Victorian Era Literature and Society

The Role of Women

• Political and legal reforms during the Victorian era granted many rights to citizens, but women were excluded from these freedoms.
  • Women could not vote or hold political office until 1918, despite early petitions for women's suffrage in the 1840s.
  • The Married Women's Property Acts (1870-1908) allowed married women to own property.
  • Divorce laws were unequal: men could divorce wives for adultery, but wives needed to prove adultery combined with cruelty, bigamy, incest, or bestiality.
• Limited educational and employment opportunities for women sparked the "Woman Question" debate.

Arguments for Women's Rights

• Arguments for women's rights were based on libertarian principles of freedom and equality.
• Inequities in employment led many working-class women to prostitution, which became professionalized and a public obsession.
• Anxiety existed about the fates of "surplus" or "redundant" middle-class women who remained unmarried due to population imbalance.
  • Approximately half a million unmarried women in mid-Victorian England faced limited, unattractive, and unprofitable employment options.
  • Emigration was proposed but ineffective due to low numbers of female emigrants.
  • Governesses were the only occupation allowing unmarried middle-class women to earn a living while maintaining gentility, but they faced job insecurity, low wages, and ambiguous social status.
• The precariousness of unmarried middle-class women's status was explored in governess novels like Jane Eyre (1847) and Vanity Fair.

Victorian Society's Preoccupation with Women

• Victorian society was concerned with legal, economic limitations on women’s lives and the nature of womanhood itself.
• John Stuart Mill argued in The Subjection of Women that the nature of women is artificial, resulting from forced repression and unnatural stimulation.
• Tennyson's The Princess reflects the doctrine of "separate spheres," relegating men to the field and head, and women to the hearth and heart.
  \text{Man for the field and woman for the hearth:}
  \text{Man for the sword and for the needle she:}
  \text{Man with the head and woman with the heart:}
  \text{Man to command and woman to obey.}
• Ideology claimed women had a special nature for their domestic role, epitomized by The Angel in the House (1854-62) by Coventry Patmore.
  • Woman's purity and selflessness were stressed, creating a peaceful home for men to escape modern life's difficulties.
  • John Ruskin described home as a place of peace and shelter in "Of Queens' Gardens" (1865).
• This exalted view of home placed pressure on women to be "enduringly, incorruptibly good; instinctively, infallibly wise-wise, not for self-development, but for self-renunciation."
• This domestic ideology was used by antifeminists and feminists to justify woman's contribution to public life.
• Henry James noted in The Portrait of a Lady (1881) the "ado" about women's vocation, debated in fiction and magazines, especially regarding the "New Woman."
• The basic problem was political, economic, educational, and how women were regarded and regarded themselves in society.

Literacy, Publication, and Reading

• Victorian period saw a significant increase in literacy.
  • In 1837, about half of adult males could read and write.
  • By the end of the century, basic literacy was almost universal due to compulsory national education required by 1880 to the age of ten.
• An explosion of reading material occurred due to technological advancements in printing presses, paper production, and typesetting machines.
• The number of newspapers, periodicals, and books increased.
• Books were borrowed from commercial lending libraries due to their expense; public libraries were scarce until the late century.
• After the repeal of stamp tax and advertisement duties, an extensive popular press developed.
• The growth of the periodical was the most significant development in publishing.
  • 170 new periodicals were started in London in the first 30 years of the Victorian period.
  • Magazines catered to every taste, including cheap sensational magazines, religious monthlies, weekly newspapers, satiric periodicals (e.g., Punch), women's magazines, and monthly miscellanies.
  • Chief reviews and monthly magazines greatly influenced public affairs and literary reputations.
  • Major writers like Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot, Trollope, Gaskell, Carlyle, Mill, Arnold, Ruskin, Tennyson, and the Brownings published in these magazines.
• Periodical publication shaped literature.
  • Novels and nonfiction works were published in serial form.
  • Dickens's Pickwick Papers (1836-37) established the popularity of serial publication.
  • Serial publication influenced plotting, pacing, and allowed writers to respond to reader reactions.
  • It created a continuing world, punctuated by installments, stimulating curiosity and a sense of community among readers, encouraged by family reading.
• The middle-class reading public shared a common reading culture.
  • Poets like Tennyson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and anthologies like Palgrave's Golden Treasury (1861) were widely read.
  • Prose writers such as Carlyle, Arnold, and Ruskin were considered sages.
  • Victorian novelists were popular writers who aimed to delight, instruct, and illuminate social problems.
• By the 1870s, this shared sense of social concerns began to dissolve.
  • Writers defined themselves against the general public, and mass publication included less serious literature.
  • By the end of Victoria's reign, a unified reading public could no longer be assumed.

