The Nature of
Romanticism
As a term to cover the
most distinctive writers who flourished in the last years of the 18th century
and the first decades of the 19th, “Romantic” is indispensable but also a
little misleading: there was no self-styled “Romantic movement” at the time, and
the great writers of the period did not call themselves Romantics. Not until
August Wilhelm von Schlegel’s Vienna lectures of 1808–09 was a clear
distinction established between the “organic,” “plastic” qualities of Romantic
art and the “mechanical” character of Classicism.
The emphasis on
feeling—seen perhaps at its finest in the poems of Robert Burns—was in some
ways a continuation of the earlier “cult of sensibility”; and it is worth
remembering that Alexander Pope praised his father as having known no language
but the language of the heart. But feeling had begun to receive particular
emphasis and is found in most of the Romantic definitions of poetry. Wordsworth
called poetry “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling,” and in 1833 John
Stuart Mill defined poetry as “feeling itself, employing thought only as the
medium of its utterance.” It followed that the best poetry was that in which
the greatest intensity of feeling was expressed, and hence a new importance was
attached to the lyric. Another key quality of Romantic writing was its shift
from the mimetic, or imitative, assumptions of the Neoclassical era to a new
stress on imagination. Samuel Taylor Coleridge saw the imagination as the
supreme poetic quality, a quasi-divine creative force that made the poet a godlike
being. Samuel Johnson had seen the components of poetry as “invention,
imagination and judgement,” but Blake wrote: “One Power alone makes a Poet:
Imagination, the Divine Vision.” The poets of this period accordingly placed
great emphasis on the workings of the unconscious mind, on dreams and reveries,
on the supernatural, and on the childlike or primitive view of the world, this
last being regarded as valuable because its clarity and intensity had not been
overlaid by the restrictions of civilized “reason.” Rousseau’s sentimental
conception of the “noble savage” was often invoked, and often by those who were
ignorant that the phrase is Dryden’s or that the type was adumbrated in the
“poor Indian” of Pope’s An Essay on Man. A further sign of the diminished
stress placed on judgment is the Romantic attitude to form: if poetry must be
spontaneous, sincere, intense, it should be fashioned primarily according to
the dictates of the creative imagination. Wordsworth advised a young poet, “You
feel strongly; trust to those feelings, and your poem will take its shape and
proportions as a tree does from the vital principle that actuates it.” This
organic view of poetry is opposed to the classical theory of “genres,” each
with its own linguistic decorum; and it led to the feeling that poetic
sublimity was unattainable except in short passages.
Hand in hand with the new
conception of poetry and the insistence on a new subject matter went a demand
for new ways of writing. Wordsworth and his followers, particularly Keats,
found the prevailing poetic diction of the late 18th century stale and stilted,
or “gaudy and inane,” and totally unsuited to the expression of their
perceptions. It could not be, for them, the language of feeling, and Wordsworth
accordingly sought to bring the language of poetry back to that of common
speech. Wordsworth’s own diction, however, often differs from his theory.
Nevertheless, when he published his preface to Lyrical Ballads in 1800, the
time was ripe for a change: the flexible diction of earlier 18th-century poetry
had hardened into a merely conventional language.
Poetry
Blake,
Wordsworth, and Coleridge
William Blake:
Pity
William Blake: Pity Pity,
color print finished in pen and watercolor by William Blake, 1795; in the Tate
Gallery, London.
Useful as it is to trace
the common elements in Romantic poetry, there was little conformity among the
poets themselves. It is misleading to read the poetry of the first Romantics as
if it had been written primarily to express their feelings. Their concern was
rather to change the intellectual climate of the age. William Blake had been
dissatisfied since boyhood with the current state of poetry and what he
considered the irreligious drabness of contemporary thought. His early
development of a protective shield of mocking humor with which to face a world
in which science had become trifling and art inconsequential is visible in the
satirical An Island in the Moon (written c. 1784–85); he then took the bolder
step of setting aside sophistication in the visionary Songs of Innocence
(1789). His desire for renewal encouraged him to view the outbreak of the
French Revolution as a momentous event. In works such as The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell (1790–93) and Songs of Experience (1794), he attacked the hypocrisies
of the age and the impersonal cruelties resulting from the dominance of
analytic reason in contemporary thought. As it became clear that the ideals of
the Revolution were not likely to be realized in his time, he renewed his
efforts to revise his contemporaries’ view of the universe and to construct a
new mythology centered not in the God of the Bible but in Urizen, a repressive
figure of reason and law whom he believed to be the deity actually worshipped
by his contemporaries. The story of Urizen’s rise was set out in The First Book
of Urizen (1794) and then, more ambitiously, in the unfinished manuscript Vala
(later redrafted as The Four Zoas), written from about 1796 to about 1807.
Blake developed these
ideas in the visionary narratives of Milton (1804–08) and Jerusalem (1804–20).
Here, still using his own mythological characters, he portrayed the imaginative
artist as the hero of society and suggested the possibility of redemption from
the fallen (or Urizenic) condition.
William Wordsworth and
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, meanwhile, were also exploring the implications of the
French Revolution. Wordsworth, who lived in France in 1791–92 and fathered an
illegitimate child there, was distressed when, soon after his return, Britain
declared war on the republic, dividing his allegiance. For the rest of his
career, he was to brood on those events, trying to develop a view of humanity
that would be faithful to his twin sense of the pathos of individual human
fates and the unrealized potentialities in humanity as a whole. The first
factor emerges in his early manuscript poems “The Ruined Cottage” and “The
Pedlar” (both to form part of the later Excursion); the second was developed
from 1797, when he and his sister, Dorothy, with whom he was living in the west
of England, were in close contact with Coleridge. Stirred simultaneously by
Dorothy’s immediacy of feeling, manifested everywhere in her Journals (written
1798–1803, published 1897), and by Coleridge’s imaginative and speculative genius,
he produced the poems collected in Lyrical Ballads (1798). The volume began
with Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” continued with poems
displaying delight in the powers of nature and the humane instincts of ordinary
people, and concluded with the meditative “Lines Written a Few Miles Above
Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth’s attempt to set out his mature faith in nature and
humanity.
