periodicals brought a regulated Romanticism into Victorian homes – via, for exam-
ple, Jane Austen’s novels. In this simple sense, all subsequent literature – even the
anti-Romantic literature of the modernists – is post-Romantic. Victorian narrative
history has much in common with novel-writing. Scott’s wish to tell the tale of the
tribe was felt by Thackeray, Dickens and George Eliot, who re-create the worlds
surrounding their childhoods. In an age of disorienting change, historical thinking
was incited by the blasts of Carlyle’s trumpet in his French Revolution,Heroes and
Hero-worship and Past and Present. The effects of Carlyle can be read in Ruskin,
Dickens and William Morris.
Abundance
An eager reading public, larger than before, was regularly fed with serials and three-
decker novels. Collected editions of popular novelists and best-selling prophets, and
of fastidious prose-writers such as John Henry Newman and Walter Pater, run to
many volumes. In an age when engineering miracles appeared every month and
London had several postal deliveries a day, Dickens was thought hyperactive.
Trollope wrote 2000–3000 words daily before going to work at the Post Office. He
invented the pillar box, rode to hounds midweek and Saturday, and wrote seventy
books. The verse of a Tennyson, a Browning or a Morris is not contained in a thou-
sand pages. Lesser writers such as Benjamin Disraeli, Bulwer Lytton, Charles
Kingsley, Mrs Oliphant and Vernon Lee were equally prolific. Victorian vim contin-
ued less cheerfully in Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Joseph Conrad and the
Edwardian Ford Madox Ford. Thereafter, serious novelists became less productive,
though D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) and the American William Faulkner
(1897–1962) are exceptions.
To some,such abundance already seemed oppressive long before 1914. But by the
time Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians came out in 1918, most of what the
Victorians had believed, assumed and hoped had died. Strachey’s debunkings of
Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, O. M., Dr Thomas Arnold and General
Gordon sold well. Victorians enjoyed laughing at themselves with Dickens, Lewis
Carroll, Edward Lear, W. S. Gilbert and Oscar Wilde, and had a genius for light verse
THE VICTORIAN AGE 263Queen Victoria opening the Great Exhibition
vast Crystal Palace, erected in Hyde Park, London,
1 May 1851.