168 A Brif History of English Literature evident is not just a new energy in political and social analysis, but also a new sense of the self, including a sense of the interior self. Paradoxically, throughout this time of political turmoil, George Ill remained on the throne, from 1760 to 1820, creating an illusion of continuity and certainty, although, in a way that seems in keeping with this period, the king was afflicted with mental illness. He was succeeded by George IV and then, in 1830, William IV became king. Keats, Shelley and Byron were all dead by this time. Coleridge died in 1834. Only Wordsworth lived on into the Victorian era 10 Victorian Literature, 1837-1857 Charles Dickens Queen Victoria succeeded her uncle, William IV, as sovereign of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1837. In the same year, Charles Dickens published the first monthly instal- ments of Oliver Twist, a novel that tells us a great deal about the early Victorian period. The story concerns Oliver, an orphan child of the workhouse, who is apprenticed to an undertaker, but then runs away and encounters the Artful Dodger, who introduces him to Fagin in the London slums. Fagin is the organiser of a set of young thieves, and an associate of Bill Sikes, a violent criminal, ‘and Nancy, a prostitute. After a series of complications, Nancy reveals that Fagin is being bribed, by the boy's half-brother Marks, to corrupt Oliver, Nancy's betrayal is discovered, and Sikes mur- ders her. In the pursuit that follows, he accidentally hangs himself. Fagin is arrested, and Oliver is adopted by a benevolent Mr Brownlow. ‘An obvious target of the novel was the New Poor Law of 1834, which confined paupers to workhouses. A deeper issue, however, lies behind the immediate issue of the Poor Law; this is the way in which Britain inthe first haf of the nineteenth century was having to intro- duce new legislation and new mechanisms of social regulation in ‘order to control an increasingly complex society. The period around 1837 was one of unprecedented change as an agricultural country was transformed into an industrial one. The very appearance of the land- scape was changed by the railways, a physical alteration that also affected how people saw and related to each other. By 1851, well before anywhere else in Europe, more people lived in towns than in the countryside. These technological and demographic changes 10170 A Bre History of English Literature altered the fundamental rhythms of life. Old communal patterns of existence vanished; in a large town, such as London, and also in the new large industrial towns in the north, such as Manchester, each person encountered was not only a stranger but also potentially a threat. As early as the 18305, a new sense existed of being an individ- ual, and having to fend for oneself in the urban world. In the past, people knew precisely who they were, as they probably continued in the same occupations, and in the same homes, as their parents, but in a town it became necessary to think about one’s identity and how one related to other people. It also became necessary for the government to think about how to regulate this changing society; in Particular, the government had to think about how to deal with the surplus elements in society, the incidental casualties of economic progress. Dickens, in his characteristically populist way, challenges the inhumanity of aspects of the new social legislation. But Dickens also shares the anxieties of his time about potential disorder. The most alarming elements in Oliver Twist are Fagin and his gang, the violent Bill Sikes, and, although she has a heart of gold, the prostitute Nancy. Dickens throughout his career was fascinated, and yet repelled, by anarchic forces within society. It is a fear of criminality that is most apparent, but Dickens also deals again and again with the transgres- sive power of sexuality. What is also apparent, however, is a fear of the mob, of a threatening herd of working-class people such as the crowd that pursues the murderer Sikes. Oliver Twist, then, like Dickens's other novels, looks at the question of how to control an increasingly complex society, but in doing so ~ and this is one reason why his novels are so effective - offers a vivid sense ofthe dangerous forces that threaten this society. There was, it is true, a precedent for the kind of plot Dickens employs in Oliver Twist. In the years before 1837, the novel as a genre ‘was characterised by novelists reworking old forms and developing ‘new ones. There were novels of manners and sentiment, featuring life among the upper class and middle-class aspirants; one variety of the novel of manners was the ‘silver-fork’ novel, preoccupied with fash- ionable society. There were Gothic novels, and parodies of Gothic novels (such as Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey), and, by contrast, Vietorian Literature, 1837-1857 m1 novels of ordinary life. Extremely popular were historical novels, as, influenced by Walter Scott. But Dickens owes most to the Newgate novel, a form of fiction that dealt with the lives of criminals. A typi- cal Newgate novel, however, such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford (830) or Harrison Ainsworth’s Rookwood (1834), is a loose and episodic picaresque tale; Oliver Twist has altogether more focus. An aspect of this the way in which Dickens