His investigation of the
relationship between nature and the human mind continued in the long
autobiographical poem addressed to Coleridge and later titled The Prelude
(1798–99 in two books; 1804 in five books; 1805 in 13 books; revised
continuously and published posthumously, 1850). Here he traced the value for a
poet of having been a child “fostered alike by beauty and by fear” by an
upbringing in sublime surroundings. The Prelude constitutes the most
significant English expression of the Romantic discovery of the self as a topic
for art and literature. The poem also makes much of the work of memory, a theme
explored as well in the “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of
Early Childhood.” In poems such as “Michael” and “The Brothers,” by contrast,
written for the second volume of Lyrical Ballads (1800), Wordsworth dwelt on
the pathos and potentialities of ordinary lives.
Coleridge’s poetic
development during these years paralleled Wordsworth’s. Having briefly brought
together images of nature and the mind in “The Eolian Harp” (1796), he devoted
himself to more-public concerns in poems of political and social prophecy, such
as “Religious Musings” and “The Destiny of Nations.” Becoming disillusioned in
1798 with his earlier politics, however, and encouraged by Wordsworth, he
turned back to the relationship between nature and the human mind. Poems such
as “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” “The Nightingale,” and “Frost at Midnight”
(now sometimes called the “conversation poems” but collected by Coleridge
himself as “Meditative Poems in Blank Verse”) combine sensitive descriptions of
nature with subtlety of psychological comment. “Kubla Khan” (1797 or 1798,
published 1816), a poem that Coleridge said came to him in “a kind of Reverie,”
represented a new kind of exotic writing, which he also exploited in the
supernaturalism of “The Ancient Mariner” and the unfinished “Christabel.” After
his visit to Germany in 1798–99, he renewed attention to the links between the
subtler forces in nature and the human psyche; this attention bore fruit in
letters, notebooks, literary criticism, theology, and philosophy.
Simultaneously, his poetic output became sporadic. “Dejection: An Ode” (1802),
another meditative poem, which first took shape as a verse letter to Sara
Hutchinson, Wordsworth’s sister-in-law, memorably describes the suspension of
his “shaping spirit of Imagination.”
The work of both poets
was directed back to national affairs during these years by the rise of
Napoleon. In 1802 Wordsworth dedicated a number of sonnets to the patriotic
cause. The death in 1805 of his brother John, who was a captain in the merchant
navy, was a grim reminder that, while he had been living in retirement as a
poet, others had been willing to sacrifice themselves. From this time the theme
of duty was to be prominent in his poetry. His political essay Concerning the
Relations of Great Britain, Spain and Portugal…as Affected by the Convention of
Cintra (1809) agreed with Coleridge’s periodical The Friend (1809–10) in
deploring the decline of principle among statesmen. When The Excursion appeared
in 1814 (the time of Napoleon’s first exile), Wordsworth announced the poem as
the central section of a longer projected work, The Recluse, “a philosophical
Poem, containing views of Man, Nature, and Society.” The plan was not
fulfilled, however, and The Excursion was left to stand in its own right as a poem
of moral and religious consolation for those who had been disappointed by the
failure of French revolutionary ideals.
Portrait of poet Samuel
Taylor Coleridge
Portrait of poet Samuel
Taylor ColeridgeSamuel Taylor Coleridge, detail of an oil painting by
Washington Allston, 1814; in the National Portrait Gallery, London.
Both Wordsworth and
Coleridge benefited from the advent in 1811 of the Regency, which brought a
renewed interest in the arts. Coleridge’s lectures on Shakespeare became
fashionable, his play Remorse was briefly produced, and his volume of poems
Christabel; Kubla Khan: A Vision; The Pains of Sleep was published in 1816.
Biographia Literaria (1817), an account of his own development, combined
philosophy and literary criticism in a new way and made an enduring and
important contribution to literary theory. Coleridge settled at Highgate in
1816, and he was sought there as “the most impressive talker of his age” (in
the words of the essayist William Hazlitt). His later religious writings made a
considerable impact on Victorian readers.
Other poets of the early
Romantic period
In his own lifetime,
Blake’s poetry was scarcely known. Sir Walter Scott, by contrast, was thought
of as a major poet for his vigorous and evocative verse narratives The Lay of
the Last Minstrel (1805) and Marmion (1808). Other verse writers were also highly
esteemed. The Elegiac Sonnets (1784) of Charlotte Smith and the Fourteen
Sonnets (1789) of William Lisle Bowles were received with enthusiasm by
Coleridge. Thomas Campbell is now chiefly remembered for his patriotic lyrics
such as “Ye Mariners of England” and “The Battle of Hohenlinden” (1807) and for
the critical preface to his Specimens of the British Poets (1819); Samuel
Rogers was known for his brilliant table talk (published 1856, after his death,
as Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers), as well as for his
exquisite but exiguous poetry. Another admired poet of the day was Thomas
Moore, whose Irish Melodies began to appear in 1808. His highly colored
narrative Lalla Rookh: An Oriental Romance (1817) and his satirical poetry were
also immensely popular. Charlotte Smith was not the only significant woman poet
in this period. Helen Maria Williams’s Poems (1786), Ann Batten Cristall’s
Poetical Sketches (1795), Mary Robinson’s Sappho and Phaon (1796), and Mary
Tighe’s Psyche (1805) all contain notable work.
