English literature in the nineteenth century

The essays of the Cockneys, and those of De Quincey, constituted what the critics called the "prose form of English romanticism". At the same time along with the high flowering of romantic poetry and prose the older traditions of realism were never discontinued. With George Crabbe in poetry, with Fanny Burney, Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen in prose, realism steadfastly stood its ground. Crabbe's narrative poems, "the annals of the poor" as he justly called them, gave a memorable presentation of the degradation of country folk under the stress of want and dreary hard work.

With the lady-novelists mentioned above literature moved in more fashionable circles. Of these the art of Jane Austen is the most consummate and therefore representative. Through the very narrow social milieu (land-owners, gentry, country clergy) that constitutes the theme of her novels, Jane Austen succeeded in bringing home the essence of the social relationships of her time. With unfailing accuracy does she draw a small world possessed by a yearning for money and high social standing, and deprived of either, wish or capacity for using other criteria in their judgement over men and women but those of fortune and rank.

With a touch at once delicate and sure Austen introduces a vast variety of characters whose mentality is more or less distorted by false moral and social standards. Her irony and humour are omniscient and ever at the service of her keen critical insight, of her shrewd utterly unsentimental comprehension of the motives underlying the actions and feelings of a vain, selfish and mercenary society. It is the few persons who are comparatively unscathed by these shallow and ugly motives that Austen makes her heroines. Almost none of them are just born wise and virtuous. The most convincing of them are those who like Emma Woodhouse or Anne Elliott have to pass through a moral ordeal before they find that the only thing that really matters is the true worth of man and woman, his or her gift for disinterested affection, loyalty and generosity.

Jane Austen's ethics are high and strict but they are never obtruded upon the reader. Her methods are mostly indirect. The authorial voice is disguised by objective presentation of dialogue, inner monologue (reported speech), as well as of the characters' actions and reactions. The "inimitable Jane" is warmly admired and much studied in twentieth century England and America.

Although Austen stands aloof from the romantic trends of her own time and mocks some of their more obvious and salient characteristics, although she is a follower of 18th century realistic traditions, yet her artistic detachment and her dispassionate survey of her contemporaries could only have been born out of the same critical and humanitarian spirit and the same historicism that gave birth to the romantic movement.

A sort of reduced and imitative romanticism is to be detected in the work of Edward Bulwer Lytton. He modelled his early works on Byron's and Scott's and later on the realistic novels of the 'forties and 'fifties. Hardly ever original, Bulwer Lytton was a true and refined mirror of succeeding literary and philosophical fashions.

Towards the end of the 1820's the conclusion of the industrial revolution along with its natural implications — the rise of a powerful manufacturing and trading class and at the same time the radical agitation for political change — culminated in the Parliamentary reform of 1832. It was carried in the teeth of a stout opposition on the part of the Tory party. Its effect was a far better representation of the middle class in Parliament. The lower classes, however, were still kept out of Parliament by a high property qualification for members.

The political victory of the bourgeoisie brought no relief to the working class and eventually considerably weakened its condition. Newly gained political power enabled employers to introduce new methods of exploitation. Thus, with a view of enlarging the number of workers at mills and factories and reducing the number of the poor who obtained relief within their parishes and were under no immediate necessity to sell their labour to mill-owners new Poor Laws were passed by Parliament. According to these relief was granted to the poor only in special workhouses where they were subjected to harsh treatment, practically little better than in prison, and  were  made   to work for their food.

The disappointment of the working class in reform, and acute social distress led to the organised movement known under the name of Chartism. The oppressed classes demanded a further and more democratic reform of Parliament. They entertained the hope that adequately represented, they could radically improve their own condition. Chartist agitation, mass meetings, strikes and uprisings went on, intermittently, for more than ten years, from the later thirties all through the "hungry forties".

The movement subsided after an  improvement  in economic condition  and after the English bourgeoisie wisely decided to avoid revolution by conceding the most urgent demands of the Chartists.

