The Victorian novel

The Victorian novel (that took place during the Victorian age, a complex and contradictory era marked by progress to one side and characterised by poverty to the other) reflects and discuss social changes like the struggle for democracy (the problems of relationship between one class and another, the desire to rise and the fear of falling down the social ladder), the problems that arose from children’s exploitation of labour and corruption, but also the growth of towns (indeed by the middle of the 19th century Britain had became a nation of town dwellers thanks to the extraordinary industrial development –that it had been possible by child labour-), and all the institutions that reflected social conditions (business, education, etc.). Moreover, the Victorian novel is generally set in the city, a place where identities are lost. The greatest Victorian novelist is certainly Charles Dickens. In “Coketown”, Dickens centred on the description of the industrial centre of Coketown, showing to the readership the industrial development and its consequences. Moreover, in the Victorian age childhood was generally a cruente experience: poor children were obligated to work in industries (children were easier to control than adults and they were more flexible and malleable, they were used to adapt to all situations), and Dickens perfectly describes this troubled situation in “Oliver Twist”, a novel that reflects the economic insecurity and humiliation that the writer experienced when he was a child. In addition, the novel had a double face: to inform and to enjoy the readers, mixing useful with pleasant. For this reason, it was used to create opinions in the readership. Indeed, to tell the truth, Dickens uses an omniscient narrator, according to commenting the situation he tells about. The novel allied itself to parliamentary reports on industry, agriculture, health, prison conditions and criminality, but the most characteristic theme in Victorian fiction is class. For this reason, the reading public was predominantly middle class, and in particular, lower middle class; indeed the most popular subject for working writers was family life, especially middle class family one. The villains in Victorian fiction are over villainous caricatures of evil; the virtuous are often too virtuous and innocent (usually children), like victim designed to provide the sense of pathos which is so typical of Victorian fiction (that make rich people feel empathy with poor ones, driving them to help this people). Victorian novelists uses realism to one side and on the other they exploits pathos and the grotesque (hyperboles, exagerations that deform the character who becomes a caricature useful to entertain the reader and, moreover, to provide an alibi for rich people’s actions (there was the necessity in the reader to identify himself in the character). So, in the Victorian novels, the Manichean vision (that describes the struggle between a good, spiritual world of light, and an evil, material world of darkness) distinguishes just two categories of characters: rich and poor people (bad and good ones). All that explains why there is pathos and what does it means. Moreover, the logic of Utilitarianism (the doctrine according to which actions are right if they are useful or for the benefit of a majority) offered a sound of excuse: if on one hand all this accounts for the pathetic side of Victorian art, on the other it also explains much about the complementary side of the coin: the grotesque (that described the underworld damnation).