A History of English Literature

against the age, as sometimes did Dickens. Tennyson periodically tried to make sense

of it; Matthew Arnold criticized it; Mrs Gaskell reflected it and reflected on it.

Anthony Trollope represented it.

Moral history

Although literature is never merely history, the novel becomes a moral history of

modern life with Dickens and Thackeray, elaborately so in George Eliot’s

Middlemarch, a novel exemplifying a principle Eliot derived from Scott: ‘there is no

private life which has not been determined by a wider public life’. Yet the wider life

was interesting to George Eliot (the pen-name of Mary Ann Evans) because it

shaped the moral and emotional life of single persons. In keeping with this

Romantic priority, her characters are more personal than Scott’s.

George Eliot (1819–1880) was one of many who sought after wisdom in an age

ofshaken certitudes and robust consciences. Clergymen, sages and critics wrote

lessons and lectures for the breakfast-table and the tea-table. These were later bound

up in tomes with marbled endpapers. Few are unshelved today, except in universi-

ties.The Victorian books living today are chiefly novels, and these novels (despite the

‘authenticity’ of their modern film versions) do not hold up a mirror to the age.

Victorians produced impressive reports on the London poor, on the factories of

Manchester and on urban sanitation, but a documentary social realism was not the

rule in Victorian fiction.

One reason for this lies in the subjective and imaginative character of Romantic

liter ature of the years 1798–1824, which altered the nature of non-factual writing.

The simple pleasure of vicarious egotism died with Byron, but books, annuals and

260 8 · THE AGE AND ITS SAGES

The Albert Memorial

Gardens, Hyde Park, London. Prince

Albert had died in 1861; George Gilbert

Scott’s Gothic monument (1864–7)

celebrates the achievements of the age,

and the Prince’s patronage of the arts

and sciences. Among the many figures

round the base appears a profile of

himself, behind the figure of Pugin.

© David Sailors/Corbis.