Chartism had important literary results in the development of popular poetry. Not only did the Chartists revive the revolutionary poems of Byron and Shelley (whose Song to the Men of Englandbecame a Chartist marching-song) but within a short time a new poetry sprang up voicing the aspiration of those who had as yet not succeeded in making themselves heard. Besides a considerable amount of anonymous songs and poems, there were poets of distinction among the organised fighters for workers' rights. Of these Gerald Massey, Thomas Cooper, William James Linton and especiallyErnest Jones probably ranked highest. A militant spirit of resistance, sarcasm and irony, pathos and rhetorics, strong rhythms and sonorous rhymes go together to give the Chartist poetry a peculiar vigour. The Chartists also wrote a few good novels (Ernest Jones, Thomas Martin Wheeler) and published some literary criticism devoted to those they looked upon as the early prophets of revolution. The work of Chartist poets was deliberately neglected by bourgeois scholars; the Chartist periodicals (e. g., The Northern Star) wherein most of that work was published have long been out of print and have been properly studied only in this country.

The Chartists' passionate concern for the cause of the suffering English people inspired poets who were not in any direct way associated with Chartism. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's much anthologized Cry of Children, Thomas Hood's no less famous Song of the Shirt and The Bridge of Sighs plead for human kindness and altruism, for sympathy with the hardships of the poor. 

It was in the period of political strife, when social problems came to the fore and revealed their prosaic, material nature, that new trends were born in literature. Preoccupation with public life, a sense of the paramount importance of things social, of the necessity of looking into the way things are and to describe them faithfully so as to redress or at least palliate the evils of a cruel industrial system were the forces that stimulated the growth of realism. Romanticism now seemed too abstract, too aloof, too much relying upon symbolic or fantastic presentation of actuality. It had done its work and played its role; the time had come when the mysterious powers ruling the new era that the romantics had anticipated stood much more clearly revealed. A direct and straightforward consideration of everyday life became an imperative necessity. At first realistic prose took the shape of short essays, more objective, informative and descriptive than the romantic essay had been, and yet certainly bearing some affinities with it. Nor was this the only debt mid-nineteenth century realism owed to its romantic predecessors. Without their shattering social criticism (even if couched in somewhat abstract terms and imagery), without their repudiation of classicist regulations of literature, without their minute attention to the individual and particular, without their psychological discoveries and insight into the inner life of man, realism could not have come into being.

The greatest realist of England Charles Dickens certainly learned much from romantic writers. In his early essays the influence of the London essays of Charles Lamb and Leigh Hunt can easily be traced, though Dickens is more true to the typical detail, to social fact, to objective observation of the habits and customs of the poor inhabitants of Europe's richest capital.

In each of his earlier novels written in the thirties Dickens devoted his efforts to striking at some obvious social evil and helping to remove it. In the Pickwick Papers, e.g., he laughed to scorn the clumsy comedy of Parliamentary elections, of the English court of law and the iniquities of London's prisons (a subject he was later to take up on a much wider scale in Bleak House). In Oliver Twist he treated the burning issues of the day — the horrors of workhouses and of crime; in Nicholas Nickleby — the conditions of Yorkshire boarding schools, etc.

In these early novels it is plain that Dickens was yet quite hopeful about the future of his country and confidently looked forward to happier days. The wrongs he stigmatized are but episodes in his novels and do not become central in their plotting. The 'forties were a sort of transitional period in his career. Towards the end he emerged as a mature artist with such fine generalisations of the mental attitudes of the bourgeois as in Dombey and Son and in the partly autobiographical David Copperfield.

Dickens's greatest masterpieces, the sad and wise novels of the fifties, differed from his earlier ventures in scope and structure.