Robert Southey was
closely associated with Wordsworth and Coleridge and was looked upon as a
prominent member, with them, of the “Lake school” of poetry. His originality is
best seen in his ballads and his nine “English Eclogues,” three of which were
first published in the 1799 volume of his Poems with a prologue explaining that
these verse sketches of contemporary life bore “no resemblance to any poems in
our language.” His “Oriental” narrative poems Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) and
The Curse of Kehama (1810) were successful in their own time, but his fame is
based on his prose work—the Life of Nelson (1813), the History of the
Peninsular War (1823–32), and his classic formulation of the children’s tale
“The Three Bears.”
George Crabbe wrote
poetry of another kind: his sensibility, his values, much of his diction, and
his heroic couplet verse form belong to the 18th century. He differs from the
earlier Augustans, however, in his subject matter, concentrating on realistic,
unsentimental accounts of the life of the poor and the middle classes. He shows
considerable narrative gifts in his collections of verse tales (in which he
anticipates many short-story techniques) and great powers of description. His
antipastoral The Village appeared in 1783. After a long silence, he returned to
poetry with The Parish Register (1807), The Borough (1810), Tales in Verse
(1812), and Tales of the Hall (1819), which gained him great popularity in the
early 19th century.
The later Romantics:
Shelley, Keats, and Byron
The poets of the next
generation shared their predecessors’ passion for liberty (now set in a new
perspective by the Napoleonic Wars) and were in a position to learn from their
experiments. Percy Bysshe Shelley in particular was deeply interested in politics,
coming early under the spell of the anarchist views of William Godwin, whose
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice had appeared in 1793. Shelley’s
revolutionary ardor caused him to claim in his critical essay “A Defence of
Poetry” (1821, published 1840) that “the most unfailing herald, companion, and
follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in
opinion or institution, is poetry,” and that poets are “the unacknowledged
legislators of the world.” This fervor burns throughout the early Queen Mab
(1813), the long Laon and Cythna (retitled The Revolt of Islam, 1818), and the
lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound (1820). Shelley saw himself at once as poet
and prophet, as the fine “Ode to the West Wind” (1819) makes clear. Despite his
grasp of practical politics, however, it is a mistake to look for concreteness
in his poetry, where his concern is with subtleties of perception and with the
underlying forces of nature: his most characteristic images are of sky and
weather, of lights and fires. His poetic stance invites the reader to respond
with similar outgoing aspiration. It adheres to the Rousseauistic belief in an
underlying spirit in individuals, one truer to human nature itself than the
behavior evinced and approved by society. In that sense his material is
transcendental and cosmic and his expression thoroughly appropriate. Possessed
of great technical brilliance, he is, at his best, a poet of excitement and
power.
Portrait of
poet John Keats
Portrait of poet John
KeatsJohn Keats, detail of an oil painting by Joseph Severn, 1821; in the
National Portrait Gallery, London.
John Keats, by contrast,
was a poet so sensuous and physically specific that his early work, such as
Endymion (1818), could produce an over-luxuriant, cloying effect. As the
program set out in his early poem “Sleep and Poetry” shows, however, Keats was
determined to discipline himself: even before February 1820, when he first
began to cough blood, he may have known that he had not long to live, and he
devoted himself to the expression of his vision with feverish intensity. He
experimented with many kinds of poems: “Isabella” (published 1820), an
adaptation of a tale by Giovanni Boccaccio, is a tour de force of craftsmanship
in its attempt to reproduce a medieval atmosphere and at the same time a poem
involved in contemporary politics. His epic fragment Hyperion (begun in 1818
and abandoned, published 1820; later begun again and published posthumously as
The Fall of Hyperion in 1856) has a new spareness of imagery, but Keats soon
found the style too Miltonic and decided to give himself up to what he called
“other sensations.” Some of these “other sensations” are found in the poems of
1819, Keats’s annus mirabilis: “The Eve of St. Agnes” and the great odes “To a
Nightingale,” “On a Grecian Urn,” and “To Autumn.” These, with the Hyperion
poems, represent the summit of Keats’s achievement, showing what has been
called “the disciplining of sensation into symbolic meaning,” the complex
themes being handled with a concrete richness of detail. His superb letters
show the full range of the intelligence at work in his poetry.
George Gordon, Lord
Byron, who differed from Shelley and Keats in themes and manner, was at one
with them in reflecting their shift toward “Mediterranean” topics. Having
thrown down the gauntlet in his early poem English Bards and Scotch Reviewers
(1809), in which he directed particular scorn at poets of sensibility and
declared his own allegiance to Milton, Dryden, and Pope, he developed a poetry
of dash and flair, in many cases with a striking hero. His two longest poems,
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18) and Don Juan (1819–24), his masterpiece,
provided alternative personae for himself, the one a bitter and melancholy
exile among the historic sites of Europe, the other a picaresque adventurer
enjoying a series of amorous adventures. The gloomy and misanthropic vein was
further mined in dramatic poems such as Manfred (1817) and Cain (1821), which
helped to secure his reputation in Europe, but he is now remembered best for
witty, ironic, and less portentous writings, such as Beppo (1818), in which he first
used the ottava rima form. The easy, nonchalant, biting style developed there
became a formidable device in Don Juan and in his satire on Southey, The Vision
of Judgment (1822).
Other poets of
the later period
John Clare, a
Northamptonshire man of humble background, achieved early success with Poems
Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820), The Village Minstrel (1821), and
The Shepherd’s Calendar (1827). Both his reputation and his mental health
collapsed in the late 1830s. He spent the later years of his life in an asylum
in Northampton; the poetry he wrote there was rediscovered in the 20th century.
