Introductory Remarks on Victorian Literature and Its Context

Nineteenth century English literature was very diverse, and among the more impressive literatures within one period England produced, with a possible competitor in Renaissance English. The Victorian period covers 64 years, longer than the average Victorian lifespan.

England changed during this period from an essentially agrarian nation to the wealthiest industrial and imperialist power in the world, but the shift was attended by massive poverty and attendant social problems--disease, filth and pollution, a high mortality rate, illiteracy, immiseration, unrest and repression.

The population of Great Britain increased from 11 million in 1811 to 32 million in 1870, and to 42 million by the end of the century. London became the largest city in Europe, with its population of around 1 million in 1812 rising to more than 3 million by 1870.

In literature, among other things, this is the period of the rise of a mass audience for newspapers, fiction, and other forms of reading matter, and the century of the respectabilization of the novel.

At the beginning of the century novels were considered an inferior genre, and highly educated persons preferred to write poetry. By the end of this century of great popular novelists such as Dickens and Bronte, the novel was at least valued for its potential artistry; in the intervening decades, of course, it has even become the genre of academic choice.

In a related phhenomenon, the 19th century was an era of great women novelists; women were less likely to receive the classical education considered appropriate for successful poets, and were more accepted as authors of fiction than of other genres (with some qualifications and some differences in markets).

Before the beginning of the century, sentimental and gothic novels constituted the bulk of fiction, but at the turn of the century and directly afterwards, Maria Edgeworth, Walter Scott, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley extended these genres.

The Victorian period saw an explosion in the number of great novelists--Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Gissing, Meredith, the Brontes, Gaskell, Eliot, Hardy, Schreiner, Moore--and in novels which combined social and psychological analysis.

The best novels combined both psychological and social analysis--of the novels we read, each represents one of these polarities (WH, FH).

Many "romances" and pastorals were written during the period, as were fairy stories, mythological tales and literature for children; and in a related genre, utopias such as News from Nowhere combined elements of the pastoral romance, travel account, time-travel narrative and social critique.

There were several social determinants of authorship. Most highly reputed authors received an upper-middle class education (the upper-middle-class was defined in 1840 as 1% of the population; the middle-class as 5%; at least half of the urban population worked as servants). Class distinctions were always important in the response authors received--Keats, for example, was forced to study the classics on his own, and was criticized for this; at the end of the cenury Hardy was very conscious of his lack of a university education, and wrote his greatest novel Jude the Obscure on a young man's disappointment at his educational and social marginality.

The essay was a popular form. Victorians bought and read sermons, and writers couched social and ethical criticism in the form of history and art criticism.

The period brought a rise in consciously autobiographical modes of writing--in autobiographies (J. H. Newman, John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, Anthony Trollope, Charles Darwin); novels (George Eliot's Mill on the Floss; Charles Dickens' David Copperfield); and poetry ("In Memoriam,").

Its poetry was lyrical, musical, and highly varied in meter and diction. Often poems placed an external or more realistic frames around an inner or romantic vision, used oblique and multiple narrators, and projections into the past and future, mingling irony, direct emotion, detachment and sympathy.

In art, social groups or settings were portrayed with vivid romantic coloration and sentiment. The Pre-Raphaelites were a new school of early Victorian Romantics.

England After the Napoleonic Wars and in the Early Years of Victoria's Reign:

Once the focus of academic history was chiefly on political and to a lesser degree, intellectual hstory, but in recent years, greater emphasis has been placed on social, economic and cultural history. Here I will mention a few topics relevant to understanding the early Victorian period: the Corn Laws and unrest; the suffrage and Chartism; food; wages; education; and the laws affecting women.

In 1815 most persons in Britain worked on the land, but by 1840 half lived in cities. During this period Britain became a textile exporting nation, which imported raw cotton from the American South. Its economy was based on trade and colonial markets (which of course had a growing effect on British foreign policy).

The Napoleonic War had affected the upper classes very little. At the end of the war the ranks of unemployed were swollen by more than 400,000 demobilized men.