In Little Dorrit and in Bleak House the novelist's satire rises above the particular and incidental and is transformed into a sweeping indictment of the whole system, of the very foundations English society rests-upon. In Bleak House the English law is no longer an episode as in the Pickwick Papers but dominates the whole structure of the epic; so does the criticism of government in Little Dorritwhen compared with similar pieces of criticism in the earlier novels. Social satire does not exist apart from the plot (as, say, in Oliver Twist) but permeates the whole atmosphere of the novel, shapes the plot and the relationship between the characters, major and minor alike. A sense of tragic unity underlies the vast concept of these books. But by the end of the 'fifties Dickens's inspiration had very nearly exhausted itself. Despite some very fine pages of description and character-drawing his last novels lack the rich humour and fancy of his earlier works.

Dickens is not remarkable for circumstantial motivation of his heroes' actions. But he excels in the art of catching their more obvious social characteristics and giving them an infinite variety of individual shapes and forms that were joyously acclaimed as recognisable and memorable types. To the end of his days Dickens liked no literary compliments better than that or the other reader's admission he or she had known somebody who was the spit of one of the novelist's characters.

Through grotesque and comical exaggeration the fundamental realism of Dickens's viewpoint was everywhere apparent. The author's own attitude stands clearly, revealed. He hates every species of oppression and injustice, every vestige of fraudulent misrepresentation and hypocrisy, every sight of man's cruelty to man, and loves all who suffer and still do not lose heart and keep on doing their best by all around them. Dickens's love of humanity and his penetrative portrayal of what is best and noblest about it, no less than of its foibles, his persistent championship of the inherent goodness of common man ever opposed to the stiffness and class egoism of the higher classes make him a central figure in the democratic literature of England.

His stature can be properly appreciated when his work is compared to that of such minor writers as Charles Kingsley, the author of popular novels on the condition and dramatic struggle of the Chartist workers (Yeast, Alton Locke). Dickens's works contain a wider view of man and his problems, a broader and more humane outlook and the art of hitting off types that alternately set all England laughing and sobbing. He also compares well with his friend Wilkie Collins, the author of famous semi-detective, semi-social novels such as The Woman in White, No Name, The Moonstone, etc. Though Dickens, too, introduced elements of the detective story into his later work he always submitted the suspense and thrill of the plot to the message of his novel. With Collins specific detective interest often came first.

Dickens's closest follower and admirer was Elizabeth Gaskell. In his turn he was delighted with her books and published them in the literary magazines that he directed. Mary Barton, a simple and artless story of the misery and stout resistance of English Chartist workers appealed to Dickens both for its strict veracity and for its sentimental and idealistic sermon of love as the only remedy in a society endangered by the cancer of economic egoism and cynical indifference. Quite different in style and treatment is the gay comedy of provincial life in the country-town of Cranford. Gaskell's humour is delicate, sensitive, and gently ridicules the petty snobbery and prejudices of superannuated middle-class ladies. Her latest books deal with serious problems of domestic life and are fine studies of the mentality of women. Mrs. Gaskell is also the author of a subtle biography of three lady-writers of her own time, the sisters Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Bronte, all of whom died of consumption when still young. Anne was the least remarkable of the three; Charlotte won the greatest recognition, but it was Emily whose talent both for poetry and prose was the most powerful and original. Her only novelWuthering Heights was published posthumously and is an extraordinary blend of Byronic romantic individualism and realistic motivation. The tragedy of two lovers torn asunder by difference in pecuniary and social standing and complicated by ambition and vanity is drawn against a perfectly real world of sordid poverty and greed. The withering influence of trampled love distorts the characters both of hero and heroine, turning the one into a demonic sadist and the other into a capricious spoiled woman. The drama of love and death gains in intensity by being rendered through the eyes of a casual observer and a minor character, — an old servant, only indirectly participating in the events she narrates. The bleak colouring of the story is heightened by the natural background — vast moors, wind-blown hills and stone-grey skies. A note of mysticism also rings in the novel, indicative of Emily Bronte's religious feeling and her interest in the irrational aspects of life.

