Part Four: Victorian Literature to 1880

periodically tried to make sense of it; Matthew Arnold criticized it; Mrs Gaskell reflected it and reflected on it. Anthony Trollope represented it.

Moral history

Although literature is never merely history, the novel becomes a moral history of modern life with Dickens and Thackeray, elaborately so in George Eliot’s Middlernarch, a novel exemplifying a principle Eliot derived from Scott: ‘there is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life’. Yet the wider life was interesting to George Eliot (the pen-name of Mary Ann Evans) because it shaped the moral and emotional life of single persons. In keeping with this Romantic priority, her characters are more personal than Scott’s.

George Eliot (1819-80) was one of many who sought after wisdom in an age of shaken certitudes and robust consciences. Clergymen, sages and critics wrote lessons and lectures for the breakfast-table and the tea-table. These were later bound up in tomes with marbled endpapers. Few are unshelved today, except in universities. The Victorian books living today are chiefly novels, and these novels (despite the ‘authenticity’ of their modern film versions) do not hold up a mirror to the age. Victorians produced impressive reports on the London poor, on the factories of Manchester and on urban sanitation, but a documentary social realism was not the rule in Victorian fiction.

One reason for this lies in the subjective and imaginative character of Romantic literature of the years 1798-1824, which altered the nature of non-factual writing. The simple pleasure of vicarious egotism died with Byron, but books, annuals and

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periodicals brought a regulated Romanticism into Victorian homes - via, for example, Jane Austen’s novels. In this simple sense, all subsequent literature - even the anti-Romantic literature of the modernists - is post-Romantic. Victorian narrative history has much in common with novel-writing. Scott’s wish to tell the tale of the tribe was felt by Thackeray, Dickens and George Eliot, who re-create the worlds

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surrounding their childhoods. In an age of disorienting change, historical thinking was incited by the blasts of Carlyle’s trumpet in his French Revolution, Heroes and Hero-worship and Past and Present. The effects of Carlyle can be read in Ruskin, Dickens and William Morris.

Abundance

An eager reading public, larger than before, was regularly fed with serials and three-decker novels. Collected editions of popular novelists and best-selling prophets, and of fastidious prose-writers such as John Henry Newman and Walter Paten run to many volumes. In an age when engineering miracles appeared every month and London had several postal deliveries a day, Dickens was thought hyperactive. Trollope wrote 2-3000 words daily before going to work at the Post Office. He invented the pillar box, rode to hounds midweek and Saturday, and wrote seventy books. The verse of a Tennyson, a Browning or a Morris is not contained in a thousand pages. Lesser writers such as Benjamin Disraeli, Bulwer Lytton, Charles Kingsley, Mrs Oliphant and Vernon Lee were equally prolific. Victorian vim continued less cheerfully in Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Joseph Conrad and the Edwardian Ford Madox Ford. Thereafter, serious novelists became less productive, though D. H. Lawrence (18851930) and the American William Faulkner (1897-1962) are exceptions.

To some, such abundance already seemed oppressive long before 1914. But by the time Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians came out in 1918, most of what the Victorians had believed, assumed and hoped had died. Strachey’s debunkings of Cardinal Manning, Dame Florence Nightingale, Dr Thomas Arnold and General Gordon sold well. Victorians enjoyed laughing at themselves with Dickens, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, W. S. Gilbert and Oscar Wilde, and had a genius for light verse and for nonsense verse (not the same thing). But the modernists ridiculed the Victorians, who are still not always taken seriously, even by academics. Although universities have reinvested heavily in Victorian literary culture, quality remains the criterion in a critical history. Much of this literary abundance is of human or of cultural interest. How much of it is of artistic value?

Queen Victoria opening the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace, Hyde Park, London, 1 May 1851.

extraordinary in form and style. Once devoured for its message, the book’s chaotic style makes it hard reading.

After arduous years studying German thought and translating Goethe, Carlyle moved from Craigenputtock, Dumfries, to Chelsea, where his History of the French Revolution made him famous. Scornful of metaphysical and materialist thinkers, he forged a faith in Life, in intuition and action, and in historical heroes who transcended human limitation. His great man - statesman, priest, man of action, captain of industry, man of letters - achieves his vision with energy. Earnest action is itself good; the vision itself is secondary. Carlyle’s shrewdness, trenchancy and conviction cannot hide a want of mind, a substitution of means for ends. It is an attitude which prepared the way for the ‘world-historical’ man, the Hitlers and Stalins of the religion of humanity.

