”, but by the 1870’s, Marx no longer has confidence in that project. Rather, to the Late Victorian mind, and not just Marx, the East is where the Orientalism comes from that is infecting the homeland with its superstitions and mysterious travellers, as Wilkie Collins’ “The Moonstone” makes clear. This Orientalism is the opposite of Edward Said’s. The Orient is not made glamorous so as to provide a plaything for empire; rather, the Orient carries dangers with it and, as Kipling has it, the powers of the English have to be mustered so that they can absorb or deflect Oriental tendencies.
The most original subgenre introduced during the Late Victorian is science fiction, which is the portrayal of a utopia or dystopia set in the future that is based on technology. Jules Verne invents the modern submarine with “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” in 1870, though he had embarked on writing futuristic novels in the 1860’s, and publishes a minor but characteristic work in 1886, “Robur the Conqueror”, where automobiles drive recklessly down country roads scaring the horses, this theme made much more diabolical when Mark Twain picks it up in his “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”, from 1889, in which he presents a very disturbing conception of the future rather than an idyll of the past: Twain sees automobiles as the forerunners of tanks.
The setting of science fiction in the future is enough to radically distinguish science fiction from the more fantastic of the gothic novels, such as “Frankenstein”, that may also dabble in technology but, contrary to Susan Sontag, its tale of an ogre hunted to its death has more to do with legends of Eastern Europe in a time before the Enlightenment times than it does with the science introduced as the vehicle for producing the monster. Frankenstein’s monster is more a golem than a robot. The nature of science fiction lies in its science or pseudoscience: a claim that scientists will take over the world and make it a better place. And so it is not to be confused with fantasy or other fairy tales.
Helen Merrell Lynd, in her “England in the 1880’s” reads much into the Victorian prose authors who she takes to be preaching a new world of socialism. But Robert Morris and John Ruskin are Medievalists, which is a strand of the Gothic that reaches back to Coleridge, is strong in Tennyson, the poet of High Victorianism, and reaches its nadir with Butler’s “Erewhon”. Morris and Ruskin, after all, favor guilds that preserve the privileges of craftsmen while modern socialists favor unions as making more sense in an industrial society.These two essayists/artists are to be conjoined with others in the Medievalist revival, such as the Pre-Raphaelite artists, who also indulge the Gothic taste for the strange and macabre, women of an eerie rather than healthful beauty. Modern science, for its part, offers to do away with the ravages of smallpox and other diseases.
The pleasure of science fiction is that readers look forward to what can come out of technology rather than out of fantasies that are indebted to medieval and ancient literature, in that case the fantasies becoming merely forms of utopianism: places that existed as isolated Edens rather than as inevitable future events that would happen everywhere in a world united by its technology. Science fiction gives rise to a parliament of nations and a galactic empire. Bellamy’s “Looking Backward” is more noteworthy for imagining symphony concerts sent into people’s living rooms through telephone wires than because of the way he reorganizes class structure. Bellamy had invented radio.
Science fiction, whatever it's later accretions, such as political elitism and apocalyptic thinking, as that happens in H. G. Wells, is a boy’s source of fun in that it is steeped in gee-whiz gimmickry and how to do things that are plausible rather than things that are fantastical or romantic, which is what happens when Ray Bradbury sets his mark upon the genre. It is therefore just another extension of the idea that the 1880’s, the heyday of the Late Victorian, are an opening for the ways literature presumably directed at children can open the spigots of the imagination for reader and writer alike. The emotions are thinner than they are in the full blown Victorian novel; the plots have little interest except to move people along in their discovery of a new world. The science fiction novel is a travelogue into the way things will be.
To make this point clear, consider Morris’ “News From Nowhere”, which would seem to be science fiction because it is about a future England, and yet for all of the profound changes Morris imagines happening to society—basically, getting rid of all institutions based on property, which includes government and marriage, and relying on the goodwill of people towards one another—the novel does not have the bite that one would expect from being able to see the technological transformations that will have happened by then. There are none and so “News From Nowhere” is not science fiction but simply the simplification of life according to a guiding thesis.