Emily died at the age of thirty, and Charlotte survived her but for a few years. Her art had more obvious ties with ordinary life and easier reached the audience — and a wider one, at that. The most popular by far was Jane Eyre, the story of a poor governess who by sheer force of personality won a decisive victory in the fierce battle she had to fight for love and happiness. The dark Byronic nature of Jane's "demon lover", the gruesome mystery of his house, the final catastrophe are all depicted in the stark melodramatic tones peculiar to the late 18th century Gothic novel. But borrowed romantic and preromantic motifs are developed along with entirely original realistic delineation of the radical injustice of a life dominated by all that is not essential, as money and high connections, and leaving out and crushing all that is fundamental — true moral worth, loyalty and intellect.

Bronte's horror-struck realisation of the inhumanity of the relationship between employers and employed appears to the greatest advantage in Shirley where scenes introducing starving workers who break the machinery that threatens to supplant their labour mingle with a fine social and psychological analysis of the plight of /Women in a men-ruled world. In all of Charlotte Bronte's novels there is a note of  true, unconventional passion (and a penetrative analysis of that passion) that shocked the hypocritical morality of the Victorian bourgeoisie ("Victorian" was a much used — and abused — term denoting the self-satisfied priggish and smug mentality of the upper and middle classes during the greater part of the reign of Queen Victoria — 1837—1901).

Charlotte Bronte was in some ways a disciple of Dickens's greatest rival, William Makepeace Thackeray. He set out courageously to teach the English a harsh lesson in self-appraisal. He let them see themselves with severely critical eyes, and not through the rose-coloured glasses of complacency. A parallel has often been drawn between Dickens and Thackeray, sometimes to the advantage of the one, sometimes of the other. They are, indeed, very different in outlook and artistic method, in education and background.

The essential thing they have in common, however, is their fundamental honesty in carrying out what they conceive to be their moral obligation towards their fellow-men. They both saw themselves as in duty bound to tell their readers the unpalatable truth about the social wrongs wringing the body of society, about its narrow and shallow standards, about the hypocritical greed and ruthlessness of the higher classes. Thackeray mostly used the weapon of sharp irony; in describing the vices of the very high he hardly ever had recourse to Dickens's grotesque exaggeration, to his humourous presentation of variously coloured and comically individualised figures. Thackeray was an excellent caricaturist (he illustrated some of his own works), but his caricatures are less particularised and more generalised than Dickens's. The latter was obviously quite judicious in rejecting Thackeray's offer to supply pictures to the Pickwick Papers — their ways were too different. This was distinctly felt by both writers. Thackeray thought that Dickens was too much given to melodrama and pathos, that his characters were too often angels or devils, with very few links between them. Thackeray's literary apprenticeship was as long and painstaking as Dickens's had been short and brilliant. Like Dickens, he went to school to eighteenth century masters, especially Fielding (Dickens's favourite was Smollett), but unlike Dickens, he was also influenced by European writers. Balzac's Human Comedy, in particular, taught him the device of introducing the same characters in different novels and thus giving them time for growth and development.

Of Thackeray's earlier work the most important was, probably, a collection of sketches entitled The Book of Snobs. He derived the word "snob" from students* slang and it is through him that it acquired first a national and then an international significance. Thackeray's definition of it was that "a snob is one who meanly looks up to things mean". A snob fawns upon his social superiors and is contemptuously haughty to inferiors. A snob, finally, is one who has no criteria to judge of others but the degree of their wealth and rank. Having classified the snobs of England according to their profession and social standing, having made it clear that at court, church, shops, universities and in the walks of art snobs were ever essentially the same, Thackeray was ready to write his greatest workVanity Fair. The title was an allusion, quite familiar in those days, to the city of London which had been described as Vanity Fair in the famous 17th century religious allegory of John Bunyan (The Pilgrim's Progress, 1678). By referring thus to the heart of England Thackeray also played on the inevitable association with the book of the Bible called Ecclesiastes whose memorable and often reiterated words are: All is vanity, sayeth the Preacher.

