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Tema 50:
The Victorian Novel 

Madhatter Wylder 
30/06/2009 
 

Iván Matellanes’ notes

 Topic 50:
The Victorian Novel.
2

Table of contents

1. Tiime Line: ____________

____________________ ___ 3 
______________________________
2. An
n age of exppansion ___
____________________ ___ 4 
______________________________
2.11. The early period (18330-48): A tim
me of troublles. _____________________________
____ 4 
2.22. The Mid-p
period (18488-70): Econoomic prospeerity & religgious controoversy. ____
____ 5 
2.33. The Late period (1870-1901): Deecay of Victo
orian Valuess. ___________________
____ 8 
3. Th
he Victorian
n Novel. ___
____________________ ___ 9 
______________________________
3.11. Charles Dickens
D (18112-60): Oliveer Twist ___
________________________________
___ 12 
3.22. William M.M Thackeraay (1811-63))__________ ________________________________ ___ 14 
3.2.1. Thackeeray’s Vanity Fair____________________ ____ 16 
____________________________________
3.33. The Brontës _____________________________ ________________________________ ___ 18 
3.3.1. Charlotte Brontë & Jane
J Eyre. _______________ ____ 19 
____________________________________
3.3.2. Emily Brontë
B & Wutthering Heighhts. _________ ____ 22 
____________________________________
3.44. George Elliot (1819-18880). _________________ ________________________________ ___ 24 
3.4.1. Middleemarch. _____________________________ ____ 26 
____________________________________
3.55. Thomas Hardy.
H __________________________
________________________________
___ 29 
Bibliiography. ____________
____________________ __ 34 
______________________________
Summary _______________
____________________ __ 35 
______________________________

IIván Matellanes’ Notes

 Topic 50:
The Victorian Novel.
3

1. Time
T Lin
ne:
- 183
30-48: THE AGE
G OF TROUBLE ES.
- 183
32: The REFO ORM BILL: Ex xtended the e right to voote to all ma
ales with £10
0+ annual re
ents
- 183
34: POOR LAW W BILL: Crea ation of Workkhouses.
EARLY PERIOD

- 183
37: Accessionn of QUEEN VICTORIA.
Charles Dicken’s
D Pickkwick Paperss & Oliver Tw
wist.
44: Thackera
- 184 ay’s The Lucck of Barry Lyndon
L .
47: K. Marx & F. Engels Communist
- 184 C M
Manifesto .
Emily Brrontë's Wuth thering Heigh
hts.
Publicatio
on of Charloote Brontë’s s Jane Eyre.
48: Thackera
- 184 ay's Vanity Fair
F

- 1848-70: THE TIME OF PROSPEERITY.

51: Great Ex
- 185 xhibition in Hyde Park. Main
M building
g: The crysttal Palace.
MID PERIOD

- 185
54-56: War against Russia a in Crimea.
59: Charles Darwin's On
- 185 O the Origiin of Specie es
Meredithh’s The Orde eal of Richard
rd Feverel
- 186
61-5: United States Civil War
W
67: 2nd REFORM BILL: exttended the riight to vote to
- 186 t sections of the work king classe
es.

- 70-1901: DECCAY OF VICTORRIAN VALUES.

187
- 71: Emergencce of Bisma
187 arck’s Germany after the defeat of France.
F
- 72: George Elliot’s Middle
187 lemarch
LATE PERIOD

- 187
73-4: Severe economic de epression: increase of ratte of emigrattion.
- 188
80s: Westwa ard expansion of railroa ads in the US
SA open up a vast grain-rich lands.
st
- 188
86: 1 Irish HOME RULE of o Gladstone.
- 87: 50th Jubile
188 ee of Queen Victoria.
- 91: Hardy’s Tess
189 T of the D'Urbervilles
D
- 97: 60th Jubile
189 ee of Queen Victoria.

IIván Matellanes’ Notes

 Topic 50:
The Victorian Novel.
4

2. An age of expansion
In the 18th C, the central city of western civilization had been Paris. By
the 2nd half of the 19th C this center of influence has shifted to London, a
city that expanded from about 2,000,000 inhabitants when Victoria came
to the throne to 6,500,000 at the time of her death. This rapid growth of
London is one of the many indications of the most important development of
the age: The shift from a way of life based on the OWNERSHIP OF LAND to
a modern urban economy based on TRADE & MANUFACTURING.
Because England was the 1st country to become industrialized, its
transformation was an especially painful one: It experienced a number of
social and economic problems consequent to the rapid & unregulated
industrialization. This early start enabled England to capture markets all over
the globe. Cotton & other manufactured products were exported in English
ships, a merchant fleet whose size was without parallel in other countries. The
profits gained from trade led also to extensive capital investments in all
continents. England gained particular profit form the development of its own
colonies, which, by the 1890s, compromised more than a ¼ of all the territory
on the surface of the earth.

2.1. The early period (1830-48): A time of troubles.

In 1830, two decisive events took place in England: The first
locomotive-operated public line in the world opened (btw Liverpool &
Manchester) and the REFORM PARLIAMENT opened. Two years later, the
REFORM BILL of 1832 was passed in the response to the demands of the
middle classes, who were gradually taking control of England’s economy and
who were also committed to the technological and industrial change.
More precisely, the REFORM BILL of 1832 extended the right to vote
to all males owning property worth £10 or more in annual rent. This bill
included the lower middle classes, not the working classes, who did not obtain
the right to vote until the 2nd REFORM BILL of 1867. Even more important than
the extension of the franchise was the virtual abolition in 1832 of an archaic
electoral system whereby some of the new industrial cities were unrepresented

Iván Matellanes’ Notes

 Topic 50:
The Victorian Novel.
5

in Parliament (Manchester …) while “rotten boroughs1” elected the nominees of

the local squire. Because it broke up the monopoly of power that the
conservative landowners had so long enjoyed2, the REFORM BILL represents
the beginning of a new age. Yet this celebrated piece of legislation could
hardly be expected to solve all the economic, social and political problems that
had been building up while England was developing into a modern democratic
and industrialized state. The changeover was in fact a painful one and this early
period came to be called the TIME OF TROUBLES. In the early 1840s a severe
depression, with widespread unemployment, led to rioting. Even without the
provocation of unemployment, conditions in the new industrial and coal-mining
area were terrible enough to create fears of revolution. Workers and their
families in the slums (=barrios bajos) of such cities as Manchester lived in horribly
crowded, unsanitary housing, and the conditions under which women and
children toiled (=trabajar duramente) in mines and factories were unimaginably
brutal. The owners of mines and factories regarded themselves as innocent of
blame for such conditions, for they were linked to an economic theory of
laisse-faire, which assumed that unregulated working conditions would
ultimately benefit everyone.

2.2. The Mid-period (1848-70): Economic prosperity & religious

controversy.
This second phase of the Victorian period had many problems too, but it
was a time of prosperity. On the whole its institutions worked well. Even the
consuming war against Russia in the Crimea (1854-56) did not seriously affect
the growing sense of satisfaction that the challenging difficulties of the 1840s
had been solved or would eventually been solved by the English wisdom and
energy. The monarchy was providing its worth in a modern setting. QUEEN
VICTORIA and her husband, PRINCE ALBERT, were themselves models of
middle class domesticity and devotion to duty. The aristocracy was
discovering that Free Trade was enriching rather than impoverishing their
estates; agriculture flourished together with trade and industry. Through a

1
Communities that had become depopulated.
2
The Tory party had been in office almost continuously from 1783 – 1830.

Iván Matellanes’ Notes

 Topic 50:
The Victorian Novel.
6

series of FACTORY ACTS in Parliament, which restricted child labor and limited
hours of employment, the condition of the working classes was also being
gradually improved. When we speak of Victorian optimism, we are usually
referring to this Mid-Victorian age.
In 1851, Prince Albert opened the GREAT EXHIBITION
in Hyde Park, where a gigantic glasshouse, THE CRYSTAL

PALACE, had been erected to display the exhibits of modern

industry and science. The CRYSTAL PALACE was one of the
first buildings constructed according to modern
architectural principles in which materials such as glass
and iron are employed for purely functional ends3.
The building itself, as well as the exhibition, symbolized
the triumphal achievements of Victorian technology.
The critical sense of many of the great Victorians—at least as far as
opinions were concerned—inevitably involved questions of religion as much
as of society or politics, and Victorian doubt about inherited biblical religion was
as much an acknowledged theme of the period as Victorian belief. Discoveries
in geology and biology continued to challenge all accepted views of
religious chronology handed down from the past. Perhaps the most
profound challenge to religion came with Charles Darwin's On the Origin of
Species, another of the great books of the remarkable year 1859. Yet the
challenge was neither unprecedented nor unique. A year later Essays and
Reviews was published; a lively appraisal of fundamental religious
questions by a number of liberal-minded religious thinkers, it provoked the
sharpest religious controversy of the century.
Behind such controversies, there were many signs of a confident belief
on all sides that the search itself, if freely and honestly chased, would do
nothing to dissolve shared ideals of behavior. Emphasis on conduct
was, of course, related to religion. The English religious spectrum was of
many colors. The Church of England was flanked on one side by Rome and on

3
Much late Victorian furniture, on the other hand, with its fantastic and irrelevant
ornamentation, was constructed according to the opposite principle.