The rise of a woman in social class, it has been pointed out, had been a major trope of the Eighteenth Century novel as well as in the Romantic and the High Victorian period, and would become so again with George Bernard Shaw. It is replaced in the Late Victorian by the trope of the fallen woman, as that is exemplified by Gustave Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary”, from 1856, and by Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina”, from 1878, and by Verdi’s “La Traviata”, from 1853. This trope would remain powerful through the aforementioned Pinero. (It is to be noted that “Madame Bovary” and “La Traviata” are from the High Victorian, even if the trope is at its most powerful in the hands of Tolstoy. Authors and composers may not check the calendar to find out what is their cultural period. They just do what comes naturally and it happens that most of the authors and composers in a cultural period have similar impulses as to what feels right in an aesthetic construction.)
“Madame Bovary” and “Anna Karenina” play to the melodramatic themes of the grand opera of the period and strike me as rather claustrophobic in comparison to the grandly conceived novels of the High Victorian. They are studies of women who are pathetic rather than tragic because they suffer the opprobrium of their societies rather than feel sanctified by their love and lust and also because they seem victims rather than agents in their own lives. The reader or audience looks at all of them from the outside, Anna in particular seen in how she is perceived by people who come to visit her when she is in exile rather than in terms of how she feels about her own condition. These stories, however much still revered, are entertainment rather than art in that the reader or audience pays attention to how successful the authors are at bringing about effects of pathos and mock tragedy rather than because the reader becomes engaged in the dilemmas of its protagonists.
It might be said that Dostoevsky and Henry James are exceptions to the rule that the Late Victorian novel is deliberately gimmicky, something that might also be said of Mark Twain who always finds a way to make his tales pleasing and of some socially redeeming value, as when “The Prince and the Pauper” is supposedly about the rich and the poor when it is about identity. Dostoevsky and Henry James are too deep for this era of children’s books. They are involved in the High Victorian form of the novel: characters are placed within the larger context of class and religion so as to illuminate those issues. The way to make sense of the two is that they bear very different relationships to the guiding theme of the era, its pragmatism. Dostoevsky is part of the reaction against reason and so, like Tolstoy, is looking for ways to turn back the clock so as to embrace, in his case, a traditional Russian spiritualism, and in Tolstoy’s case, a traditional sense of the relation of people to their land and nation, the railroad an interloper into that. Henry James, for his part, is the secular consciousness struggling with the problem of the soul and thereby discovering how deep psychology can go without abandoning, for another decade or two, its roots in the reasonableness of human thought. He shows how the psyche picks over in extreme detail the minutiae of its settings and generalizes feelings from that and onto that. James is doing what Cardinal Newman had done a decade before: make plausible the associations which the psyche constructed. Freud subverts that plan, as does William’s brother, William James, who turns religious experience from being traditional to being accessible to the modern mind. For William James, experience not doctrine is the point of religion, and that is a very Modernist view and so not the one championed by the Late Victorian German theologian and historian, Adolph Harnack, for whom doctrine was still at the center of religion.
That halfway house between doctrine and deep psychology is shared by the other authors of the High Victorian. They go back to the individual and find out how complicated are the connections made by and through human thought as that is a refinement and a control on human emotions. Henry James might have thought that Freud simplified things and Mark Twain might have felt the same way. Life is not about just the up and the down; it is about how a person stands out from his national or ethnic environment and even his passions so as to form his life through the power of his feelings and his mind. No mean feat for children who may or may not succeed in doing so or for adults who hope they have already done that.
As I say, not every author has to be fit into the characteristics of a period. Authors will write what they want to write and so will reflect their own personal and cultural predispositions. Lewis Carroll might have indulged in a children’s literature but he is not pragmatic; Alice is, instead, an idealist, as befits the creation of a mathematician. She is concerned with pointing out what is impossible, like a Cheshire Cat who smiles when he is invisible and a Queen of Hearts who is less a parody of Queen Victoria than someone who does not respect what is essential to any legal system. Similarly, Sherlock Holmes is an empiricist rather than a pragmatist. He is always on the lookout for evidence to prove a point, like dogs who fail to bark, rather than molding his own values to be representations of the way things are rather than to be representations of customary thinking. His freshness of thought applies only to evidence, not to good and evil, as is the case with Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson, two of the great figures of the Late Victorian.