Features of the Victorian novel

How the reader reacts to pathos and the grotesque (typical feature of Victorian novel)?

Pity and compassion for the child’s conditions, but the middle class also felt superior because they are not so bad.

Title: refers to social problems; if the title is a proper name it is a child’s.

The narrator is a third person obtrusive narrator. He uses the telling technique, adverbs and metaphorical language. So the reader is not free to make a personal idea about characters and setting (subtle way of writing).

Another feature of the Victorian novel are children and women used as protagonists because they are considered inferior defenceless, so the reader feels pity toward them.

It is also important to notice that the setting most used is the city. In fact cities were the places where industrialization spread and the centre of the main social problems of the Victorian age such as workhouses.

Use of pathos and the grotesque:

1.      Involves the reader in feeling superior;

2.      Exaggeration of tones (hyperbolic use of language). The narrator creates a filter, which is an alibi to exorcise all the ghosts and fears of the middle class (fear of falling down the social ladder).

The grotesque’s filter allows the reader not to recognize himself or herself and laughter makes the reader take distance of reality.

Novels became mass production and they were published in instalments in order to make the reader buy the next one and to make him conjectures what would happen in the next instalment. The use of instalments is also due to the function of mass construction of the novel.