Iván Matellanes’ Notes

 Topic 50:
The Victorian Novel.
7

the other by religious dissent. Both were active forces to be considered. The
Roman Catholic church was growing in importance not only in the Irish
sections of the industrial cities but also among university students and teachers.
Sometimes the local battle between Church of England and Dissent was
bitterly contested, with Nonconformists opposing church rates (taxes),
challenging closed foundations, and preaching total abstinence and educational
reform. A whole network of local voluntary bodies, led either by Anglicans or
Dissenters, usually in rivalry, came into existence, representing a tribute to the
energies of the age and to its fear of state intervention.
The Church of England itself was a divided family, with different
groups contending for positions of influence. The HIGH CHURCH MOVEMENT

(which emphasized the “Catholic” side of Anglicanism) was given a distinctive

character, first by the Oxford Movement, or Tractarianism, which had grown up
in the 1830s as a reaction against the new liberal theology, and then by
the often provocative and always controversial ritualistic agitation of the 1850s
and '60s. THE EVANGELICALS, in many ways the most influential as well as the
most distinctively English religious group, were suspicious both of ritual
and of appeals to any authority other than that of the Bible. Their concern with
individual conduct was a force making for social conformity during the middle
years of the century rather than for that depth of individual religious experience
that the first advocates of “vital religion” had preached in the 18th century.
Beyond the influence of both church and chapel there were thousands
of people in mid-Victorian England who were ignorant of, or
indifferent toward, the message of Christianity, a fact demonstrated by
England's one religious census in 1851. Although movements like the
SALVATION ARMY, founded by William Booth in 1865, attempted to rally the
poor of the great cities, there were many signs of apathy or even hostility.
There was also a small but active secularist agitation; particularly in London
forces making for what came to be described as “secularism” (more goods,
more leisure, more travel) could undermine spiritual concerns. The great
religious controversies of mid-Victorian England were not so much to be settled
as shelved.

Iván Matellanes’ Notes

 Topic 50:
The Victorian Novel.
8

2.3. The Late period (1870-1901): Decay of Victorian Values.

The third phase of the Victorian age is more difficult to categorize. At
first glance, its point of view seems merely an extension of Mid-Victorianism,
4
whose golden flame remained through the Jubilee years of 1887 & 1897 down
to 1914. For many Victorians, this final phase of the century was a time of
serenity and security. It was the age of house parties and long weekends
in the country. There were anomalies in the seemingly smooth-working
institutions of Mid-Victorian England, and after 1870 flaws became evident.
Some of the flaws developed out of issues of long standing such as
relation with the Irish and, a relative issue, the status of Roman Catholics in
England reappeared. The “Irish Question”, as it was called, became especially
divisive in the 1880s, when HOME RULE for Ireland became a topic of warm
debate – a proposed reform that was unsuccessfully promoted by PM W.
Gladstone. Furthermore, outside England there were other developments that
challenged Victorian stability & security. The sudden emergence of Bismark’s
Germany after the defeat of France in 1871 was progressively to confront
England with powerful threats to its naval and military position and also to its
exclusive supremacy in trade and industry. The recovery of the United
States after the Civil War likewise provided new and serious competition not
only in industry but also in agriculture. As the westward expansion of
railroads in the United States open up the vast grain-rich prairies, the English
farmer had to confront lower grain prices and a dramatically different scale on
productivity that England could not match. In 1873-4 such severe economic
depression occurred that the rate of emigration rose to an alarming degree.
Another threat to the domestic balance of power was the growth of labor as
a political and economic force. In 1867, Disraeli passed the 2ND REFORM
BILL which extended the right to vote to sections of the working classes, and
this, altogether with the development of Trade Unions, make labor a political
force to be considered. The LABOR PARTY represented a wide variety of shades
of socialism. Some labor leaders were followers of the Tory-socialism which
labeled the state non-interference (Laise-faire) as irresponsible and immoral.

4
Years celebrating the 50th and 60th anniversaries of the Queen’s accession.

Iván Matellanes’ Notes

 Topic 50:
The Victorian Novel.
9

Other labor leaders had been deeply influenced by the revolutionary theories of
K. Marx & F. Engels in their Communist Manifesto (1847).

3. The Victorian Novel.

It will be obvious that any estimate of Victorian literature has to take into
account the outstanding achievements of the Victorian novelists. From the time
of CHARLES DICKENS (1812-1890), early in the period (his first novel, Pickwick
Papers, was published in the same year as Victoria became queen), to the final
decade when the late novels of THOMAS HARDY (1840-1928) such as Tess of
the D'Urbervilles (1891) appeared, a long time of novelists continued to turn
out monumental masterpieces that delighted their contemporaries and that
continue to delight readers today.
After Dicken's epoch-making early novels had appeared on the scene in
the 1830s, each subsequent decade featured the emergence of new novelists of
stature such as CHARLOTTE BRÖNTE (1816-1855) and EMILY BRÖNTE (1818-
1848) in the 1840s, and WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY (1811-1863) whose
prominence in the 1850s was a challenge to Dicken's continued preeminence
and popularity. In the 1860s, ANTHONY TROLLOPE (1815-1882) established
himself as a portraist of mind-Victorian society, and in the 1870s, GEORGE ELIOT
(1819-1880) published what is generally regarded as her finest novel,
Middlemarch (1872), although she had already established her reputation
earlier with Adam Bede (1859) and The Mill on the Floss (1860). In the 1880s,
GEORGE MEREDITH (1828-1909) -a less well known novelist today- finally began
to receive adequate attention from the critics and public for novels he had
published earlier such as The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859).
Often these novelists confront the same issues and employ similar
styles as their contemporaries among the poets and essayists. One significant
difference, however, is that the novelists for the most part do not share the
preoccupation of the Victorian poets and essayists with humanity's
relationship to God. Like their greatest predecessors -Fielding, Richardson
and Austen- most of the Victorian novelists were primarily concerned with
people in society and with such aspects as manners, morals and money.
Typically these stories center on the struggles of a protagonist, male or

Iván Matellanes’ Notes

 Topic 50:
The Victorian Novel.
10

female, to find himself in relation to other men or women, in love or

marriage, with family or neighbors, or with associates in his or her working
career. Occasionally such a search may take on quasi-religious, as in the later
novels of Thomas Hardy or in Emily Brönte's Wuthering Heights (1847), and
more indirectly, in George Eliot's novels, with their persistent concern with the
role of free will and fate in the lives of their characters. On the whole, however,
the major Victorian novelists were less occupied with people's relation
to God than with their relation to other people.
And for the most part, the other people were the reader's
contemporaries. The historical novel, as established by Sir Walter Scott,
remained popular throughout the post-Romantic period, but it was a form
especially congenial to the lesser novelists, such as BULWER-LYTTON (The Last
Days of Pompeii, 1834) or CHARLES READE (The Cloister and the Hearth, 1861).
While the major novelists occasionally tried their hand at historical fiction, their
preference was for the contemporary or the recent past. Whether the story was
set in the rural landscapes of Eliot's Warwickshire and Hardy's Wessex,
Trollope's cathedral towns, or Dicken's fogbound London, readers expected a
representation of daily nineteenth-century life that would be recognizably
familiar to them.
To satisfy such expectations they were provided with a rich fare.
DICKENS was praised for having described like a special correspondent for
posterity. His contemporaries and successors among the novelists were also
skillful reporters, and most of them were more scrupulously concerned
with detailed realism than he had been. Disputes about the degree of
Dicken's realism have persisted among critical readers from his day to ours, but
what is now generally recognized is that he was much more than a brilliant
reporter, and that are very different from straightforward realism. "Every writer
of fiction", he said, "although he may not adopt the dramatic form, writes, in
effect, for the stage." The attitude to this aspect of his writings by other
novelists is of crucial importance in understanding how the Victorian novel
developed. Among Dicken's rivals and successors there was a common
agreement that the stagey aspect of his novels was his most glaring fault, and

Iván Matellanes’ Notes

 Topic 50:
The Victorian Novel.
11

each of the novelists in turn set out to correct that fault by an example of what
he or she believed was a more realistic representation of life. THACKERAY's
masterpeace Vanity Fair (1848) has to a modern reader many mannerisms of
its own but is much less obviously mannered than a characteristic Dicken's
novel. In GEORGE ELIOT this reaction against novelistic theatricalism took a
more influential turn: she set out to explore what the theatrical writer rarely
explores -the inner lives of her characters. Early in the 20th C, the young D.
H. Lawrence, beginning his career as a novelist, remarked to a friend: "You see,
it was realy George Eliot who started it all, and how wild they all were with her
for doing it. It was she who started putting all the action inside. Before, you
know, with Fielding and the others, it had been outside. Now I wonder which is
right)" Lawrence himself decided, as a practicing novelist, that Fielding and his
Victorian followers could be as right as George Eliot, but most early-twentieth-
century novelists preferred to follow Eliot's example and concentrate on the
inner lives of their characters, and critical readers, adapting their tastes to the
new mode, were disposed at that time to undervalue Victorian novels that had
portrayed people acting rather than people recollecting, or reflecting, or trying
to come to decision.
Serial publication, as later critics have come to recognize, did not
necessarily preclude artful storytelling, and it had advantages to offset the
possible disadvantages of fragmentation. Publication by installments challenged
the novelists to sustain the interest of their readers; in every single number
they had to entertain them or, to use the traditional critical term, to provide
delight. Like actors or public speakers, the Victorian novelists had a sense,
during the very process of writing their books, of how their audience was
responding to their performance. And it was an audience that offered a special
challenge because of its exceptional diversity; Victorian readers ranged from
the sophisticated and well-read lawyer to the semiliterate household servant.
The present-day division of the novel-reading public into highbrow, middlebrow,
and lowbrow existed only in embryonic form in the Victorian age and did not
become a significant controlling influence on the novelist until late in the
century.