Carlyle was one of the first to diagnose the ills that industrial capitalism brought to society. He saw the plight of the factory hand whose labour was the source o wealth: with no stake or pride in the processes to which he was enslaved; exploited, underpaid, discarded (unemployment was high in the 1840s) and condemned to the workhouse. Carlyle’s analysis was admired by Karl Marx when he took refuge in

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liberal England. Marx’s solution was political: class war, and the victory of the proletariat. The warning of Carlyle was moral: those to whom evil is done do evil in return. The remedy, in Past and Present, lies in renewing old arrangements: leaders who work, a renewed feudalism. Carlyle argues that Gurth, the Saxon swineherd of Scott’s Ivanhoe, knew his master, his place, and the value of his work. Unlike the factory hand, the serf Gurth was spiritually free. This idealization of the mutual respect between the different ranks of pre-industrial society, found in Burke, Scott, Cobbett’s Rural Rides (1821-) and Pugin’s Contrasts (1836), is found again in Disraeli, Ruskin and even Morris. Anti-capitalist, it more often took a paternalist than a progressive form. Carlyle’s political legacy was mistrust of revolution and fear of the mob, given unforgettable expression in his French Revolution, a source of Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities.

John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill (1806-73) was the son of James Mill (1773-1836), a Scot intended for the ministry who came to London, like Carlyle. A friend of the economist David Ricardo and the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, James forced his infant son through a famously stiff educational programme.

At 16, J. S. Mill founded the Utilitarian Society to study Bentham’s idea that all policy should be judged by the criterion of what furthered ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ by the use of a ‘felicific calculus’. As Mill recounts in his Autobiography (1873), he had as a young adult ‘felt taken up to an eminence from which I could see an immense mental domain, and see stretching out into the distance intellectual results beyond all computation.’ This biblical metaphor recalls both Swift’s Academy of Projectors, and Bentham’s Panopticon, a design for a workhouse where every inmate could be supervised by a single all-seeing person. (All inmates could see the supervisor’s elevated observation-room, but could not tell whether he was there watching them.) British reformers used Bentham’s planning throughout the 19th century, but his reductive and mechanistic model of society was anathema to Carlyle and Dickens (see the illustration on page 255).

At 20, Mill suffered a depression from which he was rescued by reading Wordsworth’s poetry – ‘the very culture of the feelings which I was in quest of’. Mill’s lucid essays on Bentham and Coleridge balance rational material improvement with emotional and spiritual growth. They are a good starting-place for an understanding of post-Romantic culture, and an advertisement for the 19th-century liberal mentality. Intellectual clarity marks the prose of On Liberty (1859), Principles of Political Economy (1848) and Utilitarianism (1863).

John Ruskin

The most Romantic prose of the Victorian sages is found in John Ruskin (1819-1900). His eloquent reaction to social problems had a spellbinding effect on the thought and lives of the young: on William Morris and Oscar Wilde, on Gandhi, who read him on trains in South Africa, and on Marcel Proust, who translated him (with some help) into French. Ruskin, untrained in aesthetics, was to be England’s great art critic. He next turned from art and architecture to society, denouncing the ugly greed of England, and eventually, in apocalyptic tones, the pollution of the natural world by ‘the Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century’.

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Ruskin’s greatness is as striking as his singularity, an instance of the effect of Evangelicalism and Romanticism on an only child. Of his first sight (at 14) of the Swiss Alps at sunset, he wrote (at 70) that ‘the seen walls of lost Eden could not have been more beautiful’. Like the Alps at sunset, Ruskin’s works are vast, awe-inspiring and easy to get lost in. He is like Coleridge in his range, but less metaphysical and more moral in his discursiveness. He has passages of rhythmical harmony almost as beautiful as Tennyson’s verse: of rapt perception and analytic description, of social insight and prophetic force. Of his passages of description, Virginia Woolf wrote that it is as if ‘all the fountains of the English language had been set playing in the sunlight’. He was an enchanting public lecturer, but could run self-persuaded into oddity or obsession. Ruskin, like Carlyle and Dickens, confronted by the brutality and waste of industrial society and by the amoral neutrality of political economists, felt outrage. He proposed radical and collective human solutions both in the arts and in politics. He lost the narrowness of his upbringing, but regained Christian belief. He called himself a Tory of the school of Homer and Sir Walter Scott and a ‘communist, reddest of the red’.