The novel follows the fates of two middle-class girls. One of them, Amelia Sedley, the daughter of a wealthy merchant, goes down in the world as her father is ruined in the course of the French wars. By the end of the book she is restored to respectability by a second marriage and a timely legacy. The other, Rebecca or Becky Sharp, is a clever adventuress, a genteel 19th century Moll Flanders. The ups and downs of her career and final defeat are handled with ironical scorn, lashing not so much at Becky's tireless ruses and stratagems as at the society that encourages her and makes it possible for her to win many victories before she has to accept her downfall. With Thackeray neither of the two heroines is painted in black and white. He has a sort of amused sympathy with the vicissitudes of Becky's life and much pity and little respect for Amelia's sentimental silliness.

His main subject is the false heartless ways and the resourceful hypocrisy of society, the silent misery of simple souls. Thackeray satirises the victims of inequality and snobbishness. The story of a gifted young man very nearly corrupted by the world of fashion and saved at the eleventh hour from disgrace and crime is told in The History of Pendennis. Its sequel The Newcomes, a chronicle of a few generations of a rich upper middle-class family, is narrated by a sadder and wiser Pendennis, now firm on the path of virtue, authorship and domestic felicity. Thackeray's historical novels, particularlyHenry Esmond where the action is laid at the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century, are realistic books that do not treat history as the story of kings, generals and courtiers but as the history of a whole people, with an eye to culture, literature, morality and general condition of the nation. Wars are not described as glamorous, heroic and worthy of enthusiastic admiration. They are drawn in all the ugliness of hatred, of atrocities inflicted in cold blood and resulting in unheard-of suffering for thousands upon thousands of innocent people. Thackeray distinctly says he cares nothing for big wigs, but only for the small fry. A historical novel, he maintained, should content itself with finding out how great events affect ordinary people (in Vanity Fair, too, he had described the battle of Waterloo only in so far as it wrecked the life of his heroine).

The staunch realism of Dickens and Thackeray, of Gaskell and the Bronte-sisters did a great deal to explain their times and to explode the myth of Victorian prosperity that bourgeois historians like Т.В. Macaulay had done their best to perpetuate.

By the 'fifties and 'sixties the worst period in the evolution of classical capitalism in England was over. This is not to say, however, that progress was as universal as official opinion had it. The condition of the working-men was still precarious, a hand-to-mouth existence being the lot of the majority, with only the minority of qualified workers finding themselves comparatively well off. Two moreparliamentary reforms were needed before the labouring classes were at all represented in the House of Commons. English industry and trade and English finance were the most powerful in the world and the bourgeoisie was cautious enough to see to it that the economic status of those who made them rich should not sink to the starvation wages of the 1840's. But the disproportion between the situation of the classes was more glaring than ever. It was in the fifties that Dickens wrote the books that were most seriously critical of the whole order of things: it was in the fifties that scientists and scholars began to question religious dogmas and ready-made ethical formulae. The rapid development of natural sciences (geology, biology, embryology, psychology), Darwin's epoch-making Origin of Speciesundermined the current beliefs and paved the ground to scepticism and non-conformism. The advanced men of the '60's and 70's called themselves free-thinkers. They rebelled against the narrowbourgeois ideology, they mocked the new spirit of militant national pride growing along with England's colonial expansion, they were full of concern for a new and efficient rationalisation of public and private life.

In philosophy they supported rather mechanistic materialistic ideas; they drew crude parallels between biological and social processes; they preached a new morality whose foundation no longer was religious but utilitarian, i. e. the concept of "the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people". (This concept was, however, given an entirely bourgeois interpretation, since the "greatest happiness" implied uninterrupted development of capitalist production.) The most important ideologist of this new trend was Herbert Spencer. He endeavoured to create an all-embracing system of sociology, philosophy and psychology and to take care that it should rest only on positive knowledge and facts and disregard all abstract speculation (Positivism is the name frequently given to that school of thought — a term borrowed from the French philosophy of Auguste Comte who exercised a great influence on his later English colleagues).