Iván Matellanes’ Notes

 Topic 50:
The Victorian Novel.
12

3.1. Charles Dickens (1812-60): Oliver Twist

Few writers are lucky enough to have their first novels become
runaway bestsellers. Yet that is exactly what happened when 25-year-
old Charles Dickens published Oliver Twist in 1837.
Many readers already knew of young Dickens. As a journalist, he had
written, under the pen name Boz, exposing social conditions in England. He
had also written a bestselling collection of humorous stories called The
Pickwick Papers.
One reason why Oliver Twist was so popular was that Dickens
understood what his audience wanted to read and was willing to
write it. He gave them sentimental love scenes, a horrifying glimpse of
the criminal underworld, a virtuous hero in Oliver, and nasty villains in
BILL SIKES and FAGIN. And he mixed it all up in a complicated, puzzling
mystery story. Because Oliver Twist was published in monthly
instalments, DICKENS could leave his readers in agonizing suspense
from month to month. All across England, readers eagerly discussed what
had happened in the most recent instalment and argued over what they
thought would happen in the next one, just as Big Brother Shows are for
us today.
Dickens wanted to do more than just entertain. He challenged
his readers to consider things they would rather have ignored. He drew
a picture of London's poorest neighbourhoods that was shocking in its
realism. Victorian authors were not supposed to acknowledge the
existence of drunkards & prostitutes, but DICKENS did. They were not
supposed to use street language, even in dialogue, but DICKENS did.
In 1834, a few years before the publication of Oliver Twist,
Parliament had passed a POOR LAW intended to end some of the worst
abuses against the indigent. Yet the provision of the bill didn't go far in
providing aid for those who were suffering. DICKENS wanted to do something
about the poverty in England. Although his readers didn't know this,
poverty had personally touched Dickens. His family had been quite
comfortable when he was born in Portsmouth in 1812, but his parents weren't

Iván Matellanes’ Notes

 Topic 50:
The Victorian Novel.
13

very skilled at managing money. When he was about 12, his family was
confined to debtors' prison, in London. Only the money left by his
grandmother when she died paid them out. His knowledge of prison
gave Dickens a lifelong obsession with prisoners and inhumane
institutions. The hunger and loneliness that tortures Oliver Twist while he is a
ward of the parish were very real to Dickens during his own family crisis.
Young DICKENS was forced to work as an apprentice in a boot
blacking factory, for 6 awful months. Not only was the work exhausting,
the experience was humiliating. In Oliver Twist he included a brief
episode condemning the apprenticeship system, but it was not until later,
in David Copperfield, that he could face writing about the factory in detail.
While Oliver Twist is not as autobiographical as David
Copperfield, many other incidents in the novel reflect DICKENS'
experiences. He deeply regretted not having had more schooling and
suggests that in Oliver's eagerness to learn.
The criminal underworld of FAGIN, NANCY, and SIKES in Oliver
Twist was as well-known to Dickens as the workhouses5 and debtors'
prisons. As a reporter and journalist, he had seen the sordid side of urban life.
He had met criminals like SIKES and women like NANCY. He had little sympathy
for criminals like FAGIN, who abuse and corrupt others, yet he knew that there
were others- like NANCY and CHARLEY BATES- who were criminals only because of
their environment, and who might still be reformed. Later he became actively
involved with URANIA COTTAGE, a refuge for homeless women, including
prostitutes. URANIA COTTAGE was set up as an environment where these
women could feel at home and prepare themselves for a better life.
DICKENS' sympathy for NANCY is clear in OLIVER TWIST. Typically, he was
motivated to get involved, to try to change conditions for girls like her
before it was too late. The 1830s were a time of growing concern about
social issues and reform. As a popular writer, he could reach a vast middle-
class audience, shocking them into action by his dramatic storytelling.

5
Workhouses were common institutions in 19th C. They provided shelter for the unemployed
poor. But for many people, also Dickens, they seemed places of punishment rather than charity.

Iván Matellanes’ Notes

 Topic 50:
The Victorian Novel.
14

3.2. William M. Thackeray (1811-63)

It’s a little sad to examine the row of Thackeray’s works and to find that
of this long and one famous line only three, Vanity Fair, Esmond &
Pendennis remain in the general repertory of “the great variety of readers”.
Therefore, even when THACKERAY wrote many novels & essays along his
life, he is considered as an author of 2, may be 3 novels. I must also note
that fact that some of the great Victorians seem to run in pairs. Probably,
people are born Dickensians or Thackeryans, just in the same way that they are
born Platonists or Aristotelians, Liberals or conservatives. In the wide field of
action which their novels cover, in the generous proportions of their
construction and in the great variety of their personages, THACKERAY
bears a superficial resemblance to his contemporary DICKENS; and the two
novelists have become the object of a traditional contrast in which
DICKENS’s colossal power of fantastic creation and more direct appeal to
popular sentiment, as opposed to THACKERAY’s minute observation of
everyday peculiarities and more elusive humour, has gained the vote of
the majority.
Thackeray is regarded as one of the first British Realists. His style and
affinity for realism is compared to that of the French Realists: Flaubert &
Balzac. Thackeray remarks: "The art of novel is to convey as strongly as
possible the sentiment of reality" He wishes to present a semblance of reality in
all its variety. Thus, many of the characters & names of places are taken from
real life.
Thackeray’s realism gives him scope for satire. His is not a purposeless
verisimilitude. And behind the realist and satirist lurks a great moralist. Like
Alexander Pope, Thackeray wishes to reconcile and improve society not by
serious moralizing, but by light humor. He wishes to "leave everybody
dissatisfied and unhappy at the end of the story," so that his readers are
compelled to think and analyze themselves in the light of self- reflexivity.
Thackeray also satirizes the unreal Romantic and Gothic modes of
writing with similar intelligence. Vanity Fair elicited very strong reactions -
either readers loved it or hated it. There were no intermediate responses.

Iván Matellanes’ Notes

 Topic 50:
The Victorian Novel.
15

Charlotte Brönte was impressed while some of his contemporaries were not.
Some people considered him a great moralist, while others called him godless
because his moral vision is obscure in the novel.
The versatility of THACKERAY’s invention as novelist, essayist or
humorist makes him less easy to judge than more homogeneous writers. His
worst works cloud his best. William Makepeace Thackeray was born near
Calcutta, the son of a “collector”. Thackeray was another writer with a
homeless childhood, for his father died in 1815 and his mother soon remarried.
The small boy of six was sent to England and attended various schools. Finally,
he entered the in Trinity, Cambridge, which he soon left without achieving
anything special. After that he went to Paris and studied art there and in Rome.
At that time he met his wife-to-be, a daughter of a Colonel. Their relation end
up in a tragedy, because Mrs. Thackeray became insane 4 years later and
remain so until her death in 1894. Thereafter, he began to inhabit the
Bohemian world of letters, writing and drawing in various papers and
magazines and using many pseudonyms, such as Yellowplush, Major
Gahagan, Fitzboodle, Titmarsh, Michael Angelo Titmarsh and George
Savage Fitz-Boodle, who, as editor, began to supply the periodical Frasier
with the remarkable work The Luck of Barry Lyndon, an excellent, speedy,
satirical narrative until the final sadistic scenes and was a trial run for the great
historical novels, especially Vanity Fair. It was Thackeray’s most substantial
work of fiction before Vanity Fair and his first full-length work.
On the covers of Vanity Fair (1847-8) Thackeray used his own name.
His erratic changes of pseudonym had obscured the real man and it was not
until the new novel was well advanced in its serial course that popular interest
was aroused. Much of the work that Thackeray had produced during the
10 years preceding Vanity Fair was purely figurative and even flat and
poor in quality. But he had acquired practice in a style which he was to use
in perfection in his later books. That Thackeray loved the 18th C was clear; that
he ever directly imitated any 18th C writer is an absurd supposition. He
had a natural affinity with the period of the essayist; moreover, in Fielding’s

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 Topic 50:
The Victorian Novel.
16

tolerant view of life he found the closest response to his own appreciation of
generousity.
Vanity Fair satirizes middle-class English society of the early 19th C. As
usually is the case with many 19th C novels, Vanity Fair was published serially
before being committed to book form. It was the first work that Thackeray
published under his own name, and was extremely well-received and popular at
the time. Some editions had illustrations by Thackeray himself, unfortunately
lost in most present editions. Thackeray made clear as the narrator and in his
private correspondence that the book was meant not to be only
entertaining, but instructive as well. Although being a very rich novel,
some say that it possesses some structural problems. Thackeray sometimes lost
track of the huge scope of his work, mixing up characters' names and minor
plot details.

3.2.1. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair

- Protagonist:
Vanity Fair is subtitled: ‘A Novel Without A Hero.’ Thackeray is a
thorough advocate of realism. He believes that in reality, there are only
human and lesser human characters but no chivalric heroes. That is why
there is not one single protagonist pin pointed. Nevertheless, the story of Vanity
Fair revolves around the lives of two ladies, Rebecca and Amelia, how their
lives converge, diverge and run parallel to each other. Rebecca has suffered
humiliation at the hands of poverty and so becomes a selfishly bad
woman, while Amelia is a selfishly good woman. Neither of the main
characters are perfectly virtuous and innocent.
- Antagonist:
Thackeray has exposed the underbelly of society, its follies and foibles in
his unparalleled work, Vanity Fair. The antagonist in his novel is not an
individual, but Vanity. These vanities may be individual or collective vanities
of a class or society or people.
Some vanity or another leads each character and this self-delusion leads
him to his end. Amelia’s vanity comes in her way and she refuses to admit that
George was being untrue to her. George Osborne is excessively vain about his

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good looks, so is Joseph Sedley who considers himself to be Adonis, but in

reality is a fat, ridiculous man. Old Osborne’s stubbornness compels him to be
vain and not forgive his son for a very long time. Whether it is outward vanity
or inner, almost every character, like a puppet, is animated by his own vanity
and it makes him do selfish things. Though there are some cruel and wicked
people, but they are so because of their vanities. Therefore, vanity is the
antagonist and not a person in Vanity Fair.
- Climax:
As the novel does not follow a linear pattern, it is difficult to mention just
one climax. The novel accounts for the lives of two main characters and it
moves alternately from one to the other. So, the climax occurs at two different
points for the two different lives.
Amelia’s life seems devastated after the death of George Osborne in the
battle of Waterloo. This episode occurring at the 32nd chapter (almost middle of
the novel) can be regarded as the climax of her story.
Rebecca’s life takes a sharp turn in chapters 54 and 55, when Rawdon
discovers that she is being selfish and unfaithful to him. He leaves her forever
and Becky’s life is never the same.
- Outcome:
The novel does not surely end in tragedy, but it is not a wholehearted
happy ending either. Thackeray says that he wants to leave everybody
dissatisfied at the end. He stops at a certain point in the story and
summarizes but does not contrive a fake but happy ending.
The outcome of the death of George is that Amelia spends her days in
melancholy and poverty. Her father-in-law refuses to accept her, she has to
give her son away to his grandfather, but after going through a lot of misery,
her goodness brings happiness to her life as she marries Col. Dobbin.
As for Rebecca, she is out of favour from all quarters and so moves
around in the continent like a vagabond for some years. Then she anchors on
Jos Sedley and getting him out of the way, inherits half his property. Rebecca
lives fairly well, doing charity for the rest of her life, which is more than a
punishment for her.