His natural simplicity and lucidity of diction, his intent observation, his
almost Classical poise, and the unassuming dignity of his attitude to life make
him one of the most quietly moving of English poets. Thomas Lovell Beddoes,
whose violent imagery and obsession with death and the macabre recall the
Jacobean dramatists, represents an imagination at the opposite pole; metrical
virtuosity is displayed in the songs and lyrical passages from his
over-sensational tragedy Death’s Jest-Book (begun 1825; published posthumously,
1850). Another minor writer who found inspiration in the 17th century was
George Darley, some of whose songs from Nepenthe (1835) keep their place in
anthologies. The comic writer Thomas Hood also wrote poems of social protest,
such as “The Song of the Shirt” (1843) and “The Bridge of Sighs,” as well as
the graceful Plea of the Midsummer Fairies (1827). Felicia Hemans’s
best-remembered poem, “Casabianca,” appeared in her volume The Forest Sanctuary
(1825). This was followed in 1828 by the more substantial Records of Woman.
The novel: from
the Gothic novel to Austen and Scott
Flourishing as a form of
entertainment during the Romantic period, the novel underwent several important
developments in this period. One was the invention of the Gothic novel. Another
was the appearance of a politically engaged fiction in the years immediately
before the French Revolution. A third was the rise of women writers to
prominence in prose fiction.
The sentimental tradition
of Richardson and Sterne persisted until the 1790s with Henry Brooke’s The Fool
of Quality (1765–70), Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771), and Charles
Lamb’s A Tale of Rosamund Gray and Old Blind Margaret (1798). Novels of this
kind were, however, increasingly mocked by critics in the later years of the
18th century.
The comic realism of
Fielding and Smollett continued in a more sporadic way. John Moore gave a
cosmopolitan flavor to the worldly wisdom of his predecessors in Zeluco (1786)
and Mordaunt (1800). Frances Burney carried the comic realist manner into the
field of female experience with the novels Evelina (1778), Cecilia (1782), and
Camilla (1796). Her discovery of the comic and didactic potential of a plot
charting a woman’s progress from the nursery to the altar would be important
for several generations of female novelists.
More striking than these
continuations of previous modes, however, was Horace Walpole’s invention, in
The Castle of Otranto (1764), of what became known as the Gothic novel.
Walpole’s intention was to “blend” the fantastic plot of “ancient romance” with
the realistic characterization of “modern” (or novel) romance. Characters would
respond with terror to extraordinary events, and readers would vicariously
participate. Walpole’s innovation was not significantly imitated until the
1790s, when—perhaps because the violence of the French Revolution created a
taste for a correspondingly extreme mode of fiction—a torrent of such works
appeared.
Illustration
from Ann Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest
Illustration from Ann
Radcliffe's The Romance of the ForestFrontispiece illustration from an 1847
edition of Ann Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest (1791).
The most important writer
of these stories was Ann Radcliffe, who distinguished between “terror” and
“horror.” Terror “expands the soul” by its use of “uncertainty and obscurity.”
Horror, on the other hand, is actual and specific. Radcliffe’s own novels,
especially The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797), were
examples of the fiction of terror. Vulnerable heroines, trapped in ruined
castles, are terrified by supernatural perils that prove to be illusions.
Matthew Lewis, by
contrast, wrote the fiction of horror. In The Monk (1796) the hero commits both
murder and incest, and the repugnant details include a woman’s imprisonment in
a vault full of rotting human corpses. Some later examples of Gothic fiction have
more-sophisticated agendas. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern
Prometheus (1818) is a novel of ideas that anticipates science fiction. James
Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) is a
subtle study of religious mania and split personality. Even in its more-vulgar
examples, however, Gothic fiction can symbolically address serious political
and psychological issues.
By the 1790s, realistic
fiction had acquired a polemical role, reflecting the ideas of the French
Revolution, though sacrificing much of its comic power in the process. One
practitioner of this type of fiction, Robert Bage, is best remembered for
Hermsprong; or, Man as He Is Not (1796), in which a “natural” hero rejects the
conventions of contemporary society. The radical Thomas Holcroft published two
novels, Anna St. Ives (1792) and The Adventures of Hugh Trevor (1794),
influenced by the ideas of William Godwin. Godwin himself produced the best
example of this political fiction in Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of
Caleb Williams (1794), borrowing techniques from the Gothic novel to enliven a
narrative of social oppression.
Portrait of
feminist novelist Mary Wollstonecraft
Portrait of feminist
novelist Mary WollstonecraftMary Wollstonecraft, copy by John Keenan of a
painting by John Opie, 1804; in the New York Public Library.
Women novelists
contributed extensively to this ideological debate. Radicals such as Mary
Wollstonecraft (Mary, 1788; Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman, 1798), Elizabeth
Inchbald (Nature and Art, 1796), and Mary Hays (Memoirs of Emma Courtney, 1796)
celebrated the rights of the individual. Anti-Jacobin novelists such as Jane
West (A Gossip’s Story, 1796; A Tale of the Times, 1799), Amelia Opie (Adeline
Mowbray, 1804), and Mary Brunton (Self-Control, 1811) stressed the dangers of
social change. Some writers were more bipartisan, notably Elizabeth Hamilton
(Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, 1800) and Maria Edgeworth, whose long, varied,
and distinguished career extended from Letters for Literary Ladies (1795) to
Helen (1834). Her pioneering regional novel Castle Rackrent (1800), an
affectionately comic portrait of life in 18th-century Ireland, influenced the
subsequent work of Scott.
Novelist Jane
Austen
Novelist Jane AustenJane
Austen, pencil-and-watercolor sketch on paper by her sister, Cassandra Austen,
c. 1810; in the National Portrait Gallery, London.
