Overview
The super-productive Dickens is the dominant figure of the Victorian novel,
combining elements of the Gothic – a genre made serious by the Brontë sisters
- with a vividly imagined account of the social institutions of Victorian England.
The mode of his novels owes much to popular stage and melodrama, though
language and character-creation are his own. His rival, Thackeray, is repre-
sented here by Vanity Fair. A less theatrical realism comes in with Mrs Gaskell
and Trollope, and with the historian of imperfect lives in their fullest social
settings, George Eliot.
nThe triumph of the novel
Modern images of 19th-century English life owe much to novels, and versions of
novels. By 1850, fiction had shouldered aside the theatre, its old rival as the main
form of literary entertainment. As with the drama at the Renaissance, it took intel-
lectuals some time to realize that a popular form might be rather significant.
Human beings have always told stories, but not always read the long prose narra-
tives of the kind known as novels. In English, the reign of the novel has now lasted
so long as to appear natural. There had been crazes for the Gothic novel and for
Scott’s fiction, yet it was only in the 1840s, with Charles Dickens, that the novel
again reached the popularity it had enjoyed in the 1740s. Between 1847 and 1850
appeared Jane Eyre,Wuthering Heights,Vanity Fair and David Copperfield. In 1860,
Dickens was still at his peak, Mrs Gaskell and Trollope were going strong, and
George Eliot had begun to publish. Poetry was popular, but prose more popular.
The popularity of broadly realistic novels seems to go with the broadening basis of
middle-class democracy.
The popular franchise was extended in 1867, against Liberal opposition, by a
Conserv ative government. Its leader was Benjamin Disraeli(1804–1881),who in the
1840s had set out his political beliefs, using fiction to advance a critique of contem-
porary society which built on those of A. W. Pugin and Carlyle, views later developed
by Ruskin.The young Disraeli was not a sage but a political visionary, and he was
both more and less than a novelist. The novel was now so popular that it could be
Contents
The triumph of the
novel 285
Disraeli’s Sybil 286
Two Brontë novels 287
Jane Eyre 287
Wuthering Heights 289
Elizabeth Gaskell 290
Charles Dickens 290
The Pickwick Papers 291
David Copperfield 292
Bleak House 293
Our Mutual Friend 294
Great Expectations 295
‘The Inimitable’ 295
Wilkie Collins 296
William Makepeace
Thackeray 296
Vanity Fair 296
Anthony Trollope 299
George Eliot 300
Adam Bede 302
The Mill on the Floss 302
Silas Marner 303
Middlemarch 303
Daniel Deronda 306
Nonsense prose and
verse 306
Lewis Carroll 306
Edward Lear 307
Further reading 308285Fiction
10
CHAPTER