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In such a way, a relatively good character Amelia is happy (but with reservation
for she is slightly envious of her daughter) but a selfish and wicked character
too is not severely punished. Becky may not have love, but she is still surviving.
This, according to Thackeray, is realism.

3.3. The Brontës

The story of the Brontës in Literature is so far peculiar that it must begin
with the father (1777-1861) who came from Ireland with the unpromising name
of PATRICK BRUNTY, which he happily changed to Brontë. He got himself into
St. John’s college, Cambrige, in 1802 and after holding minor clerical posts,
became perpetual priest’s assistant in a wild and lonely district of
Yorkshire (Haworth) and there remained till his death. He married in 1812 and
by 1822 his wife was dead and he was left with 6 children, of whom the eldest
was 8 and the youngest not yet 2. The children amused their long empty hours
with writing. They got some instruction from the father, and when they had
grown up the elder girls were sent to a cheap boarding-school for the
daughters of clergymen. Of this institution it is enough to say that it
killed Maria and Elisabeth, that it nearly killed Charlotte, and that it
served as the model for LOWOOD in Jane Eyre. When Charlotte was nearly
15, she was again sent to a boarding-school. A little later, Charlotte returned as
a kind of teacher, with Emily and Anne as her pupils. Charlotte was unhappy in
her work, and left it after a year or two. Emily also tried school-teaching and
failed. The three girls, after trying the life of governess in private families,
thought they could do better in their own school, bit some knowledge of foreign
Lg was indispensable. In February 1842, the 2 elder sisters went as pupils to
the Pensionnat Heger in Brussels. There, Charlotte found herself attracted to by
Constantine Heger, a man of 33 with considerable gifts and a powerful
personality. The death of the aunt who kept her father’s house brought the girls
back home. Emily took over the household duties and Charlotte went back to
Brussels to teach English in the Heger establishment. The relationship end up
badly and she returned home very unhappy. This attachment was only fruit in
literary sense.

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3.3.1. Charlotte Brontë & Jane Eyre.

Jane Eyre belongs to the tradition of the GOTHIC NOVEL, which
narrates a macabre, fantastic and supernatural tale. Horace Walpole,
M.G. Lewis, and Ann Radcliff were among the practitioners of this genre. Jane
Eyre builds suspense like the traditional Gothic novel, but moves towards
encouraging the reader's identification with the narrator, the
unfortunate but ultimately triumphant Jane. The frequent use of symbols in
Jane Eyre provides an extra infusion of poetic power. Bertha's tearing of the
wedding veil, for instance, symbolizes Rochester's betrayal of both his real wife
and Jane, his betrothed. For a time, the novel was criticized for portraying a
strong-willed woman in a "coarse" manner, but the depiction of a woman's life
in nineteenth-century England has been studied with great interest in this
century.
Jane Eyre is also a coming-of-age novel, charting the life of an
"average" woman in Victorian England. Jane, in this sense, is contrasted
with Bertha, who can be thought of as Jane's "evil twin." Bertha is the
conquered "exotic territory," gone crazy with use and neglect, much like Jane in
her early rebellious stage is conquered by her domineering family. Both women
experience captivity and both rebel, but the exotic Bertha must (in an
imperialistic Victorian novel) die. Jane, meanwhile, learns to play by society's
rules and is rewarded with a suitably comfortable life.
A popular book in its time, Jane Eyre is still read as an example of
Gothic, Victorian and feminine writing in Britain in the mid-19th C. It is often
compared to the works of the other Bronte's, George Eliot, George Sand and
the American Victorians. Jane, as a character, has been vilified and celebrated
by a wide variety of readers over the past two centuries.
- Jane Eyre as a Gothic novel:
Jane Eyre comes in the tradition of the Gothic novel, which was
inaugurated by Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story. William
Beckford's Vathek, Ann Radcliff's The Mysteries of Udolpho and Matthew
Gregory Lewis' The Monk are examples of the GOTHIC NOVEL in English. The
principal object of such novels is the evocation of terror by exploiting

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mystery and a variety of other horrors. The Byronic hero with his
sensational past, the mad wife locked up in an attic and supernatural
occurrences are some of the features of the Gothic novel. This kind of novel
was satirized by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey.
In Jane Eyre Edward Rochester represents the Byronic hero with
a secret past. The Byronic hero is a man proud, moody, and cynical,
with defiance on his brow and misery in his heart, yet capable of deep
and strong affection. At Jane's first meeting with Mr. Rochester, she notices
his "dark face, with stern features and a heavy brow." He turns out to be a man
with a past and his immoral life in Paris adds to both the sense of mystery and
repulsion for many readers.
In Jane Eyre, as in many Gothic novels, the reader comes across a
lunatic wife (Bertha Rochester) locked in the attic of the manor house.
The peculiar sound produced by her mad ravings contributes to the atmosphere
of mystery and suspense in the novel.
Another feature of the Gothic novel is the use of the supernatural.
There are no ghosts in Jane Eyre, but every phase of Jane's life is preceded
by her imagining a supernatural visitation from another world. And Mr.
Rochester's telepathic communication to Jane towards the end of the
novel is in fact a supernatural phenomenon fully exploited for the purpose of
fiction.
Jane Eyre has been called a new type of Gothic romance on account
of Charlotte Brontë's use of poetic symbolism in the novel. The chestnut
tree splitting into two serves as a symbol for the separation of Jane and Mr.
Rochester. Bertha's tearing of the wedding veil symbolizes Mr. Rochester's
betrayal of his real wife and Jane, his betrothed. In this way Charlotte Brontë
contributed a new dimension to the Gothic novel. She managed to make the
patently Gothic more than just a stereotype.
- The relationship btw character & atmosphere.
The relationship between character and atmosphere is one of the
principal concerns in Jane Eyre. This is developed with reference to Jane's
movement from place to place. The movement from one place to another can

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be called the movement in atmosphere in the novel. Corresponding to the

movement in atmosphere, there is a movement in character. Location
changes correspond to similar changes in the nature of Jane's
experience. Each location represents a stage both physical and experiential.
The significance of the five locations (Gateshead, Lowood, Thornfield, Moor
House and Ferndean) lies in the fact that each house is a metaphor for each of
the stages through which Jane has pass on her journey to self-discovery.
Jane's passionate rebelliousness at GATESHEAD leads to her isolation
and rejection. Charlotte Brontë often presents Jane as an isolated figure.
This isolation is related to the atmosphere of Gateshead, which is a place
characterized by physical cold. Jane's character is not one that endears her to
others. Her experience in the red room brings forth her emotional outbursts.
Even the friendly Bessie is limited both in understanding and sympathy. John
Reed bullies Jane physically. Mrs. Reed exercises her tyrannical authority over
her. Jane's situation and character drive her to lonely introspection. "You are
passionate, Jane, that you must allow," Mrs. Reed points out.
LOWOOD is also a place of severe cold. It is a place where Jane
learns, at the fireside of Miss Temple, to curb her emotions. Inspired by Helen
Burns and her saintliness, Jane learns to endure her life at Lowood with
patience. Mr. Brocklehurst, misguided by Mrs. Reed, warns the teachers of the
capacity for deceit of which Jane's aunt has accused her. The intervention of
Mr. Lloyd helps Jane to clear her name publicly.
THORNFIELD is place of warmth, both physical and emotional. Here
the reader sees the danger of all-consuming fire. It is here that Jane meets
with the first crisis in her adult life. It comes soon after the cancellation of the
wedding between Jane and Mr. Rochester when he offers to make her his
mistress.
MOOR HOUSE is the location where Jane is threatened by physical,
emotional and spiritual freeze. St. John in this section advises Jane to
merge her identity with his: "A part of me you must become." She is almost
tempted to give up the struggle for integrity. That is the threat which each
suitor holds for her.

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Finally, FERNDEAN is the place of warmth without burning, the coolness

of the evening without the chill. This is the scene of Jane's reconciliation and
reunion with Mr. Rochester.
In this way atmosphere and character, location and experience are inter-
related in Jane Eyre.

