and for nonsense verse (not the same thing). But the modernists ridiculed the
Victorians, who are still not always taken seriously, even by academics. Although
universities have reinvested heavily in Victorian literary culture, quality remains the
criterion in a critical history. Much of this literary abundance is of human or of
cultural interest. How much of it is of artistic value?
Before attempting this question, a change in the position of the writer must be
noted. The novel became a major public entertainment at the same time that books
became big business. The writer now worked for the public, via the the publisher.
Whereas Wordsworth had a government sinecure, and the Prince Regent had
obliged the reluctant Jane Austen to dedicate Emma to him, Victorian writers
pleased the public. It is true that the Queen liked Tennyson to read to her, and that
she ordered Lewis Carroll’s complete works. When she wished to meet Dickens, he
declined to be presented. Dickens was a commercial as well as a literary wizard, but
not every writer could trade in letters. Edward Lear, a twentieth child, acted as tutor
to Lord Derby’s children. Robert Browning, Edward Fitzgerald and John Ruskin had
private incomes. Lewis Carroll was a mathematics don, Trollope a civil servant,
Matthew Arnold an Inspector of Schools. But commercial publication and writers’
personal finances meant that few Victorians treated literature as an art – unlike
Jonson, Milton, Austen or Keats, none of whom was rich. There were perfectionists- W. S. Landor, Emily Brontë, Christina Rossetti, J. H. Newman, Matthew Arnold,
Gerard Hopkins, Walter Pater, Henry James, and more in the Nineties. Other perfec-
tionists, Tennyson and Wilde, prospered greatly, and George Eliot earned millions in
modern money, though less than Dickens.
But few Victorian novels are as well made as Wuthering Heights or Middlemarch,
and few Victorian poems are perfect. What was perfection in comparison with imag-
inativ e and emotional power, moral passion, and the communication of vision,
preferably to a multitude? The popularity of Romanticism, combined with the need
of the press for a rapid and regular supply, had an inflationary effect on the literary
medium.The quality of the writing of Carlyle, Thackeray, Ruskin and Dickens is
more uneven than that of their 18th-century predecessors. In retrospect, and in
comparison with today, Victorian confidence in the taste of a middle-class public is
impressive. The quality of novels published in monthly serials is high if not consis-
te nt.Ordinary talents were strained by the hectic pace of serial publication, but
Dickens exulted in it. His novels could be shorter, but few would wish them fewer.
The abundance and unevenness of Victorian writing do not suit the summary
generalizations of a brief literary history. To the curious reader with time, however,
there is compensation in its immense variety, and the unprecedentedly full and indi-
vidualized set of pictures it gives of its age. The reader of Christopher Ricks’s New
Oxford Book of Victorian Verse(1988) will have some pleasant surprises.
Why sages?
The lasting influence of Victorian thinkers such as Carlyle, Mill, Ruskin, Newman,
Darwin and Arnold requires some preliminary attention. Why did this new animal,
the Victorian Sage, appear? Why did secular literature assume such importance?
Why did the saintly Newman write two novels and the politician Disraeli sixteen?
Why did another prime minister, Gladstone, publish three books on Homer, and a
third, Lord Derby, translate Homer? Why did Matthew Arnold believe that poetry
would come to replace religion?264 8 · THE AGE AND ITS SAGES