Jane Austen stands on the
conservative side of this battle of ideas, though in novels that incorporate
their anti-Jacobin and anti-Romantic views so subtly into love stories that
many readers are unaware of them. Three of her novels—Sense and Sensibility
(first published in 1811; originally titled “Elinor and Marianne”), Pride and
Prejudice (1813; originally “First Impressions”), and Northanger Abbey
(published posthumously in 1817)—were drafted in the late 1790s. Three more
novels—Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1815), and Persuasion (1817, together with
Northanger Abbey)—were written between 1811 and 1817. Austen uses, essentially,
two standard plots. In one of these a right-minded but neglected heroine is
gradually acknowledged to be correct by characters who have previously looked
down on her (such as Fanny Price in Mansfield Park and Anne Elliot in
Persuasion). In the other an attractive but self-deceived heroine (such as Emma
Woodhouse in Emma or Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice) belatedly recovers
from her condition of error and is rewarded with the partner she had previously
despised or overlooked. On this slight framework, Austen constructs a powerful
case for the superiority of the Augustan virtues of common sense, empiricism,
and rationality to the new “Romantic” values of imagination, egotism, and
subjectivity. With Austen the comic brilliance and exquisite narrative
construction of Fielding return to the English novel, in conjunction with a
distinctive and deadly irony.
Thomas Love Peacock is
another witty novelist who combined an intimate knowledge of Romantic ideas
with a satirical attitude toward them, though in comic debates rather than
conventional narratives. Headlong Hall (1816), Melincourt (1817), and Nightmare
Abbey (1818) are sharp accounts of contemporary intellectual and cultural
fashions, as are the two much later fictions in which Peacock reused this
successful formula, Crotchet Castle (1831) and Gryll Grange (1860–61).
Sir Walter Scott is the
English writer who can in the fullest sense be called a Romantic novelist.
After a successful career as a poet, Scott switched to prose fiction in 1814
with the first of the “Waverley novels.” In the first phase of his work as a novelist,
Scott wrote about the Scotland of the 17th and 18th centuries, charting its
gradual transition from the feudal era into the modern world in a series of
vivid human dramas. Waverley (1814), Guy Mannering (1815), The Antiquary
(1816), Old Mortality (1816), Rob Roy (1817), and The Heart of Midlothian
(1818) are the masterpieces of this period. In a second phase, beginning with
Ivanhoe in 1819, Scott turned to stories set in medieval England. Finally, with
Quentin Durward in 1823, he added European settings to his historical
repertoire. Scott combines a capacity for comic social observation with a
Romantic sense of landscape and an epic grandeur, enlarging the scope of the
novel in ways that equip it to become the dominant literary form of the later 19th
century.
Discursive
prose
The French Revolution
prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a debate
conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s
Discourse on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s
conservative Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and by
Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and A Vindication of
the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early statement
of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on
individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period, particularly in
criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic
work is seen in his collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On
the English Comic Writers (1819) and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series
of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The Essays of Elia (1823) and
The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal essayist,
projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of
himself—charming, whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine
Letters show, however, he could on occasion produce mordant satire. Mary
Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example of the charm and humor
of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the new
interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early
experiences in Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and
enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of evoking states of dream and nightmare is
best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach” and “On the Knocking at
the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts”
(1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at
its best in some brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary
Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of
the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh Review (begun 1802),
edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks
on contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard
of fearless and independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh
Hunt, whose outspoken journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808),
was of wide influence, and by William Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in
1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling picture, in forceful and
clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of
English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble, Sarah Siddons,
and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or
“legitimate”) theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms.
The classic repertoire continued to be played but in buildings that had grown
too large for subtle staging, and, when commissioning new texts, legitimate
theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-verse manner of the
great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular modes
of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less
acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith and Richard
Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing
comedy.” But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the
dominant mode, persisting in the work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian,
1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem, 1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll
Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic Reynolds (The
Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in
the 1790s from the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald
translated his controversial Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental
plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most important
dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic
plot, and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt;
Holcroft translated the latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802.
Using background music to intensify the emotional effect, the form appealed
chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences of the
“illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The
Castle Spectre (first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820),
were theatrical equivalents of the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal
melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas
(Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic melodramas (John Howard
Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker, The Factory
Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist
in the films and television of a later period.
Legitimate drama,
performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James Sheridan
Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted
to write tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797)
was produced (as Remorse) at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in
1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers (1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained unperformed, though The Cenci
has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the general
Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet
dramas” (for reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert
Browning would spend much of his early career writing verse plays for the
legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the ’Scutcheon, produced in
1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished the distinction
between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
Reginald P.C.
Mutter
John Bernard
Beer
Nicholas
Shrimpton
The
post-Romantic and Victorian eras
Self-consciousness was
the quality that John Stuart Mill identified, in 1838, as “the daemon of the
men of genius of our time.” Introspection was inevitable in the literature of
an immediately Post-Romantic period, and the age itself was as prone to self-analysis
as were its individual authors. Hazlitt’s essays in The Spirit of the Age
(1825) were echoed by Mill’s articles of the same title in 1831, by Thomas
Carlyle’s essays “Signs of the Times” (1829) and “Characteristics” (1831), and
by Richard Henry Horne’s New Spirit of the Age in 1844.
This persistent scrutiny
was the product of an acute sense of change. Britain had emerged from the long
war with France (1793–1815) as a great power and as the world’s predominant
economy. Visiting England in 1847, the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson
observed of the English that “the modern world is theirs. They have made and
make it day by day.”
This new status as the
world’s first urban and industrialized society was responsible for the
extraordinary wealth, vitality, and self-confidence of the period. Abroad these
energies expressed themselves in the growth of the British Empire. At home they
were accompanied by rapid social change and fierce intellectual controversy.
The juxtaposition of this
new industrial wealth with a new kind of urban poverty is only one of the
paradoxes that characterize this long and diverse period. In religion the
climax of the Evangelical revival coincided with an unprecedentedly severe set
of challenges to faith. The idealism and transcendentalism of Romantic thought
were challenged by the growing prestige of empirical science and utilitarian
moral philosophy, a process that encouraged more-objective modes in literature.