3.3.2. Emily Brontë & Wuthering Heights.

All Emily Brontë's girlhood was an unconscious preparation for the
writing of Wuthering Heights. In her preface to Wuthering Heights, Charlotte
describes her sister's feeling for the moors: "her native hills were far more to
her than a spectacle; they were what she lived in, and by, as much as the wild
birds, their tenants, or as the heather, their produce." Wandering over the
moors in all seasons and weathers, Emily Brontë loved them with as passionate
and intimate a knowledge as that with which she endowed her heroines of
Wuthering Heights, the two Catherines. Those heathery wastes around her
home fed her imagination as vitally as they nourished her physical well being.
Emily Brontë's love and knowledge of her native place undoubtedly
played a powerful part in the writing of the novel, which Charlotte described as
"moorish, and wild, and knotty as a root of heath."
Emily might have taken the idea of Heathcliff's revenge from the Tales
of Hoffman and other German romances she read while at school in Brussels
in 1842. The sources of her characterization and incidents were various. As a
child she had listened to the tales of her father over the breakfast table. Some
of these were weird Irish legends from his youth. Others were lurid true stories
of their own neighborhood in the recent past. Emily's lively imagination eagerly
absorbed all of his descriptions and changed some of them into characters and
events in Wuthering Heights.
In addition to all the tales she had heard, Emily Brontë had first-hand
experience with the wretched spectacle of masculine depravity.
Branwell, the brother of Emily, had high literary and artistic ambitions that were
doomed to disappointment. Always in trouble, and slowly destroying himself
with drink and drugs, he was an unending source of worry to his family. Emily's

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portrait of the disintegration of Hindley in Wuthering Heights reflects Branwell's

own disintegration.
- Symbolism and imagery:
Emily Bronte uses both symbolism and imagery in her novel. The two
houses, WUTHERING HEIGHTS and THRUSHCROSS GRANGE, are highly symbolic.
The Heights represents a "storm," whereas the Grange stands for
"calm." Lockwood explains the meaning of "wuthering" as "descriptive of the
atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather." Brontë
takes pains to stress the house's ordinary, unfinished, and provincial nature.
But its chief characteristic is exposure to the power of the wind, which makes it
appear fortress-like. It is an appropriate house for the Earnshaw family: they
are the fiery, untamed children of the storm, especially Heathcliff, the
foundling. On the other hand, Thrushcross Grange is set in a civilized valley and
stands in a sheltered park. Here, the effects of weather are always gentler,
filtered, and diluted. The Grange is a house of soft, clinging luxury, and its
inhabitants are guarded by servants and bulldogs. It is "a splendid place," rich,
carpeted and cushioned with crimson. In contrast to the Heights, it belongs to
"civilization," which values comfort more than life itself. Thus, it is a natural
home for the children of calm: the gentle, passive and timid Lintons.
Animal imagery is used by Emily Brontë to project her insights
into human character. Catherine describes Heathcliff as a wolfish man.
Isabella Linton, after she becomes his wife, compares him to "a tiger, or a
venomous serpent." Nelly Dean sees his despair after Catherine's death as not
like that of a man, but of a savage beast. Heathcliff himself, when he wishes to
insult his enemies, compares them to animals. However, these are not wild
creatures he respects for their strength, but gentler animals that he despises.
Edgar Linton is "a lamb" that "threatens like a bull." Linton, Heathcliff's son, is a
"puling chicken." Heathcliff hates Hindley Earnshaw because he sees him as the
author of all his misfortunes. When he dies before the arrival of the doctor,
Heathcliff brutally says that "the beast has changed into carrion."
Symbolism is implicit also in various events of the novel. For example, on
the fateful night of Heathcliff's departure from the Heights, the storm comes

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"rattling over the Heights in full fury." It symbolizes the storm that eventually
destroys the lives of Cathy and Heathcliff. Then again, after three years, on
Heathcliff's return, he and Cathy meet by the light of fire and candlelight,
symbolizing the warmth of their affection for one another. In these ways, and
many others, images and symbols in Wuthering Heights add meaning to
characters, theme, tone, and mood.

3.4. George Eliot (1819-1880).

George Eliot was born Mary Ann Evans in November 1819. She was the
daughter of Robert Evans and his second wife Christiana; Robert was the agent
to a landlord, Francis Newdigate on his property in Derbyshire. Later Newdigate
moved to a larger estate in Warwickshire, and took Evan’s with him. Mary Ann
was the youngest of his children and lived for the first thirty years of her life in
the countryside. Only from about 1828 to about 1830, she was sent away to
school in the town of Coventry. In fact, Coventry is felt to have been the
original town on which Middlemarch is based.
Mary Ann’s father was a very competent estate manager & had very
conservative in his political and religious views. Though his daughter grew up
thinking very differently from him, she continued to respect his sincerity and
loved him deeply. Many feel the character of CALEB GARTH is an idealized
version of her father.
Mary Ann was a clever and hard working student. Even as a child she
was quite happy reading the classics & had little interest in children's stories.
Yet given her background, she had to be skillful at all the traditional tasks on a
farm baking, butter and cheese making, spinning yarn, from wool and flax;
even making jams which she disliked. She knew how hard the life of a
housewife was, and though her own ambitions were very different, she
always presented them with great sympathy, as she does with SUSAN
GARTH or HARRIET BULSTRODE in Middlemarch. In fact Midland scenes, tasks
and rural people are graphically and sympathetically depicted in all her novels.
Mary Ann was sent to school but girl’s education was very limited in
those days. Hence, she educated herself, devouring all the books she could
get hold of. Her parents were also sympathetic and helped her. She and her

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sister were very close, although very different in personality, and she loved her
brother Isaac, the closest to her in age. Both older siblings married and left
home and when her mother died in 1836, Mary Ann had to keep house for her
father. This kept her very busy and did not work. She particularly enjoyed. Yet
she went on with studies including mathematics, literature, music, ancient and
modern languages. Having mastered French and German, she also learnt
Latin and Greek at the age of twenty. Up to this time she was an intense
and deeply religious person, but this was to change.
In 1841, she and her father moved to Coventry, a large town. This
brought her into contact with wholly new experiences and people. Fifty
years before Mary Ann’s birth, the industrial revolution had got underway. Yet
the process was still going on, involving massive changes in the economy,
society, and the power structure. As part of this, a process of intellectual
ferment was in progress.
In Coventry, Mary Ann met two couples, the BRAYS and the HENNELLS,
who were parts of this ferment. While the BRAYS were free thinkers and
vaguely socialist in their ideas, the HENNELLS were Unitarians (a religious
sect which was more rationalistic and modern). They, along with noted women
writers, Elizabeth Gaskell and Harriet Martineau and others, formed part of a
vanguard of intellectuals, who tried to create a religion based not on
faith but on reason and ethics. Mary Ann became an active member of this
group, though it meant a breach, at least partially, with her father and brother.
She translated the controversial European philosophers of the
day - D. F STRAUSS, the German theologian; LUDWIG FEVERBACH, the humanist
philosophies and the French philosophies, AUGUST COMTE, into English. This
gave her acceptance as a serious intellectual and after her father’s death,
she decided to earn her living as a writer and journalist. She had also
met another writer and historian George Henry Lewes. Lewes and she
became close, and finally decided to live together. Marriage was out
of the question as Lewes had a living wife with four children. Lewes’
wife was living with one of his colleagues who was the father of some her

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children. Yet Mary Ann and Lewes decided ending the marriage was not correct,
and Lewes supported his family until his death.
It was during this period of her life that she wrote her novels and stories.
Her first collection Scenes of Clerical Life (1858) was a member of stories
published earlier in BLACKWOODS MAGAZINE. Then in quick succession came:
Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860); Silas Marner (1861); Romola
(1863), Felix Hott (1866); then Middlemarch in 1872 and her last Daniel
Deronda in 1876.
MARY ANN used the pen name GEORGE ELIOT from her first novel
onwards she chose the name "George" as it was Lewes’ first name, and
"Eliot" because she liked it. She had been ostracized after going public about
her relationship with Lewes. She obviously didn’t want this notoriety to come
between the readers and her books. Charles Dickens, an admirer of her work,
guessed the novelist was a woman, but many did not. By the time she
published The Mill on the Floss, her identity was known, and her popularity as a
novelist made her acceptable to many.
MARY ANN EVANS, the farmer’s daughter and MARY ANN EVANS the
theological and philosophical writer are both found in GEORGE ELIOT the
novelist. She raised the novel form to something for more deep and influential
than its earlier role as a mere entertainer. She sought to educate her
readers through their emotional sympathy. Like her heroines she
struggled to assert herself, to find a voice by which her moral ideas could be
conveyed to society. Being part of the new intellectual vanguard, she
expressed ideas and concepts in favor of rationality, hard work and
science and against the decrepit landowning class. But she did this, not through
preaching but the imaginative creation of appealing, very human characters,
with whom one can suffer.

3.4.1. Middlemarch.
George Eliot wrote Middlemarch towards the end of her literary
career, and it is clearly a product of her maturity. Yet, she wrote in her journal
that its theme "has been recorded among my possible Themes ever since I
began to write fiction." She published it almost six years after the publication of

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Felix Holt. The novel is, in fact, a combination of two separate works she
had undertaken.
The first entitled Middlemarch, she began writing in mid 1869. This
was to be a novel focusing on Lydgate. The second was intended to be a
long story called Miss Brooke, about Dorothea. She worked on them
independently, until in 1871, she decided on the present conception of
Middlemarch, in which she wanted to convey a "panoramic" view of
provincial life.
Another significant feature is the publication of the novel in serial
form. G.H. Lewes worked out this scheme for this with the publisher of
Blackwood’s Magazine. He felt its being published in bi-monthly
installments would give the novelist more leisure to write, and not
restrict it into the "three-Decker novel form." The publisher, John
Blackwood, was delighted both with the scheme and the work itself - "it is a
most wonderful study of human life and nature. You are like a great giant
walking about amongst us and fixing every one you meet upon your canvas,"
was his response. Again, about the installments, he said, "I think our plan of
publication is the right one as the two parts are almost distinct, each
complete in itself. Indeed there will be complaints of the want of the continuous
interest of a story, but this does not matter where all is fresh and true to life"
(Blackwood’s letter to George Eliot, 20th July 1871).
It was a common practice to serialize novels in literary magazines before
publishing them as complete works. This imposed two kinds of pressure on the
novelist. One was that of writing in time for the next issue, the other the
Victorian reader’s emotional involvement in fiction. Lewes tried to reduce the
first pressure by insisting on bi-monthly installments, which would give the
author more leisure. But George Eliot fell ill for over two months, and found it
difficult to stick to her schedules. However, the book was ultimately serialized in
the light. The second pressure was also hard to resist, and readers were
intensely demanding. One of their hopes, which was not fulfilled, was that
Lydgate and Dorothea would marry at the end! This hope of a "happy ending"
was part of a larger demand for an optimistic conclusion. In this, the British

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public felt let down by the novelist. Thus the novel was described as
"melancholy in its very conception," and elsewhere as "too often an echo of
Messrs. Darwin and Huxley." Yet, George Eliot did not succumb to audience
respond, neither in the story nor in the plot structure. In fact, the latter is so
symmetrically arranged that reviewers could not believe it had not been
completed before being serialized.
The world of Middlemarch is a world on the edge of change. Ripples
from the waves of political struggle in the cities reach the town, in the struggle
over reform; the Dissolution of Parliament takes place in 1831 and is followed
by a general election. Mr. Brooke and Will Ladislaw, two of the characters, are
sown actively participating in this election.
With all these topical references, Middlemarch is not truly a historical
novel. It does not aim primarily at conveying a period in history for its own
sake. The Middlemarchers are only vaguely aware of the great changes in the
larger English society. The historical references serve to highlight the insular
nature of a provincial town. They help the author to show how slowly sweeping
changes around it impinge on a provincial community. Yet her focal point is the
intricate "web" of relationships between people in that community.
Middlemarch was serialized from 1871 to 1872 in eight parts. However,
the age it depicts was some forty years earlier. George Eliot has written about a
provincial community with its traditional closes, values and conduct. She
focuses on the life of the community in and around Middlemarch town, but she
never lets us forget "the largeness of the world" outside the town.
The novelist has painstakingly researched the period in which her book is
set - that is the period from some months before when the 1ST REFORM
BILL of 1832 was presented in parliament by Lord Grey, to some months after
this. The Bill raised the heated issue of extending the vote to the middle and
working classes. The House of Lords rejected it. This and subsequent
Reform Bills, up to 1867 were expressions of an on-going struggle between the
old landed gentry and the newer manufacturing classes, for domination of the
economy.