Ruskin’s first major work, Modern Painters (5 volumes, 1843-60), was interrupted by The Seven Lamps of Architecture and The Stones of Venice (3 volumes,

‘Contrasted Residences for the Poor’, one of the architect A. W. Pugin’s polemical Contrasts (1830; revd edn 1841). The modern poorhouse is a rational House of Correction, like Bentham’s Panopticon (see page 254); its turnkey and dissectionist’s suppliers anticipate Dickens. The medieval almshouse, by contrast, supplies food, loving care and Christian burial.

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1851-3). He turned aside from his defence of the English Romantic painter J. M. W. Turner to preserve in prose the medieval architecture of Europe then being destroyed. He drew and measured the major Gothic buildings in Venice like a geologist, studying the components of their architecture and ornament. Volume 1 analyses the results of this original research, classifying good and bad. Volume 2 cleanses Venice of its post-medieval reputation, and famously defines, after an imagined overview of Europe from the air, ‘the Nature of Gothic’. He derived the health of Gothic architecture from the condition of its producers in craft guilds, in contrast with the uniform dead finish of British factory ware, and the condition of its producers. (The Gothic revival architect, A. W. Pugin, had anticipated these views in Contrats (1836). Ruskin did not acknowledge this, perhaps because Pugin wanted to undo the Reformation as well as the Renaissance.)

Ruskin’s perception that the workman was being turned into a machine led him to denounce competition and commercialism. After 1860 he plunged into furious propaganda on art and craft, on social, political and economic theory. He poured out money, lectures, tracts, and public letters, and set up schools, organizing the Guild of St George, and teaching at the Working Men’s College. He was the first Slade Professor of Art at Oxford, resigning twice. Increasingly isolated, he had periods of delirium. After 1889 he withdrew to Brantwood, his house on Coniston Water, spoke little and wrote nothing. (His career was to be curiously paralleled by that of the 20th-century American poet Ezra Pound.)

Before falling silent, Ruskin wrote an enchanting autobiography, Praeterita, a lucid vision of the lost paradise of his childhood: his protected upbringing, learning the Bible by heart with his mother; private education; reading Byron; Oxford (not much use to him); learning to draw (very well). Travel opened his eyes: in a carriage specially built with a seat for young John to see out from, the Ruskins visited the houses of clients (his father was a sherry-importer, a partner of Pedro Domecq), and then toured Normandy, Switzerland and northern Italy. He studied geology, walked and sketched in the Alps or in Scotland. In Praeterita, the reformer’s remaining wish is to recompose his youthful visions and make us see - the Rhone, the Alps, a single tree. This calm after the storm is not ruffled by any word of his arranged marriage, which ended in public scandal; his infatuation with Rose La Touches his court case against Whistler.

Ruskin’s principles, in art, craft, architecture and ecology, have outlasted his immediate causes. Praeterita (‘Things Past’), ends:

Fonte Branch I saw with Charles Norton, under the same arches where Dante saw it. We drank of it together, and walked together that evening on the hills above, where the fireflies among the scented thickets shone fitfully in the still undarkened air. How they shone! moving like fine-broken starlight through the purple leaves. How they shone! through the sunset that faded into thunderous night as I entered Siena three days before, the white edges of the mountainous clouds still lighted from the west, and the open golden sky calm behind the gate of Siena’s heart, with its still golden words, Cor magis

tibi Sena pandit, and the fireflies everywhere in sky and cloud rising and falling, mixed with the lightning, and more intense than the stars.

Cor magis tibi Sena pandit is the city’s motto: ‘More than her gates, Siena opens her heart to you’.

Sunset and valediction coincide in Wordsworth’s Tintern, Coleridge’s Dejection, Keats’s Autumn and Shelley’s West Wind. Soaring skies and sad clouds are a Victorian combination.