Realism would be one of the great artistic movements of the era. In politics a
widespread commitment to economic and personal freedom was, nonetheless,
accompanied by a steady growth in the power of the state. The prudery for which
the Victorian Age is notorious in fact went hand in hand with an equally
violent immoralism, seen, for example, in Algernon Charles Swinburne’s poetry
or the writings of the Decadents. Most fundamentally of all, the rapid change
that many writers interpreted as progress inspired in others a fierce nostalgia.
Enthusiastic rediscoveries of ancient Greece, Elizabethan England, and,
especially, the Middle Ages by writers, artists, architects, and designers made
this age of change simultaneously an age of active and determined historicism.
John Stuart Mill caught
this contradictory quality, with characteristic acuteness, in his essays on
Jeremy Bentham (1838) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1840). Every contemporary
thinker, he argued, was indebted to these two “seminal minds.” Yet Bentham, as
the enduring voice of the Enlightenment, and Coleridge, as the chief English
example of the Romantic reaction against it, held diametrically opposed views.
A similar sense of sharp
controversy is given by Carlyle in Sartor Resartus (1833–34). An eccentric
philosophical fiction in the tradition of Swift and Sterne, the book argues for
a new mode of spirituality in an age that Carlyle himself suggests to be one of
mechanism. Carlyle’s choice of the novel form and the book’s humor, generic
flexibility, and political engagement point forward to distinctive
characteristics of Victorian literature.
Early Victorian
literature: the age of the novel
Several major figures of
English Romanticism lived on into this period. Coleridge died in 1834, De
Quincey in 1859. Wordsworth succeeded Southey as poet laureate in 1843 and held
the post until his own death seven years later. Posthumous publication caused
some striking chronological anomalies. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “A Defence of
Poetry” was not published until 1840. Keats’s letters appeared in 1848 and
Wordsworth’s Prelude in 1850.
Despite this persistence,
critics of the 1830s felt that there had been a break in the English literary
tradition, which they identified with the death of Byron in 1824. The deaths of
Austen in 1817 and Scott in 1832 should perhaps have been seen as even more
significant, for the new literary era has, with justification, been seen as the
age of the novel. More than 60,000 works of prose fiction were published in
Victorian Britain by as many as 7,000 novelists. The three-volume format (or
“three-decker”) was the standard mode of first publication; it was a form
created for sale to and circulation by lending libraries. It was challenged in
the 1830s by the advent of serialization in magazines and by the publication of
novels in 32-page monthly parts. But only in the 1890s did the three-decker
finally yield to the modern single-volume format.
Dickens
Illustration of Samuel
Pickwick addressing fellow members of the Pickwick Club
Illustration of Samuel
Pickwick addressing fellow members of the Pickwick ClubSamuel Pickwick
addressing fellow members of the Pickwick Club, illustration by Robert Seymour
for Charles Dickens's The Pickwick Papers (1836–37).
Charles Dickens first
attracted attention with the descriptive essays and tales originally written
for newspapers, beginning in 1833, and collected as Sketches by “Boz” (1836).
On the strength of this volume, Dickens contracted to write a historical novel
in the tradition of Scott (eventually published as Barnaby Rudge in 1841). By
chance his gifts were turned into a more distinctive channel. In February 1836
he agreed to write the text for a series of comic engravings. The unexpected
result was The Pickwick Papers (1836–37), one of the funniest novels in English
literature. By July 1837, sales of the monthly installments exceeded 40,000
copies. Dickens’s extraordinary popular appeal and the enormous imaginative
potential of the Victorian novel were simultaneously established.
The chief technical
features of Dickens’s fiction were also formed by this success. Serial
publication encouraged the use of multiple plot and required that each episode
be individually shaped. At the same time it produced an unprecedentedly close
relationship between author and reader. Part dramatist, part journalist, part
mythmaker, and part wit, Dickens took the picaresque tradition of Smollett and
Fielding and gave it a Shakespearean vigor and variety.
Illustration of
Mr. Bumble and Mrs. Corney for Oliver Twist
Illustration of Mr.
Bumble and Mrs. Corney for Oliver Twist George Cruikshank's Mr. Bumble and Mrs.
Corney, illustration for Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens, 1838.
His early novels have
been attacked at times for sentimentality, melodrama, or shapelessness. They
are now increasingly appreciated for their comic or macabre zest and their
poetic fertility. Dombey and Son (1846–48) marks the beginning of Dickens’s
later period. He thenceforth combined his gift for vivid caricature with a
stronger sense of personality, designed his plots more carefully, and used
symbolism to give his books greater thematic coherence. Of the masterpieces of
the next decade, David Copperfield (1849–50) uses the form of a fictional
autobiography to explore the great Romantic theme of the growth and
comprehension of the self. Bleak House (1852–53) addresses itself to law and
litigiousness; Hard Times (1854) is a Carlylean defense of art in an age of
mechanism; and Little Dorrit (1855–57) dramatizes the idea of imprisonment,
both literal and spiritual. Two great novels, both involved with issues of
social class and human worth, appeared in the 1860s: Great Expectations
(1860–61) and Our Mutual Friend (1864–65). His final book, The Mystery of Edwin
Drood (published posthumously, 1870), was left tantalizingly uncompleted at the
time of his death.
Thackeray,
Gaskell, and others
Unlike Dickens, William
Makepeace Thackeray came from a wealthy and educated background. The loss of
his fortune at age 22, however, meant that he too learned his trade in the
field of sketch writing and occasional journalism. His early fictions were published
as serials in Fraser’s Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian
comic magazine Punch (founded 1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair
(1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens’s procedure of publication in monthly
parts. Thackeray’s satirical acerbity is here combined with a broad narrative
sweep, a sophisticated self-consciousness about the conventions of fiction, and
an ambitious historical survey of the transformation of English life in the
years between the Regency and the mid-Victorian period. His later novels never
match this sharpness. Vanity Fair was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.”
Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more sentimental Thackeray wrote novels
without villains.
Novelist
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
Novelist Elizabeth
Cleghorn GaskellElizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, chalk drawing by George Richmond,
1851; in the National Portrait Gallery, London.
Elizabeth Gaskell began
her career as one of the “Condition of England” novelists of the 1840s,
responding like Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley to
the economic crisis of that troubled decade. Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853)
are both novels about social problems, as is North and South (1854–55),
although, like her later work—Sylvia’s Lovers (1863), Wives and Daughters
(1864–66), and the remarkable novella Cousin Phyllis (1864)—this book also has
a psychological complexity that anticipates George Eliot’s novels of provincial
life.
Political novels,
religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime
novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. The years 1847–48,
indeed, represent a pinnacle of simultaneous achievement in English fiction. In
addition to Vanity Fair, Dombey and Son, and Mary Barton, they saw the
completion of Disraeli’s trilogy of political novels—Coningsby (1844), Sybil
(1845), and Tancred (1847)—and the publication of first novels by Kingsley,
Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anthony Trollope. For the
first time, literary genius appeared to be finding its most natural expression
in prose fiction, rather than in poetry or drama. By 1853 the poet Arthur Hugh
Clough would concede that “the modern novel is preferred to the modern poem.”
The Brontës
Charlotte
Brontë
Charlotte Brontë A
portrait of Charlotte Brontë, based on a chalk pastel by George Richmond.
In many ways, however,
the qualities of Romantic verse could be absorbed, rather than simply
superseded, by the Victorian novel. This is suggested clearly by the work of
the Brontë sisters. Growing up in a remote but cultivated vicarage in
Yorkshire, they, as children, invented the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and
Gondal. These inventions supplied the context for many of the poems in their
first, and pseudonymous, publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
(1846). Their Gothic plots and Byronic passions also informed the novels that
began to be published in the following year.
Anne Brontë wrote of the
painful reality of disagreeable experience, although both her novels have
cheerful romantic endings. Agnes Grey (1847) is a stark account of the working
life of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) paints a grim picture
of the heroine’s marriage to an abusive husband. Charlotte Brontë, like her
sisters, appears at first sight to have been writing a literal fiction of
provincial life. In her first novel, Jane Eyre (1847), for example, the
heroine’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty belongs very firmly to
the mode of moral realism. But her hair’s-breadth escape from a bigamous
marriage with her employer and the death by fire of his mad first wife derive
from the rather different tradition of the Gothic novel. In Shirley (1849)
Charlotte Brontë strove to be, in her own words, “as unromantic as Monday
morning.” In Villette (1853) the distinctive Gothic elements return to lend
this study of the limits of stoicism an unexpected psychological intensity and
drama.
Emily Brontë united these
diverse traditions still more successfully in her only novel, Wuthering Heights
(1847). Closely observed regional detail, precisely handled plot, and a
sophisticated use of multiple internal narrators are combined with vivid imagery
and an extravagantly Gothic theme. The result is a perfectly achieved study of
elemental passions and the strongest possible refutation of the assumption that
the age of the novel must also be an age of realism.
Early Victorian
verse
Tennyson
Poet Alfred
Tennyson
Poet Alfred
TennysonAlfred, Lord Tennyson, detail of an oil painting by Samuel Laurence, c.
1840; in the National Portrait Gallery, London.
Despite the growing
prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in fact also
an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems,
Chiefly Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some
critics to hail him as the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. A decade
later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined in two volumes the best of his early
work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The collection established
him as the outstanding poet of the era.
In his early work
Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late Romantic subject matter. The
result is a poetry that, for all its debt to Keats, anticipates the French
Symbolists of the 1880s. The death of his friend and supporter Arthur Hallam in
1833, however, left him vulnerable to accusations from less-sympathetic critics
that this highly subjective verse was insufficiently engaged with the public
issues of the day. The second volume of the Poems of 1842 contains two
remarkable responses to this challenge. One is the dramatic monologue, a form
of poetry in which the speaker is a figure other than the poet. Used
occasionally by writers since the time of the Greek poet Theocritus, the
technique was developed independently by both Tennyson and his great
contemporary Robert Browning in the 1830s, and it became the mode by which many
of the greatest achievements of Victorian poetry were expressed. The other is
the form that Tennyson called the “English Idyl,” in which he combined
brilliant vignettes of contemporary landscape with relaxed debate.
In the major poems of his
middle period, Tennyson combined the larger scale required by his new ambitions
with his original gift for the brief lyric by building long poems out of short
ones. In Memoriam (1850) is an elegy for Hallam, formed by 133 individual
lyrics. Eloquent, vivid, and ample, it is at the same time an acute
pathological study of individual grief and the central Victorian statement of
the problems posed by the decline of Christian faith. Maud (1855) assembles 27
lyric poems into a single dramatic monologue that disturbingly explores the
psychology of violence.
Tennyson became poet
laureate in 1850 and wrote some apt and memorable poems on patriotic themes.
The chief work of his later period, however, was Idylls of the King (1859–85).
An Arthurian epic constructed as a series of idylls, or “little pictures,” it
offers a somber vision of an idealistic community in decay, implicitly
articulating Tennyson’s anxieties about contemporary society.
G.K. Chesterton described
Tennyson as “a suburban Virgil.” The elegant Virgilian note was the last thing
aimed at by Robert Browning. Browning’s work was Germanic rather than
Italianate, grotesque rather than idyllic, and colloquial rather than refined. The
differences between Browning and Tennyson underline the creative diversity of
the period.