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The Industrial Revolution, which had given birth to new classes and huge
productive resources, also stimulated the development of science. One
expression of this in the novel is the character Tertius Lydgate. He represents
the new type of medical man, struggling to give medicine a more scientific
orientation. He also wants to achieve an independent professional standing,
free of patronage. George Eliot presents him against a carefully researched
background of the medical controversies of the day - the separation of the
doctor and the pharmacist, the treatment of alcoholics and the rigid hierarchy
of doctors.

3.5. Thomas Hardy.

Thomas Hardy was born on June 2, 1840, in Higher Bockhampton,
Dorset, near Dorchester, England. The eldest of four children, he was very
bright. He learned to read at an early age and also showed a great interest
in music. He was initially taught at home by his mother before he attended the
village school. He then went to Dorchester Day School. He was also a performer
in the choir of his local church and played the violin at local weddings and
dances. At sixteen he was apprenticed to John Hicks, a Dorchester
architect. For several years, he practiced architecture in Dorchester. He also
simultaneously studied Greek and Latin. It was during this period that he began
writing poetry, and his friend Horace Moule, an author and literary reviewer,
helped him improve his poetry and introduced him to modern thought.
In 1862, Hardy moved to London and worked as an architect for
Arthur Bloomfield. He continued to write poetry, but was unsuccessful in getting
it published. After five years in London, ill health sent him back to Dorset,
where he again worked for John Hicks and began writing his first novel, The
Poor Man and the Lady. He was unable to get it published. In 1871, his first
novel, Desperate Remedies, was published, and a year later, Under the
Greenwood Tree was published. In 1874, Hardy married Emma Lavinia Clifford.
He soon gave up architecture to fully concentrate on writing. Although he and
Emma spent several months each year in London, most of the time they lived in
the countryside of Dorset, close to his place of birth. In 1883, Hardy built
MaxGate, a family home near Dorchester, for Emma and himself, but the couple

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never had any children. In 1912 Emma died, and two years later Hardy married
Florence Emily Dugdale, his secretary.
Even though Hardy continued to create some poetry, he dedicated
himself to writing novels from 1874 until 1889. During this time, he
concentrated on developing his well-known theme of man's hopeless
battle against fate. His best known works were written during this period,
with Far From the Maddening Crowd published in 1874, The Return of the
Native published in 1878, and The Mayor of Casterbridge published in 1886.
During this period, Hardy also gained recognition in literary circles and received
several honors. Tess of the D'Urbervilles was begun in 1889 and was first
published as a serial. His next novel, Jude the Obscure, was published in 1894
and created public furor because of its sexual content. As a result, Hardy
decided to give up writing novels and devoted himself exclusively to poetry and
short stories. "Wessex Poems," his first poetic collection, was published in 1898.
From 1903 until 1908, he wrote The Dynasts, a three-part epic drama in verse
that centers on Napoleon. His final book of poems, Winter Words, was
published in 1928, the year of his death. He was buried in Westminster Abbey
in London.
Hardy's sensitive nature finds it hard to accept the passing of the
old age and the rise of the modernism reflected in his times. As a
result, much of his writing is marked by pessimism about society and its
many idiosyncrasies. There was, however, some social reform that Hardy
supported. He believed that marriage laws needed to be changed. He
thought that women had a significant place in society and welcomed their
working outside the home. He supported religious tolerance. He was also
against the social dogma, which compelled people to follow certain norms
that have little or no relevance. These views of the author are explicitly
expressed in some of his works, and Tess of the D'Urbervilles clearly raises
many questions about society, religion, and morals.

Iván Matellanes’ Notes

 Topic 50:
The Victorian Novel.
31

In 1896, following more than 20 years as one of the most popular and
most criticized novelists in England, THOMAS HARDY announced that he would
not write another novel as long as he lived. He kept his word. He
refused to give in to critics who had attacked his works as being overly
pessimistic and peopled with immoral characters.
Looking back at Hardy's novels today, it is hard to imagine that they
sparked such violent responses from Victorian critics. Yet the attacks on Hardy's
last two major novels, Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure,
were particularly fierce. Many libraries banned Jude from their shelves, and
one bishop announced that the book was so indecent that he had thrown it into
a fire. HARDY responded that the bishop had probably burned the book because
he couldn't burn its author.
From his appearance and personality, Thomas Hardy would seem an
unlikely man to provoke such controversy. He was small, quiet, and shy. He
was a country person rather than a city person, and the characters of his
novels have a realistic, earthy quality about them.
Hardy spent only a small part of his life in London. Instead, he
built a house in Dorchester, not far from his birthplace in Upper
Bockhampton. While the house was being built, Hardy and his wife lived in
Dorchester, and there he wrote The Mayor of Casterbridge. Dorchester is
clearly the model for Casterbridge. The careful descriptions of the buildings and
roads of Casterbridge in the novel are a product of Hardy's many walks through
Dorchester.
Nearly all of Hardy's important novels and stories are set in the
agricultural areas or towns of Dorset in Southwest England near
Dorchester, the region Hardy called "Wessex." This was the area in which he
grew up in the mid-1800s. In Hardy's time, Dorset was still a rural and
unsophisticated area inhabited by rustic and superstitious people.
For Hardy, Wessex was an ideal location for him to present a
world in which nature plays a key role, people work hard for their
living, and fate has a strong hold over human life. Hardy's series of works set
in the area are known as the "WESSEX NOVELS." Some of the best known of

Iván Matellanes’ Notes

 Topic 50:
The Victorian Novel.
32

these Wessex novels are: Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the
Native, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure, and The Mayor of
Casterbridge.
The Mayor of Casterbridge is the least typical of these novels because
of its focus on town rather than rural life and because of the concentration
on one character. Yet Casterbridge is clearly a Wessex town, caught in the past
and just awakening to 19th C social change. And MICHAEL HENCHARD is certainly a
Wessex character, attempting to deal with his fate.
Hardy was born in Upper Bockhampton on June 2, 1840, and wrote most
of his important novels between 1870 and 1895. Yet, as in many of his novels,
the action of The Mayor of Casterbridge occurs between the years 1830 and
1850. During Hardy's lifetime, British cities were growing and England was
rapidly becoming industrialized. However, he chose to write about the
rural, preindustrial England of his father's era.
Why did Hardy concentrate on the past? There are several possible
reasons. For one thing, he was concerned more with rural than urban customs.
England of the 1830s and 1840s was a simpler place in which to live than
England of the 1880s. HARDY was not a social critic like Charles Dickens.
He wasn't out to change the way people of his time lived. Instead, he
wanted to show that important elements of human life are timeless.
He once said that what is essential in life is that which is repeated. By
linking the past and the present in his novels, he hoped to demonstrate those
aspects of human morality that are repeated in generation after generation. By
looking at life in a non-industrial setting rather than in a complicated city, he
could view the essential elements of human existence.
Hardy's father was a master mason, which meant the HARDY family
was middle class. At age 16, Hardy was apprenticed to an architect whose
specialty was the restoration of churches. During his apprenticeship, Hardy
developed a greater respect for the simplicities of country life and its traditional
institutions and architecture. This appreciation is obvious in the careful
descriptions of architectural structures in The Mayor of Casterbridge.