endorses emerging middle- class values, Oliver's salvation takes the form of being absorbed into a middle-class family. This is an important idea in the Victorian peri- od: domestic order acts as a refuge and sustaining structure in a changing world. ‘What we can add to this is the way in which Dickens time and time again deals with the progress of a male hero who, as with David in David Copperfield (1849-50) and Pip in Great Expectations (1860-1), comes to terms with the world as he embraces middle-class values. ‘At the same time, however, Dickens's heroes often have uncomfort- able doubles: David Copperfield is shadowed by Uriah Heep and Steerforth, both of whom reveal the kind of dark sexual urge that David attempts to conceal or deny in his own hife. It is as if, in embracing a new middle-class code, Dickens is equally aware of the precatiousness or vulnerability of the new respectable social concep- tion of the self, ofthe buried life that is hidden beneath the veneer of polite manners. There are, too, other important aspects of Dickens's art. In all his, novels, Dickens presents the teeming variety and abundance of the nineteenth century, but iti actually a carefully controlled vision. The ‘working-class characters are frequently eccentric, but, because they are 0, they do not represent a threat, The lower classes, in effect, become a kind of carnival backdrop to the moral advance of the middle-class heroes and heroines. The story thatis usually told in a Dickens novel is, a story of social reconciliation ané reconstitution. The characteristic hero or heroine is an orphan, who moves from a position of depriva- tion and oppression towards being inside a middle-class circle of kind- ness and care. Success is associated with the bourgeois virtues of industriousness, honesty and charty, while time and time again the novels are concerned with the development and strengthening of indi- vvidual identity. The heroes often struggle with sexual desire, but by and72 A Brief History of English Literature large they manage to control both their sexual needs and their moral nature. We can see this in a character such as Arthur Clennam, in Little Dorrit (855-7), who, in the face of adversity, including uncer- tainty about his parentage and identity, tackles life manfully, and is duly rewarded. But this is only towards the end of the story. There is often play with characters’ names in Dickens's novels, and itis often only at the end of a novel that a character, as isthe case with Esther in Bleak House, gets to know who he or she really i, and how he or she relates to other people. A lot of this might seem to suggest that Dickens uses the novel form to provide reassurance for his readers: it sas if the novels hold ‘out answers, in terms of specific ideas about identity and social class, that offer hope in an increasingly complicated and mechanised urban world The constructive element of what Dickens offers is cer= tainly important: a text such as David Copperfield, in particular, pro- Vides a role model for an idea of the self. This is a central aspect of the Victorian novel: it helped people in the nineteenth century make sense of their lives, including guidance on how they could construct themselves in a changing world. But this only works so well in Dickens's novels because, simultaneously, he provides a full impres- sion of the complexity of this new age that prompted these new nar- ratives ofthe self. We can see this in Bleak House (1852-3). Dickens's novels become darker and darker during the course of his career, a development that is initiated with Dombey and Son (1848), a disturbing tale of a father ‘who has no love for his daughter. Bleak House concerns Esther, the illegitimate daughter of Lady Dedlock, and her peripheral involve- ment in a court case about an inheritance, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, that has dragged on for years. The novel might end happily, with Esther marrying Dr Allan Woodcourt, but the reader is aware of a gap between the bewildering narrative structure and the orderliness of the story's outcome. This is an impression that starts to be created on the opening page of Bleak House: Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green airs and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights Victorian Literatu, 1837-1857 173 ‘The novel starts in fog, and we seemto be lost in a confusing fog. As is increasingly the case with Dickens's novels, the story features death, murder, madness, despair, suicide and hauntings. The charac- ters are disturbed, alienated and lost. This is the disorder of society, and the disorder felt in individual lives. It is, above all else, the dan- sgerous force of sexual desire that haunts and undermines society, something that is reflected in the presence of Esther as the illegti- mate child of Lady Dedlock and Captain Hawdon, who is now employed as a law-writer and who goes by the name of Nemo, or Nobody. This is perhaps the most disturbing aspect of Bleak House. Even though the novel endorses Victorian values, steering Esther into a rewarding relationship, it is a huge labyrinthine structure built around a missing centre, a dead father. Possibly why Dickens is the most celebrated Victorian novelist i that, to an extent that is not true of any other writer, he is able to render the alarming complexity of nineteenth-century Britain in its many dimensions even while suggesting its essential middle-class nature. Charlotte and Emily Bronté A period of around eighteen months in 1847-8 is generally regarded as perhaps the most significant in the entire history of the English novel. There were major novels by Dickens (Dombey and Son), William Makepeace Thackeray (Vanity Fat) Elizabeth Gaskell (Mary Barton), Charlote Bronté (Jane Eyre), and Emily Bronté (Wuthering Heights). This huge wave of major novels is more than a coincidence. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Britain experienced unprecedented economic and social change, all the various forces seeming to build toa climax around 1847-8. The novels that appeared at this time are a response to these social developments. But more is involved than just a response. An old discourse, en old way of thinking about the world, is losing relevance, and the novel as a genre is actively involved in creating a new discourse, including new ways of talking about people, society and the individual. It is very clear at this time that social change was affecting at a fundamental level the way in which people saw themselves ané how they felt about how they related to the world at large. INIVERSIDAD DE SEVILLA Filclogia -Sibioteca174 A Brief History of English Literature Charlotte Bronté's Jane Eyre might, initially, strike us as having very. little to do with the economic and social changes of the 1840s. Indeed, the novel might appear to be a simple love story that could have happened at any time in history, or no time at all Jane Eyre isan orphan who lives with her aunt, and then attends Lowood School. After some years asa pupil and then as.a teacher, she becomes a gov- cerness at Thornfield Hall, looking after Adéle, the ward of Edward Rochester. Jane agrees to marry Rochester, but at the wedding service itis revealed that he already has a wife, Bertha, a lunatic who is con- fined upstairs in his home. Jane flees, is taken in by a clergyman, St John Rivers, and his family, and takes up a post as the local schoolmistress. St John proposes to Jane, but she rejects him and returns to Thornfield Hall, Rochester's house, which is a blackened ruin. Bertha is dead, and Rochester maimed and blinded by the fire from which he sought to rescue Bertha. Jane and Rochester marry and the novel ends with an account of marital bliss. Jane Eyre could be regarded as a Cinderella story, in which the poor girl marries a prince. But, even though the story is set at a remove from urban and industrial Britain, there is a great deal of contempo- rary relevance in the way that it examines the position of women in Victorian Britain and in the remarkable way that it presents the hero- ine. In addition, although Jane Eyre might appear to lack the broad social awareness of a Dickens novel, this is not really the case at all Towards the end itis revealed that Jane is heir to a fortune that her uncle has made in Madeira; Bertha, Rochester's wife, is of mixed race, a woman he married in the West Indies; and St John asks Jane to join him in missionary work in India, In short, the novel shows a consis- tent awareness of the economic life of early Victorian Britain, in par- ticular its colonial dimension. Once we become aware of the colonial issue in the novel, we begin to gain a sense of how Jane Eyre is situat- ed in the society of the day: itis aware of, and to a certain extent examining, the complex economic and social life of early Victorian Britain. In acknowledging this, however, we need to recognise how ways of looking at Victorian fiction have changed in recent years. There ‘was a time when critics used to emphasise the moral development of Jane: that she is a hot-headed young woman who matures, learning Victorian Literature, 1837-1857 175 to act with more caution, The book could thus be seen as a kind of guide to the Victorians as to how they should behave. The problem ‘with such an approach is that it is too quick to dismiss troublesome elements in the story. The people from the colonies, the working- class characters, and women, in particular women such as Jane, are all awkward figures, challenging the complacency of male middle- class society, and all the more so asit was the people in the colonies, the working class and women who contributed so much to the pros- perity of Victorian Britain, Quite simply, early Victorian Britain might have been reconstructing and reconceiving itself as an ordered and morally respectable society, but there were those who remained ‘outside this new middle-class discourse. ‘Accordingly, recent criticism of Jane Eyre, rather than focusing on the containment of Jane's voice as she makes an accommodation with society, has looked atthe extraordinary nature, and demands, of that voice. Lowood School, impesing conformity and discipline, may be taken as an illustration of a kind of regimentation that was increasingly a feature of Victorian lif. Jane, however, consistently challenges the authority of the school and its director, Reverend Brocklehurst. Almost wilfully, Jane places herself in the position of social outsider. She has an opportunity to become an insider when Rochester proposes to her, but what is most interesting in the novel is the way in which, verbally, she ducls with Rochester, asserting her independence and refusing to yield. If a woman does not conform in Victorian society, however, she is