Rises in the price of corn (grain) hurt the manufacturing and laboring classes, but added to the profits of the grain sellers, the aristocracy. Under the Speedhamland relief system the poor received a dole, thus maintaining wages at a below-subsistence leval and keeping grain prices high. When power was transferred to the manufacturing upper-middle-classes by the Reform Bill of 1832, one of the first things they did was to abolish outdoor relief.

In 1815 the Corn Law was passed, prohibiting the import of corn until the price rose to a certain (starvation) level. This prevented competition for grain growers and encouraged speculation. The existence of the Corn Laws provided the background for the thirty year debate about "free trade."

After the war, a decreasing proportion of farmers were able to own their own land, and the dispossessed became farmhands working for wages. Enclosure continued, as formerly cultivated land was used for grazing. In 1830 starving field laborers in the southern counties rioted for higher wages; 3 were hanged and 420 deported.

Until 1832 there were 220 offenses for which the death penalty could be imposed, among them housebreaking, forgery, and sodomy (still a hangable offense until the 1860s). Game laws were very severe; early in the century it was illegal for anyone not a squire or squire's eldest son to kill game; a cottager who set traps might be transported for 7 years; mantraps and spring-guns could be legally set on poachers. The gentry were also magistrates and justices of the peace, and remained rulers of the countryside even after the Reform Bill of 1832.

The unpopular George IV reigned until 1830, and was succeeded by his brother William IV until 1837. In 1830 the Whigs gained an electoral majority for the first time in almost half a century, and inaugurated a period of (relative, upper-middle-class) reforms. The Whigs were the party of the wealthy urban merchants; the Tories of the landed gentry. The Tories upheld the established (i. e., state-funded Anglican) church; many of the Whigs were dissenters.

In 1829 one of their legal desires had already been effected. The Catholic Emancipation Bill permitted Catholics to hold office, a crucial matter in relations with hitherto largely disenfranchised Ireland.

The Franchise:

Before 1832 the vote was given to owners of 40 shilling freeholds in the counties. The borough vote was very irregular--entire cities were disenfranchised, others were held as "pocket boroughs" [that is, a single landowner could choose the candidate], votes were openly sold, and in the absence of a secret ballot, landlords controlled the votes of smaller farmers. Those who performed services for the king routinely received newly created peerages and sat in the House of Lords.

The Reform Bill of 1832 eliminated 56 pocket and rotten boroughs and redistributed 143 seats to towns, counties, Scotland and Ireland. In the counties the vote was given to 40 shilling freeholders; to renters who paid 10 pounds per year as freeholders, copyholders, and 60 year leaseholders; and to 50 pound leaseholders with shorter term leases and renters (tenants-at-will). In the boroughs the vote was given to those paying 10 pounds annual leasehold, with one year residency. The bulk of the population was still disenfranchised; the next great reform bill, that of 1867, brough the electorate up to something less than 10% of the adult population.

In 1833 slavery was abolished in British colonies, as the culmination of agitation led by William Wilberforce and others; on the other hand, the Jamaican constitution was suspended for the 5 years 1839-44 to protect former slaveowners from punishment for brutality toward former slaves.

The trade union movement began with the repeal of the Combination Laws. Robert Owen and others formed the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union with 500,000 members, seeking an 8 hour day. In 1834 6 Dorchester laborers who had tried to enlist others in the union, the "Tolpuddle Martyrs," were sentenced to 7 years imprisonment and transportation to Australia, and the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union dissolved.

Chartist agitation for the suffrage was the major working-class movement of the late 30s and 40s. In 1836 a Workingman's Association in London set forth its program in a charter drawn up by Francis Place and William Lovett. This advocated manhood suffrage, the secret ballot, the abolition of property requirements for members of parliament, annual parliamentary elections, the payment of salaries to members of parliament, and equal electoral districts. In 1839 a large mass demonstration presented the Charter to Parliament, which rejected it; riots broke out in Birmingham and Newport, Wales, where police fired on a crowd and killed 20 persons (cmp. the 1819 Peterloo Massacre, in which 11 were killed and 400 wounded).