The Novel

• The novel was the dominant form in Victorian literature.
• Initially published in serial form, novels appeared in three-volume editions.
• Victorian novels sought to represent a large and comprehensive social world with diverse classes and settings.
• They contained numerous characters and plots that revealed the author's vision of the social world's deep structures.
• They presented themselves as realistic, sharing features with the inhabited social world.
• Stendhal called the novel "a mirror wandering down a road," but it's more accurate to speak of realisms.
• Each novelist presented a specific vision of reality, convincing readers through various techniques and conventions.
• The worlds of Dickens, Trollope, Eliot, and the Brontes differed but shared the attempt to make imagined characters and events resemble actual life.
• Victorian novelists often depicted social relationships in middle-class society, where material conditions indicated social position, money defined opportunity, and social class enforced stratification, with some class mobility.
• Most novels focused on a protagonist defining their place in society, creating tension between social conditions and the hero or heroine's aspirations.
• This tension made the novel a natural form for portraying women's struggle for self-realization.
• Heroines like Jane Eyre, Maggie Tulliver, Dorothea Brooke, Isabel Archer, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and Becky Sharp illustrated George Eliot's judgment of "a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with meanness of opportunity."
• Women writers were major authors, including Jane Austen, the Brontes, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot.
• Charlotte Bronte defied Robert Southey's advice that literature should not be a woman's business, due to the novel's amenability to women writers.
• It concerned domestic life and was a popular form with an accessible market, lacking the august tradition of poetry or the learning of a university education.
• George Henry Lewes declared, "The advent of female literature promises woman's view of life, woman's experience."
• The Victorian novel, written by both men and women, was varied, encompassing comedy, Gothic romances, satire, psychological fiction, social and political realism, and sensation novels.
• Popular genres like crime, mystery, horror, science fiction, and detective stories developed later in the century.
• The novel was both entertainment and a spur to social sympathy, addressing various social topics.
• Joseph Conrad defined the novel as "a conviction of our fellow-men's existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history?"

Poetry

• Victorian poetry developed in the context of the novel.
• Poets explored new ways of telling stories in verse, such as Tennyson's Maud, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (1857), Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book (1868-69), and Arthur Hugh Clough's Amours de Voyage (1857-58).
• Poets and critics debated appropriate subjects for long narrative poems.
  • Matthew Arnold favored heroic materials of the past.
  • Elizabeth Barrett Browning advocated representing "their age, not Charlemagne's."
• They also experimented with character and perspective, as seen in Amours de Voyage and The Ring and the Book.
• Victorian poetry developed in Romanticism's shadow.
  • The major Romantic poets had died relatively young, but their influence remained strong.
  • Victorian poets rewrote Romantic poems with a sense of belatedness and distance.
  • When, in his poem "Resignation," Arnold addresses his sister, he tells her the rocks and sky "seem to bear rather than rejoice."
• Victorian poets built upon this belated Romanticism in different ways.
  • Some, like Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne, embraced art for its own sake.
  • Arnold sought an objective basis for poetic emotion, abandoning poetry when he felt the age lacked the culture to support it.
  • Browning turned from Shelley-inspired poetry to dramatic monologues.
  • Tennyson developed a more lyric form of the dramatic monologue.
• Creating a lyric poem in the voice of a speaker distinct from the poet was a major achievement of Victorian poetry.
• Randall Jarrell noted that the dramatic monologue became the norm in poetry.
• Victorian poetry was formally experimental but shared characteristics.
  • It tended to be pictorial, using detail to construct visual images.
  • Arthur Henry Hallam defined this as combining visual impressions to create a picture carrying the poem's dominant emotion, bringing poets and painters together.
  • Contemporary artists often illustrated Victorian poems, and poems presented paintings.
• Victorian poetry used sound in a distinctive way.
  • Tennyson and Swinburne emphasized cadences, alliteration, and vowel sounds.
  • Browning and Gerard Manley Hopkins used roughness in reaction to Tennyson.
  • The sound of Victorian poetry attempted to use poetry as a medium independent of sense.
• These poets used sound to convey meaning, as Hallam noted, "The tone becomes the sign of the feeling."
• Victorian poets sought to represent psychology in a different way, creating a poetry of mood and character.
• They showed varying discomfort with the public expectation that poets be sages.
• Women poets encountered difficulties in developing their poetic voice.
• Women poets viewed their vocation in the context of the constraints and expectations placed upon their sex, making their poems less complicated by experiments in perspective.