punished, and the usual form this takes is incarceration. Bertha, who is mad, but can also be seen as a woman who refused to conform to the expectations of respectable society, is locked away. If Jane will not conform, she, too, might be locked away. The threat is all the more real because itis difficult for Jane to establish a conventional relationship with other people. Indeed, the impression that comes across is that Jane is strong and independent, but also vulnerable and confused. What is significant here is the kind of conception of the individual that Bronté offers. In Romantic literature, there is frequently a sense of the rebel or lonely outsider at odds with society. By the time we get to Jane Eyre, there is a sense of how, in a society where people are increasingly separated from their place of birth and their families, individuals are much176 A Brief History of English Literature more exposed, much more on their own. This is one of the central issues that Victorian texts return to. Socially, what we see in Victorian Britain is the emergence of a more regulated, more disci- plined society; rapid social change demands a greater degree of social control. But, at the personal level, rather than individuals just slotting into this structure, there is a sense of the lonely and complicated position of the individual. Typically, therefore, we see two things in Victorian novels: a new sense of social order, which is increasingly a ‘middle-class social order, and simultaneously, and paradoxically, a developing sense of psychological complexity, of the problems that an individual experiences in such a society. Jane Eyre ends with social reconciliation and reconstitution: Jane becomes part of the established order. But throughout the novel there are contradictory elements in her character. She sees herself as an outsider, but is always quick to judge others according to conven- tional values. In essence, she is at odds with, but also craves, middle- class respectability. This is a common contradiction in Victorian literature. Dickens, for example, is the most thorough-going sceptic about all the institutions of his day, but also a defender of middle- class society. In the case of Charlotte Bronté, her heroines are rebels, but very much middle-class rebels. What we need to appreciate, however, is that, in 1847-8, rather than merely describing an existing conception of middle-class individualism, Bronté is engaged in actively constructing this notion of individualism. It follows that Victorian readers looked to the novel asthe genre that could provide an understanding of, even a vocabulary for articulating, what it meant to be an individual in nineteenth-century Britain. ‘The kind of psychological complexity that we experience in Jane Byreis taken much further in Charlotte Bronté’s Villette (1853), where a central focus of concern is desire. The Victorians valued marriage in a way that had never been the case previously; for the Victorians, ‘marriage was the central mechanism of social regulation and control, tidying young people away into neat domestic units, and regulating the potentially dangerous force of sexuality. In Dickens's novels there is always a sense of sexuality as the anarchic energy that can disrupt the smooth-running of society. In Bronté, sexuality is equally anar- chic, but there is also something highly compelling about the way in Victorian Literature, 1837-1857 77 ‘which she creates a new discourse that can do justice to her heroines’ sexual feelings. Villette is the story of Lucy Snowe, a teacher ina girls school in the Belgian town of Villette. She gradually falls in love with Paul Emmanuel, another teacher at the school. He is obliged to depart for the West Indies, but leaves Lucy in charge of her own school, and with a promise to return in three years. At the end, however, itis pos- sible that he has died. In some ways this is the same story as Jane Eyre: anisolated young woman who asserts herself, finds herself, and finds ‘partner. But in Villete everything is cast in more extreme terms, and a compromise with society is never really achieved. At the end, Lucy is fantasising about a future that will probably never be realised. The novel is astute in its grasp of how power is wielded in society; there are extraordinary episodes, such as when Emmanuel is directing the school play, acting out all the parts and making the girls imitate his performance. He is, almost literally, putting words into the girls’ ‘mouths. The complement of this awareness of male power in society is the sense of Lucy as someone who is deeply isolated. ‘The manner is which Villette suggests Lucy’s needs, anxieties and desires is astonishing. Victorian society developed an ideology of ‘what was considered normal and respectable, with people deviating from this shared standard being judged as aberrant or dangerous. ‘The other side of this, however, was the simultaneous development of acomplex sense of the self, and this is what Villette conveys so well; indeed, the novel is helping to formulate this new sense of self by offering a language for it. This new notion of self did not actually conflict entirely with Victorian socal morality; on the contrary, itis 8 central element in the thinking ofthe Victorians and an important constitutive feature of the social formation. An advanced liberal cap- italist society not only proved flexible