The Victorian Novel

This inspiring survey challenges conventional ways of viewing the Victorian novel. The author explores the extremely varied and often experimental prose fiction of the period, paying attention to contemporary bestsellers as well as to major literary works. He reminds the reader that most Victorian novelists had their imaginations shaped not by High Victorianism, but by the ideals and sensibility of the Romantic period, and suggests that their work therefore embodies a tension between idealism and a new materialist objectivity.

The volume is based on the premise that a broad understanding of the Victorian period powerfully assists our understanding of its prose fiction. For this reason, the author not only provides overviews of the historical and social contexts of the Victorian novel, but also considers its relationship to historical, religious and biographical writing. The literary achievements of major novelists receive individual entries, while a section on topics considers issues such as colonialism, scientific speculation, the psychic and the supernatural, and working class reading.

Written in an accessible style without critical jargon, this imaginative study restores a sense of vital originality to a major body of literature.

List of Illustrations.

Acknowledgements.

How to Use This Book.

Chronology.

Introduction.

Context 1: Time Maps.

Prelude: 1830 1846.

Revolutions: 1847 1849.

Equipoise: 1850 1870.

Turning the Tide: 1871 1880.

The Last Decades: 1881 1901.

Context 2: Changing Perspectives.

′Things As They Are′.

History.

Biography.

Religion and Morals.

Evolution.

Detectives.

Context 3: Foundations.

The Truth of the Heart.

Affairs of the Heart(h).

Ways of Seeing.

The Modality of Melodrama.

The White Rabbit s Watch.

Key Authors.

William Harrison Ainsworth (1805 82).

Walter Besant (1836 1910).

Mary Elizabeth Braddon (later Maxwell) (1835 1915).

Charlotte Brontë, ′Currer Bell′ (1816 55), Emily [Jane] Brontë, Ellis Bell (1818 48), Anne Brontë, ′Acton Bell′ (1820 49).

Rhoda Broughton (1840 1920).

[William] Wilkie Collins (1824 89).

Marie [Isabel Marie] Corelli [née Mills, later Mackay] (1855 1924).

Charles [John Huffam] Dickens (1812 70).

Benjamin Disraeli (1804 81).

[Sir] Arthur Conan Doyle (1859 1930).

George Eliot (née Mary Anne/Marian Evans) (1819 80).

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (née Stevenson) 1810 65.

George [Robert] Gissing (1857 1903).

[Sir] H[enry] Rider Haggard (1856 1925).

Thomas Hardy (1840 1928).

G[eorge] P[ayne] R[aynesford] James (1801 60).

Henry James (1843 1916).

Douglas [William] Jerrold (1803 57).

Geraldine E[ndsor] Jewsbury (1812 80).

Charles Kingsley (1819 75).

[Joseph] Rudyard Kipling (1830 76).

[Joseph Thomas] Sheridan Le Fanu (1814 73).

Edward Bulwer–Lytton [until 1843, Edward George Earle Lytton] (1803 73).

George Macdonald (1824 1905).

Frederick Marryat (1792 1848).

Harriet Martineau (1802 76).

George Meredith (1828 1909).

George [Augustus] Moore (1852 1933).

Margaret Oliphant [née Wilson] (1828 97).

Ouida (Marie Louise de la Ramée, 1839 1908).

Charles Reade (1814 84).

G[eorge] W[illiam] M[acarthur] Reynolds (1814 79).

James Malcolm Rymer (1803? 84).

Robert Louis [Lewis Balfour] Stevenson (1850 94).

R[obert] S[mith] Surtees (1805 64).

William Makepeace Thackeray (1811 63).

Anthony Trollope (1815 82).

Mrs T[homas] Humphry Ward (née Mary Augusta Arnold) (1851 1920).

H[erbert] G[eorge] Wells (1866 1946).

[William Hale White] Mark Rutherford (1831 1913).

Ellen Wood [Mrs Henry Wood, née Ellen Price] (1814 87).

Charlotte Mary Yonge (1823 1901).

Key Texts.

Major Presences.

John Bunyan, The Pilgrim s Progress from this World to the Next (Part 1, 1678; Part II, 1684).

Sir Walter Scott, Waverley; or, Tis Sixty years Since (1814).

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818; revised 1831).

Pierce Egan, Sr, Life in London (1820 1).

Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (1833 4).

Main Texts.

Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (1837 8).

G. W. M. Reynolds, The Mysteries of London (1844 6).

Geraldine Jewsbury, Zoe (1845).

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847).

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847).

W. M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1847 8).

W. M. Thackeray, Pendennis (1848 50).

Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1852 3).

Charlotte Brontë, Villette (1853).

Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (1854 5).

Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers (1857).

George Eliot, Adam Bede (1859).

Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1860) 0.

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1860 1).

Mrs Henry [Ellen] Wood, East Lynne (1861).

Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley s Secret (1861 2).

Charles Kingsley, The Water–Babies (1863).

Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson], Alice s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Through the Looking Glass (1871).

Ouida [Marie Louise de la Ramée], Under Two Flags (1867).

R[ichard] D[oddridge] Blackmore, Lorna Doone (1869).

George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871 2).

Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now (1874 5).

George Meredith, The Egoist (1879).

Henry James, Portrait of a Lady (1881).

[Olive Schreiner] Ralph Iron, The Story of an African Farm (1883).

Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886).

Sir Henry Rider Haggard, She (1887).

George Gissing, New Grub Street (1891).

Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D Urbervilles (1891).

George Moore, Esther Waters (1894).

Marie Corelli, The Sorrows of Satan (1895).

H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895).

Arthur Morrison, A Child of the Jago (1896).

Bram [Abraham] Stoker, Dracula (1897).

Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh (1902).

Topics.

Children s Novels.

Colonial Novels.

Historical Novels.

Illustrated Novels.

Irish Novels.

New Woman Novels.

Publishing Formats.

Regional Novels.

Religious Novels.

Science, Utopias and Dystopias.

Sensation Novels.

Social Problem Novels.

The Supernatural.

Working–class Novels.

Further Reading.

Index.

Louis James s writing reflects his interests in Victorian and postcolonial literature, and his main publications include Fiction for the Working Man 1830–50 (1963), Print and the People (1976) and Caribbean Writing in English (1999). After a much–travelled academic life he now lives with his wife and two cats near the University of Kent at Canterbury, where he is an Emeritus Professor of English.