A History of English Literature

Overview

The last decades of the reign saw a disintegration of the middle ground of

readership. Writers went along with or rose above a broadening mass market,

as did Hardy and James respectively. These were major talents, but it was a

period of transition without a central figure, although Wilde briefly took centre

stage in a revival of literary theatre, with Shaw an emerging talent. The old

Victorian poets went on writing, but their juniors were retiring or minor,

consciously aesthetic or consciously hearty. There was a new professional

minor fiction, in Stevenson and Conan Doyle.

nDifferentiation

The two decades of 1880–1900, with the next decade, lie between the mid-Victorian
uplands and the peaks of modernism. For a long time, Joyce, Pound, Eliot, D. H.
Lawrence and, more recently, Virginia Woolf hid their predecessors. If literary
history is written by the victors, as with the Romantics and the Renaissance human-
ists,a longer view can bring revision. As the modernist revolution revolves into the
distance, and dust settles, it is easier to see origins in the eighties and nineties, and
to try an evaluative sketch.
A sketch it is, for major writers are few. Confidence in the cultural stamina of the
general reader, and in the direction of society, waned. Serious writers dealt with a
middlebrow market by some simplification or specialization, or else went into covert
or open opposition to majority views, as did some poets. The first mass-circulation
newspaper claiming to be the organ of democracy, the Daily Mail, began in 1896. Its
owner bought The Times in 1908. ‘The newspaper is the roar of the machine’,
declared W. B. Yeats. A less oracular truth is that paper and printing were now
cheaper and that new technology found a new market in the newly literate.

Thomas Hardy and Henry James

Drama revived, with Wilde and Shaw; poets shrank; sages went into aesthetics or
into politics. There was plenty of fiction, some of it short, as from R. L. Stevenson,

Contents

Differentiation 309

Thomas Hardy and

Henry James 309

Aestheticism 312

Walter Pater 312

A revival of drama 314

Oscar Wilde 314

George Bernard Shaw 316

Fiction 317

Thomas Hardy 317

Tess of the d’Urbervilles 318

Minor fiction 320

Samuel Butler 320

Robert Louis Stevenson 320

George Moore 320

Poetry 321

Aestheticism 321

A.E. Housman 321

Rudyard Kipling 322

Further reading 323

309

Late Victorian Literature:

1880–1900

11

CHAPTER