enough to accommodate a new idea of the individual but actually sustained itself by nurturing just such a sense of the individual. This is perhaps the principal rea- son why it is this complicated, intricate relationship between the individual self and society at large that Victorian novelists returned to time and time again. ‘What this also indicates, however, and perhaps rather surprising ly, is something rather parochial and insular about the subject matter178 A Brief History of English Literature of Victorian literary texts, and about the Victorian period generally. ‘The Victorians managed a vast empire but at no point saw them- selves as part of a broader European culture, as had been the case up until at least the seventeenth century. Their favoured form, the novel, focuses almost exclusively on domestic life. And the very term Victorian, unlike, say, Romantic, which suggests a way of thinking that transcends borders, implies an insular concern with British soci- ety. For the modern reader, Victorian literary texts are amongst the most compelling, but we should recognise that this is possibly because they address topics that are close to our own lives; we need to retain an awareness that, in some respects at least, the horizons of literature were reduced by the Victorians. Obviously, though, this does not reduce in any way the impact of many nineteenth-century novels. Consider Emily Bronté’s Wuthering Heights (1847), for example, which tells the story of the love between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff. It is a novel that seems to be caught between an old way of life and the new world of the Victorians. The house of Wuthering Heights is an open, communal space. Itis set against The Grange, a house of private rooms and pri- vate spaces. The architectural change suggests how the Victorians, increasingly, not only demanded their own private space, but also how, psychologically, they withdrew into themselves or detached themselves from other people. One of the many things that could be said about the relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff is that, in seeing themselves, as the imagery stresses, as one person, the novel rises above the Victorian ideology of separate individuals and sepa- rate lives. Wuthering Heights develops the idea of a passion that is so intense that it transcends individualism, but one reason why the novel can do this is because it has grasped how Victorian society is restructuring itself. A second generation emerges at the end of ‘Wuthering Heights, the children of Catherine and Heathcliff, genera- tion more moderate and disciplined in its behaviour. This, essential- ly, is the direction in which the world is heading, But, in its representation of the relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff themselves, Wuthering Heights confronts us with an extreme alterna- to the new social discipline that characterises early Victorian Britain. Victorian Literature, 1837-1857 179 William Makepeace Thackeray, Elizabeth Gaskell In 1851, Britain held a Great Exhibition in a Crystal Palace in Hyde Park in London. The social, industrial and political unrest that char- acterised the 1830s and 18408 was displaced by a spirit of burgeoning confidence in the 1850s. In this context, the Great Exhibition can be seen asa triumphalist statement, an invitation to the whole world to reproduce itself in the image of the middle-class Englishman. Industry ~ the exhibition was a celebration of industrial productivity = declared the existence of a world of identical and interchangeable parts; excess and instability were eliminated. The world's products were on display in the Crystal Palace; it was as if everything could be collected, catalogued and controlled under the roof that the British hhad constructed. Victorian literature to a large extent embraces this sense of the nation’s identity, but, as we might expect, literature also draws atten- tion to stresses and strains in the nation's self-image. In William, Makepeace Thackeray's novels what we see is a refusal to become enthusiastic about, and at times even to accept, the new values of the Victorian era, Perhaps most markedly, Thackeray appears to reject the new narratives of the Victorians For example, in Victorian fiction the typical heroine, asin Jane Eyre is frustrated by the lack of openings for her abilities within a gendered society but eventually settles down in that society. In Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1847-8), by contrast, the heroine, Becky Sharp, is conniving, cynical and nasty ~ a woman on. the make. Itis as if Thackeray knows how women are now presented in literature, but refuses to endorse this new vision. ‘There was a time when Thackeray was seen as the equal of his con- temporary Dickens. Even in his lifetime, however, reservations were voiced. Some readers felt Thackeray was old-fashioned, and certain- ly his works ~ with the exception of Vanity Fair ~ have sometimes proved less than compelling to modern readers. Yet it is possibly the old-fashioned qualities of Thackeray that make him interesting, for his is an awkward, reactionary voice, resisting the new assumptions at the heart of a great deal of early Victorian fiction. Thackeray's rep tutation was established with the publication of Vanity Fair, the sub- title of which, ‘A Novel without a Hero’, begins to suggest his