Prose

• Victorian poets felt ambivalent about the didactic mission, but writers of nonfictional prose aimed specifically to instruct.
• Nonfictional prose included history, biography, and criticism, emphasizing argument and persuasion.
• The growth of the periodical press provided the vehicle and marketplace for nonfictional prose, signifying a shared intellectual life and the urgency of social and moral issues.
• Writers sought to convince readers to share their convictions and values.
• Carlyle defined men of letters as a "perpetual Priesthood" teaching that "God is still present in their life" in On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841).
• The modern man of letters writes for money, which produces a quintessential Victorian form.
• Walter Pater argued that nonfictional prose was "the special and opportune art of the modern world" in his essay "Style" (1889).
• Pater believed that prose more readily conveyed the "chaotic variety and complexity" of modern life, the "incalculable" intellectual diversity.
• Victorian prose writers were engaged in shaping belief in a complex and changing world.
• Mill and Huxley relied on clear reasoning, logical argument, and a lucid style.
• Carlyle and Ruskin wrote a more Romantic prose, seeking to move readers.
• Victorian prose writers claimed a place for literature in a scientific and materialistic culture.
• Arnold and Pater developed the basis for modern literary criticism, arguing that culture provides immanence and meaning.
• For Arnold, this was a moral experience; for Pater, it was aesthetic.

Drama and Theater

• Victorian age excelled in poetry, prose, and novels, but not in plays until the final decade.
• Theater flourished as a popular institution, featuring dramas, burlesques, extravaganzas, scenic versions of Shakespeare, melodramas, pantomimes, and musicals.
• Robert Corrigan noted that theater was to Victorian England what television is today, attended by 150,000 in London on any given day in the 1860s.
• Theatrical entertainment influenced other genres; Dickens used theatrical techniques in his novels.
• Thackeray represented himself as a puppet master in Vanity Fair and employed melodramatic acting in his illustrations.
• Tennyson, Browning, and Henry James wrote plays without commercial success.
• Dion Boucicault was the period's most prolific and popular dramatist.
• Gilbert and Sullivan's comic operas satirized Victorian values and institutions.
• Around 1890, Henrik Ibsen's socially controversial plays influenced Arthur Pinero and Bernard Shaw to write "problem plays."
• In the 1890s, Shaw and Oscar Wilde transformed British theater with comic masterpieces that targeted Victorian pretense and hypocrisy.

Women's Rights

• Arguments for women’s rights were based on principles that had formed the basis of extended rights for men.
• In Hardy’s last novel, Jude the Obscure (1895), his heroine justifies leaving her husband by quoting Mill’s On Liberty (1859).
• She might have quoted Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869), which, like Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), challenges long-established assumptions about women’s role in society.
• Legislative measures over the nineteenth century gradually brought about changes in a number of areas.
• The Custody Act of 1839 gave a mother the right to petition the court for access to her minor children and custody of children under seven (raised to sixteen in 1878).
• The Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 established a civil divorce court (divorce previously could be granted only by an ecclesiastical court) and provided a deserted wife the right to apply for a protection order that would allow her rights to her property.
• Divorce remained so expensive as to be available only to the very rich.
• Changes in marriage and divorce laws, together with the Married Women’s Property Acts, began to establish a basis for the rights of women in marriage.
• Feminists pressured Parliament for legal reform and worked to enlarge female educational opportunities.
• In 1837 none of England’s three universities was open to women.
• Tennyson’s long poem The Princess (1847), with its fantasy of a women’s college from whose precincts all males are excluded, was inspired by contemporary discussions of the need for women to obtain an education more advanced than that provided by the popular finishing schools.
• By the end of the poem Princess Ida has repented of her Amazonian scheme, she and the prince look forward to a future in which man will be "more of woman, she of man."
• The poem reflects a climate of opinion that led in 1848 to the establishment of the first women’s college in London, an example later recommended by Thomas Henry Huxley.
• By the end of Victoria’s reign, women could take degrees at twelve universities or university colleges and could study, although not earn a degree, at Oxford and Cambridge.
• Agitation for improved employment opportunities for women was present.
• Writers as diverse as Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Florence Nightingale complained that middle-class women were taught trivial accomplishments to fill up days in which there was nothing important to do.
• Women from the majority lower-class population might have found it hard to show sympathy: the working lives of poor English women had always been strenuous, inside and outside the house, but industrial society brought unprecedented pressures.
• The largest proportion of working women labored as servants in the homes of the more affluent, the explosive growth of mechanized industries, especially in the textile trade, created new and grueling forms of paid employment.
• Hundreds of thousands of lower-class women worked at factory jobs under appalling conditions, while the need for coal to fuel England’s industrial development brought women into the mines for the first time.
• A series of Factory Acts (1802-78) gradually regulated the conditions of labor in mines and factories, eventually reducing the sixteen-hour day and banning women from mine work altogether; but even with such changes, the lot of the country’s poorest women, whether factory operatives or housemaids, seamstresses or field laborers, was undoubtedly hard.
• Bad working conditions and underemployment drove thousands of women into prostitution.