Iván Matellanes’ Notes

 Topic 50:
The Victorian Novel.
33

When he was 22, Hardy left Dorchester for London. There he began
writing essays and poetry, studying Greek tragedy, and reading modern
philosophy. He stayed in London for four years but was never really happy
there. In 1867, he returned home to continue restoring churches and to begin
his literary career in earnest. His first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady, was
never published but played an important part in Hardy's career
nevertheless. It satirized the trivial nature of London life in contrast
with the simple honesty of the country. George Meredith, a major writer
of the period, didn't like the book very much and suggested that HARDY give up
satire and write more popular, well-plotted novels. Hardy took Meredith's
advice. His next novel, Desperate Remedies, was published in 1871 and was
only a modest success. But Hardy soon followed with the first 3 WESSEX
NOVELS. The third, Far from the Madding Crowd, earned Hardy fame and
enough money to marry and become a full-time writer.
Between 1871 and 1897, Hardy published 14 novels and 3 volumes of
short stories. The novels became progressively darker and more
pessimistic over time as HARDY showed characters increasingly dominated by
fate and by guilt over their misdeeds. Far from the Madding Crowd (an early
novel) ends on a happy note, with Bathsheba finally marrying the right man,
Gabriel Oak. The Mayor of Casterbridge (a middle novel) ends on a calm
note, with Elizabeth-Jane marrying Farfrae and living a peaceful, if dull, life.
Jude the Obscure (his last important novel) ends on a totally bleak note, with
Jude Fawley's life completely shattered.
HARDY's work was very popular, but it was also often attacked by
critics. They were shocked by the earthiness of some of the characters and by
the sense of hopelessness within the environment. HARDY found himself having
to change some of his characterizations or some of the scenes in his
novels in order to please publishers of magazines serializing his
works, his readers, or his critics. Making these changes annoyed him. Finally,
when the criticism became too intense, he chose to stop writing novels
entirely. From 1897 until his death on January 11, 1928, in Dorchester, Hardy
wrote poetry and stories exclusively. He published more than 800 poems,

Iván Matellanes’ Notes

 Topic 50:
The Victorian Novel.
34

the most fam

mous of wh
hich was The Dyna
asts, a lon
ng epic po
oem aboutt the
Napo
oleonic Wa
ars.
Hardy also
a had a severe crritic inside
e his own His wife. EMMA
n home: H
HARD
DY was the
e niece of an archde
eacon in th
he church of
o England
d. As such, she
cons
sidered herself
h s
socially s
superior to her husband.
h At first their
marrriage was happy, butt it deterio
orated. For one thing, she neve
er liked living
in Dorcheste
D er and wanted to stay
s in London. She
e was also
o ambitiouss and
wantted Hardy to be mo
ore ambitio
ous as well. Some re
eaders wonder if Ha
ardy's
pesssimistic outlook in his
h novels may have
e been inffluenced b
by his unh
happy
marrriage.
Hardy may
m have felt
f strong links to th
he past bu
ut he was a
also a writter of
his time.
t Like many Victtorian writers, HARD
DY was tro
oubled by
y a dwind
dling
of his
h religious faith. He had carefully read the writiings of CHAARLES DARW
WIN &

othe
er scientistss and had lost some of his belief that a controlling
c force gove
erned
the universe. This
T loss of
o faith is reflected in the austterity of th
he landscape in
Wessex and th
he severity of the fate
e of Hardy's major ch
haracters.
HARDY's novels alsso reflect Victorian
n realism. They are
e filled not with
knights and otther Roma
antic characters, but with real people encounte
ering
theiir own we
eaknesse
es and trials. Yet fo
or all theirr realism, there is also a
certa
ain sensatiional quality in Hardy's novels. Most of his
h books were seria
alized
in magazines
m b
before being publish
hed as boo
oks. Magazzine readerrs demand
ded a
carefully developed plot and at least one majjor event, such as a crime, mu
urder,
sedu
uction, or desertion, in every episode. Hardy
H wass sometime
es annoye
ed by
erplot" his books, bu
having to "ove ut he didn't really care that mu
uch in the long
run. He felt th
hat his no
ovel writing
g was "mere journe
eywork" an
nd not artt. He
reserved his trrue artistryy for his poetry.

Bib
bliograp
phy.
- Norrton Anthollogy.
- Wut
uthering Heig ghs: http://pin
nkmonkey.coom/booknote es/monkeynootes/pmWuthhering01.asp
p
- Jane
ne Eyre: http:://pinkmonkeey.com/bookknotes/monkeynotes/pmJJaneEyre01.aasp
- Van
nity fair: http://pinkmonkkey.com/bookknotes/monkkeynotes/pmV Vanity01.asp
p
- Harrdy: http://pinkmonkey.co om/booknotees/barrons/mmyrcast.asp &
http:///pinkmonke ey.com/bookn notes/barron
ns/tessurb.assp

IIván Matellanes’ Notes

 Topic 50: Brief summary.
35
Summary
- The Victorian Age: is an age of expansion
th
- In the 18 C, the central city of western civilization shifted from Paris to London (expanded from 2,000,000 .1937- to 6,500,000 -1900-)
___ The shift from a way of life based on the ownership of land to a modern urban economy based on trade & manufacturing.
st
___ UK was the 1 industrialized country & experienced a nº of social & econ$ problems consequent to the rapid & free industrialization.
- 1830-48 Æ THE EARLY PERIOD: A time of troubles.
♦ 2 decisive events took place in England:
___ 1. The first locomotive-operated public line in the world opened (btw Liverpool & Manchester)
___ 2. The Reform Parliament opened. 2 years later, the REFORM BILL of 1832 was passed, extending vote right to all males w/property £10 &
abolishing an electoral sys where sm new industrial cities were unrepresented.
> Bc it broke up the monopoly that the conservative landowners had enjoyed, the REFORM BILL represents the beginning of a new age.
___ Workers lived in horribly crowded, unsanitary housing, and the conditions under which women and children work in mines & factories
were unimaginably brutal. The owners regarded themselves as innocent, for they were linked to an economic theory of LAISSE-FAIRE.
nd
- 1848-70 Æ THE MID-PERIOD: This 2 phase of the Victorian period had many problems too, but it was a time of prosperity.
♦ QUEEN VICTORIA and her husband, PRINCE ALBERT, were themselves models of middle class domesticity & devotion to duty.
♦ 1951 Æ P. ALBERT opened the GREAT EXHIBITION, where the crystal palace was erected to show the exhibits of modern industry & science.
st
___ The Crystal Palace was the 1 buildings constructed according to modern architectural principles (materials used are glass & iron)
___ The building itself, as well as the exhibition, symbolized the triumphal achievements of Victorian technology.
♦ Discoveries in geology & biology changed sm accepted religious views, the most imp being Charles Darwin's the Origin of Species.
- 1870-1901 Æ THE LATE PERIOD: It was the age of house parties and long weekends in the country.
♦ The Irish Question, became especially divisive in the 1880s, when HOME RULE for Ireland became a warm debate topic – by PM Gladstone.
♦ The recovery of the USA after the Civil War provided a new & serious competition for UK industry & agriculture.
___ The westward expansion in the USA open up vasts grain-rich fields & British farmers had to lower grain prices.
♦ Another threat to the balance of power was the growth of labor as a political & economic force. In 1867, DISRAELI’s 2 REFORM BILL was
nd

passed (extended vote right to working classes) & together w/the development of TRADE UNIONS make labor a strong political force.
- The Victorian novel:
- Often Victorian novelists confront the same issues.
♦ Victorian novelists were primarily concerned with people in society & w/such aspects as manners, morals & money.
___ Victorian novelists were less occupied w/people's relation to God than with their relation to other people.
♦ Victorian readers expected a version of daily 19 C life that would be familiar to them (from Eliot’s Warwickshire to Dicken’s London).
th

- Charles Dickens: Oliver Twist.

♦ 25 year-old Dickens had his first bestseller when he published Oliver Twist in 1837. Oliver Twist was published in monthly instalments &
DICKENS could leave his readers in agonizing suspense from month to month. All across England, readers discussed what had already
happened and argued over what they thought would happen in the next one, just as Big Brother Shows are for us today.
♦ However, Dickens wanted to do more than just entertain. He challenged his readers to consider things they would rather have ignored:
___ He drew a picture of London's poorest neighbourhoods that was shocking in its realism (Victorian authors were not supposed to
acknowledge the existence of drunkards & prostitutes, but DICKENS did).
___ He used the street Lg used by the lower classes.
♦ In 1834, a few years before the publication of Oliver Twist, Parliament had passed a POOR LAW intended to end some of the worst abuses
against the indigent. Yet the provision of the bill didn't go far in providing aid for those who were suffering. Dickens wanted to do something
about the poverty in England. Although his readers didn't know this, poverty had personally touched Dickens.
___ He spent some years in a debtors prison & was forced to work in a boot factory when still very young. From that experience he had really bad
memories, and in fact he gave a brief description in Oliver Twist & a thorough one in David Copperfield.
___ The criminal world of FAGIN, NANCY, & SIKES in Oliver Twist was as well-known to Dickens as the workhouses & debtors' prisons.
♦ DICKENS became actively involved with URANIA COTTAGE, a refuge for homeless women, including prostitutes. URANIA COTTAGE was set up as
an environment where these women could feel at home and prepare themselves for a better life.
- William M. Thackeray: Vanity Fair.
♦ W. M. Thackeray was born near Calcutta, the son of a collector. His father died in 1815 and his mother soon remarried.
___ The six yo boy was sent to England & attended various schools. Finally, he got into Trinity (Cambridge) which he soon left.
___ After that he went to Paris and studied art there and in Rome.
___ In 1894, he began to inhabit the Bohemian world of letters, writing and drawing in various papers & magazines using many pseudonyms.
♦ People are born Dickensians or Thackeryans, just in the same way that they are born Platonists or Aristotelians, Liberals or conservatives.
___ in the great variety of their personages, THACKERAY bears a superficial resemblance to his contemporary DICKENS.
___ DICKENS’s more direct appeal to popular sentiment, as opposed to THACKERAY’s minute observation of everyday peculiarities and more
subtle humour, has gained the vote of the majority.
♦ THACKERAY is regarded as 1 of the 1 British Realists. His affinity for realism is compared to the French Realists: FLAUBERT & BALZAC.
st