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John Henry Newman

Romanticism, on one view, is ‘spilt religion’, a definition which suggests that religion is an emotion. This was not the view of John Henry Newman (1801-90), the master of Victorian non-fictional prose. The departure of rationalists from Christian belief, and the first moves to separate Church and State in England, provoked John Keble, a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, to preach a sermon in 1833 on ‘national apostasy’: the prospect of an atheist England. This began the Oxford or Tractarian Movement, so called from Tracts for the Times, founded by Newman and contributed to by Keble and Pusey, also Fellows of Oriel. The tracts argued that the Church of England kept the faith of the apostles and of the early Church. In 1841 Newman, vicar of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, published Tract 90, which maintains that the 39 Articles in which the Church of England had formulated its faith under Edward VI were those of the historic and universal Catholic Church. Newman, originally an Evangelical and then a liberal, came to believe that Broad Church liberalism would first dilute and then dissolve Christian belief.

Bishops denounced Tract 90, and Newman had to consider the possibility that the Church of England was not apostolic, and that the Roman Catholic Church was what it claimed to be. He resigned St Mary’s and his Fellowship, and in 1845 was received into the Catholic Church. As Oxford was the intellectual centre of the country’s religious life, Newman’s conversion was a landmark in post-Reformation history. Other clergy and undergraduates turned to Rome. Was this a ‘Second Spring’ of English Catholicism? In 1846 Newman left Oxford, paying a last visit to his tutor at his undergraduate college:

Trinity had never been unkind to me. There used to be much snap-dragon growing on the wall opposite my freshman’s rooms there, and I had for years taken it as the emblem of my own perpetual residence even unto death in my University. On the morning of the 23rd I left the Observatory. I have never seen Oxford since, excepting its spires, as they are seen from the railway.

This passage comes from Apologia Pro Vita Sua, a vindication of his life, composed in 1864 in response to Charles Kingsley, who had casually remarked in a review that Newman, like the Catholic clergy generally, did not hold truth to be a necessary virtue. (Alexander Macmillan, publisher of the magazine in which the remark appeared, sincerely enquired of Newman whether this was not the Catholic position.) Newman’s scrupulous history of his religious opinions showed the falsity of Kingsley’s charge and convinced a sceptical audience of his own good faith. The Apologia remains a convincing spiritual and intellectual autobiography.

Newman had studied the Church Fathers and 17th-century Anglican divines, and like them he composed for the ear, taking pains over rhythmic and syntactic organization as well as clear argument and distinct diction. Some of his sermons, hymns, prayers, poems and lives of English saints have outlived their occasions; as have his Church history, theology and fiction. An early hymn suggests his modesty:

Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom. Lead thou me on;

The night is dark and I am far from home; Lead thou me on.

Keep thou my feet; I do not ask to see The distant scene; one step enough for me.

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Too dim for Kingsley, this hymn was a favourite of Thomas Hardy’s. Newman’s major work in verse is The Dream of Gerontius, made into an oratorio by Elgar. It dramatizes the destiny of the soul after death.

The most valuable of Newman’s other works are his Development of Christian Doctrine, which relates the historical evolution of Christian dogma to the Church’s teaching authority, and his Grammar of Assent. Another classic is his Idea of a University, his discourses as first Rector of University College, Dublin. He defines and defends the liberal idea of education against Edinburgh Utilitarianism and an Irish hierarchy which assumed that its new College was there to teach Catholic doctrine. Newman’s ‘Idea’ is that a university is not to teach useful knowledge or dogmatic truth, nor to pursue research, but to educate philosophically and critically, to discipline and enlarge the mind.

In his Apologia Newman approaches Christian belief along converging arguments from history and personal experience as well as from scripture, philosophy and theology. His view that Providence has guided the historical development of Christian revelation brings a British empiricism into theology. His argument from experience draws on the educated imagination, developing a Romantic doctrine. Newman also thought that the Oxford Movement developed from Romanticism. In retrospect, he understood that Movement as

Barbarians, and ridicules the middle class as Philistines - a name offensive to puritan belief in the English as a chosen race. His terms ‘culture’ and ‘Philistine’ gained lasting currency. His literary criticism will be mentioned later, but his forecast that the consolations of religion would in future be supplied by poetry

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deserves the final mention in an account of Victorian sages. His successor, Walter Pater (1839-94), discussed in Chapter 11, was a critic not of society but of art and letters and the individual life.

Further reading

Holloway, J. The Victorian Sage: Studies in Argument (London: Macmillan, 1953).

Houghton, W. E. The Victorian Frame of Mind: 1830-1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957).

Young, G. M. Victorian England: Portrait of an Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936; annotated edn by G. K. Clark, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1977).