In the year in which Marx and Engels published the Communist Manifesto, 1848, agitation reached its peak. In the year of great economic distress and famine in Ireland, the Charter was once again carried to Parliament and again rejected. As the recession lightened, the 50s became a period of reaction. The nationalist movement arose in Ireland, and its adherents were severely repressed by coercion bills. Though another Reform Bill was passed in 1867, universal suffrage was not attained until 1928.

In the meantime, the Corn Laws were repealed in 1846 after a great campaign by manufacturers and working people's organizations. The duty on corn was reduced to a shilling a quarter bushel, and other duties were abolished.

Religion, Railroads, Daily Life:

Non-Anglican Christians (Dissenters, Catholics) were still excluded from most forms of public office (although non-Catholics could vote and become members of Parliament) and from positions in the universities and commissions in the armed services. In 1854 Dissenters of all creeds were admitted to Oxford and Cambridge, but stil debarred from the M. A. degree, degrees of divinity, headships, professorships, and fellowships--that is, from teaching, governing and administrative positions. Disabilities on Jews were first removed in the 1850s; agnostics and non-believers suffered exclusion throughout the century.

These exclusions account for the somewhat smaller number of Catholics and Jews who were prominent in the public intellectual debates of the period. The Tory prime minister Benjamin Disraeli converted to Anglicanism; the Jesuit poet Hopkins finished Oxford before converting to Catholicism. Arguments over whether Anglican church should lean toward high- or low-church practices--Evangelicalism or the Oxford Movement--were an important feature of contemporary debates.

This was a period of swift railroad expansion and the resulting division of the countryside; by 1848 some 5000 miles of railways had been built, and the rest of the century saw the introduction of railways into hitherto remote parts of the north and west. British paintings of the period often present a nostalgically realized countryside, even as this was ever-receding.

Food: In the early Victorian period workers ate mostly potatoes and bread, with occasional portions of bacon, milk and cheese.

Education: An average education was four or five years, and often of very low quality; many women complained that they were chiefly taught to sew.

Childrearing was often severe, with corporeal punishment.

For women, no middle-class employments except governessing and teaching were available. Wives had no legal right to their own children, which could even be taken away from them by their husbands. Divorce was expensive and unequal; the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 permitted men to divorce on the grounds of adultery, but not women, legalizing a "double standard" of morality. Wives had no right to own property (except in trust), and until 1870 had to right to their own earnings, and the legal age of consent was 12, encouraging child prostitution. The average woman bore about 6 live children even at the turn of the century.

On Laws Affecting the Poor and Workers:

The Poor Law of 1832 ended outdoor relief to able-bodied poor, and in its place set up workhouses under local administration. Families were separated, and kept on subsistence rations to make the workhouse less attractive than all availble forms of labor, a grim comparison. Often the poor, insane, sick and orphans were crowded together into workhouses, though as the century progressed orphanages, insane asylums and hospitals began to absorb these more specialized functions.

Those who worked were sometimes not much better off--during the "season" dressmakers and milliners worked 20 hour days in crowded, dark conditions; it was said that one died yearly in an average establishment. Bending and fatigue produced deformed limbs, and made it difficult for long overworked seamstresses to bear children.

Mine workers lived a worse life, with 14 hour days; cramping and stooping resulted in frequent physical deformity and death. As Victorian writers and philanthropists publicized these conditions, gradually a series of factory acts began to mitigate the worst conditions.

In 1833, the first of these decreed that no child under 11 was to be employed more than 48 hours a week, or 9 hours per day; no person under 18 more than 12 hours per day; and young children were to be given leave to attend school for two hours daily. The rules on education were not always enforced by inspectors, and teachers were often untrained and ignorant. In 1847 the Ten Hours Bill limited work to 70 hours weekly for women and children; women were paid about half of the salary of men, and children even less.

No general literacy was mandated until the Education Act of 1870, which provided for state-supported primary and middle-schools.

1847 was the year of Jane Eyre, Dombey and Son, and Wuthering Heights. The latter was in some respects a romanticization of the remote life of the passionate, self-willed gentry, and in other respects reflected the harshness and unrest of the life of its decade.