The Victorian Novel (notes)

During Victorianism people read more. People could find the same problems they lived everyday, they could identify themselves partly or totally in the novel.

The Victorian Novel dwells with social conditions, conflicts between social classes, difficulties to survive.

Edward Morgan Forster divided characters into two types: round and flat. A round character shows a development of his parabola in the story, on the contrary a flat one is a stereotype character and he or she represents a type who does not change during the narration.

What are the reasons of such division? Victorians judge everything according to the Manichean worldview.

Manichean: Of or relating to a dualistic view of the world, dividing things into either good or evil, light or dark, black or white, involving no shades of gray. It is a Medieval think.

The main topics of Victorian Novels are: corruption, exploitation, effects of utilitarianism and family.

The family for the Puritans represents a church in a small size. The family don't have to live with excesses. Puritans organize the family as the father is the most important element, the woman has to look after the house (women angels of the house - V.Woolf).

What should the novelist do in order to keep the Victorian readers' attention?

The novel should be didactic and at the same time it should entertain (miscére utile dulci).

The Victorian age is a period of great contradictions which are create by the gap between powers. Nothing could be said straight forward because of the rigid orthodox code behaviour of the time.

Techniques: titles generally refer to problems or the name of characters. They were generally the name of children that were unexploited.

Development: a lot of events made up a story line.

Victorian novels are mainly novels of telling à 3^rd person omniscient and frequently intrusive narrator which contributes to the narration giving his own point of view. The readers are totally guided.  

What should the writer do in order not to create a gap between his or her novel and the power? Victorian writers criticize society but they use disguising techniques: pathos and grotesque. The reader's position is to adopt the vision of the fiction's world. The use of grotesque deforms sizes and explains why the tones of narration are always exaggerated (hyperbolic use of the language). Exaggeration is a way to create a film, a screen and alibi to exorcise all the ghost of the middle class's bad conscience. Such filter allows the reader the possibility not to recognise his own image.

Novels of poverty were expressions of fear. Victorian novels allow poor people to be above. The use of the previous techniques implies the reader's superiority. It is important to notice that children, women and animals were considered inferior and therefore pathetic.

Through laughs the reader refuses to identify himself with the grotesque. The novel then becomes the mirror of the contradictions of the middle class identity and in addiction the expression of the moral puritan obligation of the middle class to solve the social problems caused by the Industrial revolution.

The city implies the alienation and the lost of identity, this is the reason why the city is the setting of the Victorian novel.

The Victorian novel is object of mass discussion, it becomes an object of industrial production ever casting any doubt upon itself as a system.

Most important writers: Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, the Bronte sisters, George Eliot and Anthony Trollope.

Key words: positive (utilitarian, realistic, concentrated on facts), contradictions (rigid straight ethic of behaviour: bad, good, moral immoral), opposition between facts and culture (facts were useful, culture were considered only a way to create pleasure). Imagination in order to Victorians is divorced from the world of reality.

Useful àpeople must think about a way towards a progress.