___ THACKERAY remarks: The art of novel is to convey as strongly as possible the sentiment of reality.
___ THACKERAY’s realism gives him scope for satire, behind of which lies a great moralist: Thackeray wishes to improve society w/ light humor.
♦ On the covers of Vanity Fair (1847-8) Thackeray used his own name & was published serially before being committed to book form.
th
___ Vanity Fair satirizes middle-class English society of the early 19 C. It was extremely well-received and popular at the time.
___ Some editions had illustrations by Thackeray himself, unfortunately lost in most present editions.
___ THACKERAY made clear as the narrator & in his private correspondnce that the book wasn’t to be only entertaining, but instructive also.
♦ Vanity Fair’s protagonist: The novel is subtitled: ‘A Novel Without A Hero.’ THACKERAY is a thorough advocate of realism.
___ He believes that in reality, there are only human and lesser human characters but no chivalric heroes.
___ Nevertheless, Vanity Fair revolves around the lives of 2 ladies: Rebecca & Amelia (how their lives converge, diverge & run parallel)
♦ Vanity Fair’s Antagonist: The antagonist in his novel is not an individual, but Vanity: Individual or collective vanities of a class or society.
___ Some vanity or another leads each character and this self-delusion leads him to his end.
♦ As the novel does not follow a linear pattern, the climax occurs at two different points for the two different lives:
___ AMELIA’s life seems crushed after the death of George Osborne in the battle of Waterloo can be regarded as the climax of her story.
___ REBECCA’s life takes a sharp turn when Rawdon discovers that she is being selfish & unfaithful to him and he leaves her forever.
♦ Vanity Fair’s outcome: The novel does end neither tragedy nor happyly. Thackeray wants to leave everybody dissatisfied at the end.
___ After the death of George, AMELIA spends her days in melancholy & poverty. She has to give her son away to his grandfather, but after going
through a lot of misery, her goodness brings happiness to her life as she marries Col. Dobbin.
___ As for REBECCA, she is out of favour from all quarters and so moves around in the continent like a vagabond for years. Then she anchors on Jos
Sedley and getting him out of the way, inherits half his property. Rebecca lives fairly well, doing charity for the rest of her life.
Iván Matellanes’ Notes
 Topic 50: Brief summary.
36
- The Bröntes.
♦ The story of the Brontës in Literature is so far peculiar that it must begin with the father (1777-1861):
___ This Irish man got himself into St. John’s college (Cambrige) & after holding minor clerical posts, became priest’s assistant in Yorkshire.
___ He married in 1812 & by 1822 his wife was dead & he was left w/6 children: got sm instruction from him & later went to cheap boarding-sch.
___ This institution killed Maria & Elisabeth, nearly killed Charlotte, & that it served as the model for LOWOOD in Jane Eyre.
- Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre belongs to the tradition of the Gothic novel, which narrates a macabre, fantastic and supernatural tale.
♦ Jane Eyre is also a coming-of-age novel, showing the life of an "average" woman in Victorian England.
♦ Jane, in this sense, is contrasted w/Bertha, who can be thought of as Jane's "evil twin."
♦ A popular book in its time, Jane Eyre is still read as an example of Gothic, Victorian and feminine writing in Britain in the mid-19 C.
th

♦ Jane Eyre as a GOTHIC NOVEL: It comes in the tradition of the Gothic novel, inaugurated by Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto.
___ The principal object of such novels is the evocation of terror by exploiting mystery and a variety of other horrors.
___ The Byronic hero w/his sensational past, the mad wife locked up in an attic & supernatural occurrences are some Gothic features.
___ EDWARD ROCHESTER represents the BYRONIC HERO w/a secret past and BERTHA ROCHESTER is the lunatic wife locked in the attic.
> The BYRONIC HERO is a man proud, moody& cynical, w/ misery in his heart, yet capable of deep and strong affection.
___ The supernatural: There’re no ghosts, but every phase of her life is preceded by imagining a supernatural visitation from other world.
___ Jane Eyre has been called a new type of Gothic romance on account of Charlotte Brontë's use of poetic symbolism in the novel.
♦ The relationship btw character & atmosphere is developed with reference to Jane's movement from place to place.
___ The movements in atmosphers corresponds, to character movement. Location changes correspond to similar changes in Jane's experience
___ Each location represents a stage physical/experiential. The 5 locations are a metaphor of the stages which Jane has pass to self-discover.
> GATESHEAD leads to her isolation and rejection, Which is related to the its atmosphere, a place characterized by physical cold.
> LOWOOD is also a place of severe cold, where Jane learns, at the fireside, to curb her emotions & to endure her life there w/patience.
st
> THORNFIELD is place of warmth, both physical & emotional, where can be seen the danger of all-consuming fire (1 crisis in her life)
> MOOR HOUSE is the location where Jane is threatened by physical, emotional and spiritual freeze.
> FERNDEAN is the place of warmth w/out burning, the coolness of the evening w/out the chill (Jane's reconciliation w/Mr. Rochester)
- Emily Brontë: All Emily Brontë's girlhood was an unconscious preparation for the writing of Wuthering Heights. As a child, she was always
wandering over the moors & weathers. She loved them with passion as with which she endowed her heroines of Wuthering Heights.
♦ Emily might have taken the idea of HEATHCLIFF's revenge from German romances she read while at school in Brussels in 1842.
___ The characterization sources were various: As a child she had listened to his father’s tales (sm of these were weird Irish legends)
♦ In addition to all the tales she had heard, Emily Brontë had first-hand experience with the wretched spectacle of masculine depravity.
___ Emily’s brother had high literary ambitions that were not achieved. It slowly destroyed himself w/drink & drugs (source of worry to his family)
♦ Emily uses both symbolism and imagery in her novel. The 2 houses, WUTHERING HEIGHTS & THRUSHCROSS GRANGE, are highly symbolic:
__ The HEIGHTS represents a "storm" __ the GRANGE stands for "calm."
__ house's ordinary, unfinished, and provincial nature __ It is a house of soft, clinging luxury
__ its exposure to the wind power, makes it appear fortress-like __ The effects of weather are always gentler, filtered, & diluted.
__ appropriate house for the Earnshaw family: they are the fiery, untamed children of the storm, especially Heathcliff
♦ Animal imagery is used by Emily Brontë to project her insights into human character:
___ HEATHCLIFF is a wolfish man. ISABELLA, after she becomes his wife, becomes a venomous serpent.
___ HEATHCLIFF himself, when he wishes to insult his enemies, compares them to animals (gentle animals that he despises).
- George Elliot real name was Mary Ann & his father was conservative in his political & religious views (not as her daughter, though).
♦ Mary Ann was sent to school but girl’s education was very limited. Hence, she educated herself, devouring all the books she could get.
♦ Although she has to take care of his father, she went on studying (maths, lite, music, Lgs - French, German, Latin & Greek at the age of 20-).
♦ Up to this time she was an intense and deeply religious person, but this was to change.
___ 1841 Æ She & her father moved to COVENTRY, where she met the BRAYS (free thinkers & smhow socialist in their ideas) & the HENNELLS
(Unitarians Æ religious sect which more rationalistic & modern).
___ They & other writers formed part of a vanguard of intellectuals, who tried to create a religion based not on faith but on reason & ethics.
♦ After her father’s death, she decided to become a writer & journalist, using the name GEORGE ELIOT (Dickens guessed she was a woman).
___ She met GEORGE H. LEWES and decided to live together, as marriage was out of the Qs as Lewes had a living wife w/4 children.
___ Both MARY ANN EVANS, the farmer’s daughter and theological and philosophical writer are both found in GEORGE ELIOT the novelist.
___ She sought to educate her readers through their emotional sympathy and expressed ideas & concepts in favor of rationality.
- Middlemarch: The novel was published in 8 bimonthly installments (to give the novelist more leisure to write) & and not the "3-Decker form".
♦ It was a common practice to serialize novels in literary magazines before publishing them. This imposed 2 kinds of pressure:.
___ 1. Writing in time for the next issue. ___ 2. The Victorian reader’s emotional involvement in fiction.
___ Readers were intensely demanding that LYDGATE & DOROTHEA would marry at the end! G. ELIOT did not succumb to audience respond.
♦ The novel is a combination of 2 separate works: Middlemarch (1869 - focusing on LYDGATE) & Miss Brooke (1971 - about DOROTHEA).
♦ Middlemarch seems a historical novel but The historical references serve to highlight the insular nature of a provincial town.
___ Eliot has written about a provincial community w/its traditional values & conduct, but she never forget "the largeness of the world" outside.
ST
___ The book is set months before the 1 REFORM BILL (1832) which showed the struggle btw the landed gentry & the manufacturing classes.
- Thomas Hardy learned to read at an early age and also showed a great interest in music (church choir & played the violin at local weddings)
♦ Though Hardy created some poetry, he dedicated himself to writing novels for many years.
___ Jude the Obscure (1894) created public furor bc of its sexual content. So, Hardy decided to devote himself to poetry & short stories.
___ Hardy's work was very popular, but it was also often attacked by critics. They were shocked by the sense of hopelessness.
___ Many libraries banned Jude from their shelves, and one bishop announced that the book was so indecent that he had thrown it into a fire.
♦ Hardy also had a severe critic inside his own home: His wife Emma, who considered herself socially superior to her husband.
___ she never liked living in Dorchester & wanted to stay in LND. She was also ambitious and wanted Hardy to be more ambitious as well.
♦ Hardy found hard to accept the passing of the old age & the rise of the modernism. However, Hardy supported some social reforms.
___ He believed that marriage laws needed to be changed & that women had a significant place in society (working outside home).
___ He supported religious tolerance. He was also against the social dogma Æ These views are explicitly expressed in se of his works.
___ From his appearance, Hardy would seem an unlikely to provoke such controversy. He was small, quiet, shy & country person (Dorchester)
♦ The Hardy’s novels became darker & more pessimistic over time as he showed characters increasingly dominated by fate.
___ The Mayor of Casterbridge (a middle novel) ends on a calm note, with Elizabeth-Jane marrying Farfrae and living a peaceful, if dull, life.
___ Jude the Obscure (his last important novel) ends on a totally miserable note, with Jude Fawley's life completely shattered.
♦ Like many Victorian writers, Hardy was troubled by a dwindling of his religious faith (Charles Darwin …)
♦ Hardy's novels also reflect Victorian realism, w/real people encountering their own weaknesses & trials (no knights or Romantic characters)
♦ Hardy's series of works set in Wessex are "WESSEX NOVELS": Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure, The Mayor of Casterbridge …
___ The Mayor of Casterbridge is the least typical bc of its focus on town rather than rural life & bc of the concentration on 1 character.
♦ This novel is set btw 1830-50 Æ When England was rapidly becoming industrialized. Why did Hardy concentrate on the past?
Iván Matellanes’ Notes
___ HARDY was not a social critic like DICKENS. He wanted to show that important elements of human life are timeless.