it reflects Hardy’s idea of life as determined, not by heredity, environment and
economics but by ‘crass Casualty’. Chance, in logic, cannot be cruel, although it can
feel so. Such a pathos makes one think less about the victims than about their
creator, Hardy.Minor fiction
Samuel Butler
Hardy’s assault on Victorian morality was anticipated by Samuel Butler(1835–
1902), the author ofErewhon (1873), a dystopiannovel. Butler was a professional
heretic, attacking the Resurrection (Darwin applauded), Canadian prudery
(Montreal would not exhibit naked statues), Darwinian evolution (Butler preferred
Lamarck’s theory), and the Homeric problem (The Authoress of the Odyssey, 1897).
His heartlessly entertaining satirical novel The Way of All Flesh (1903) is based on his
own upbringing in a clerical family.Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson(1850–1894) was once famous enough to be known as
RLS, but the legend faded for a time. He sailed much in childhood – his
Edinburgh family built lighthouses – and his weak health later took him far from
Scotland to die in Samoa. He wrote plays, travel, a historical novel and A Child’s
Garden of Verses (1885), much of which has dated. But his full-length romances
are as vivid as ever:Treasure Island(1883), begun in Braemar, finished in Davos;
Kidnapped(1886), with its sequel Catriona (1893);The Master of Ballantrae
(1889),and, more seriously engaging with the past,Weir of Hermiston (1896),
unfinished.His ‘shocker’,The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) is a
page-turner, but, like Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1879) and most cult fiction, disap-
points adult re-reading. His later, strikingly unsentimental, short stories,The
Ebb-Tide and The Beach at Falesà,stylishly anticipate early Conrad, exploring
themes of isolation and identity in a new way. RLS is a great storyteller in an
economically picturesque style, which, though often imitated, has never been
done so perfectly. Yet another Scot who developed a genre in England was Arthur
Conan Doyle (1859–1930), with his Sherlock Holmes detective stories, beginning
with A Study in Scarlet (1887).George Moore
George Moore(1852–1933) wrote much and variously. A major figure in Anglo-
Irish literature, he is noted here for pioneering French fictional styles in English,
and remembered chiefly for Esther Waters (1894),a novel in the naturalist
manner of Emile Zola, combining a clinical physical realism deriving from natu-
ral science with a pathos lacking in glamour. Esther is a religious girl driven from
home to work in a racing stable; she becomes pregnant, and endures many
ordeals. George Gissing (1857–1903) also wrote about poverty and failure, but
from personal experience; especially, in New Grub Street (1891), of the life of a
struggling writer.320 11 · LATE VICTORIAN LITERATURE: 1880–1900
dystopia An imaginary
world in which everything is
wrong; the opposite of
‘eutopia’ (a good place).
Erewhonis an anagram of
Nowhere, ‘utopia’ (no place).