Robert Browning
and Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Deeply influenced by
Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts. One was as a playwright in the
1830s and ’40s. The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional
meditation Pauline (1833) and the difficult though innovatory narrative poem Sordello
(1840).
Browning found his
individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume Dramatic
Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues,
among them “Porphyria’s Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last
Duchess.” The monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning’s new
manner: they involve the reader in sympathetic identification with the interior
processes of criminal or unconventional minds, requiring active rather than
merely passive engagement in the processes of moral judgment and
self-discovery. More such monologues and some equally striking lyrics make up
Men and Women (1855).
Poet Elizabeth
Barrett Browning
Poet Elizabeth
Barrett Browning Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
In 1846 Browning married
Elizabeth Barrett. Though now remembered chiefly for her love poems Sonnets
from the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora Leigh
(1856; dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her
husband. Her Poems (1844) established her as a leading poet of the age. Casa
Guidi Windows (1851) is a subtle reflection on her experience of Italian
politics, and “A Musical Instrument” (1862) is one of the century’s most
memorable expressions of the difficulty of the poet’s role. Only with the
publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Robert Browning achieve the sort of
fame that Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years. The volume contains, in
“Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the most extreme statement of Browning’s celebrated optimism.
Hand in hand with this reassuring creed, however, go the skeptical intelligence
and the sense of the grotesque displayed in such poems as “Caliban upon
Setebos” and “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium.’ ”
His The Ring and the Book
(1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented scope. Published in
parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way that both
explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human knowledge.
Browning’s work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Arnold and
Clough
Matthew Arnold’s first
volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849), combined lyric
grace with an acute sense of the dark philosophical landscape of the period.
The title poem of his next collection, Empedocles on Etna (1852), is a sustained
statement of the modern dilemma and a remarkable poetic embodiment of the
process that Arnold called “the dialogue of the mind with itself.” Arnold later
suppressed this poem and attempted to write in a more impersonal manner. His
greatest work (“Switzerland,” “Dover Beach,” “The Scholar-Gipsy”) is, however,
always elegiac in tone. In the 1860s he turned from verse to prose and became,
with Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Literature and
Dogma (1873), a lively and acute writer of literary, social, and religious
criticism.
Arnold’s friend Arthur
Hugh Clough died young but managed nonetheless to produce three highly original
poems. The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) is a narrative poem of modern
life, written in hexameters. Amours de Voyage (1858) goes beyond this to the
full-scale verse novel, using multiple internal narrators and vivid
contemporary detail. Dipsychus (published posthumously in 1865 but not
available in an unexpurgated version until 1951) is a remarkable closet drama
that debates issues of belief and morality with a frankness, and a metrical
liveliness, unequaled in Victorian verse.
Early Victorian
nonfiction prose
Carlyle may be said to
have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He continued
thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously
postrevolutionary age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History
(1841) combined the Romantic idea of the genius with a further statement of
German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle opposed to the influential
doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism. Carlyle’s political writing, in
Chartism (1839; dated 1840), Past and Present (1843), and the splenetic
Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), inspired other writers to similar “prophetic”
denunciations of laissez-faire economics and utilitarian ethics. The first
importance of John Ruskin is as an art critic who, in Modern Painters (5 vol.,
1843–60), brought Romantic theory to the study of painting and forged an
appropriate prose for its expression. But in The Stones of Venice (3 vol.,
1851–53), Ruskin took the political medievalism of Carlyle’s Past and Present
and gave it a poetic fullness and force. This imaginative engagement with
social and economic problems continued into Unto This Last (1860), The Crown of
Wild Olive (1866), and Fors Clavigera (1871–84). John Henry Newman was a poet,
novelist, and theologian who wrote many of the tracts, published as Tracts for
the Times (1833–41), that promoted the Oxford movement, which sought to
reassert the Roman Catholic identity of the Church of England. His subsequent
religious development is memorably described in his Apologia pro Vita Sua
(1864), one of the many great autobiographies of this introspective century.
Late Victorian
literature
Charles Darwin:
On the Origin of Species
Charles Darwin: On the
Origin of SpeciesTitle page of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by
Means of Natural Selection, 1859.
“The modern spirit,”
Matthew Arnold observed in 1865, “is now awake.” In 1859 Charles Darwin had
published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Historians,
philosophers, and scientists were all beginning to apply the idea of evolution to
new areas of study of the human experience. Traditional conceptions of man’s
nature and place in the world were, as a consequence, under threat. Walter
Pater summed up the process, in 1866, by stating that “Modern thought is
distinguished from ancient by its cultivation of the ‘relative’ spirit in place
of the ‘absolute.”
The economic crisis of
the 1840s was long past. But the fierce political debates that led first to the
Second Reform Act of 1867 and then to the battles for the enfranchisement of
women were accompanied by a deepening crisis of belief.
The novel
Late Victorian fiction
may express doubts and uncertainties, but in aesthetic terms it displays a new
sophistication and self-confidence. The expatriate American novelist Henry
James wrote in 1884 that until recently the English novel had “had no air of having
a theory, a conviction, a consciousness of itself behind it.” Its acquisition
of these things was due in no small part to Mary Ann Evans, better known as
George Eliot. Initially a critic and translator, she was influenced, after the
loss of her Christian faith, by the ideas of Ludwig Feuerbach and Auguste
Comte. Her advanced intellectual interests combined with her sophisticated
sense of the novel form to shape her remarkable fiction. Her early novels—Adam
Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), and Silas Marner (1861)—are closely
observed studies of English rural life that offer, at the same time, complex
contemporary ideas and a subtle tracing of moral issues. Her masterpiece,
Middlemarch (1871–72), is an unprecedentedly full study of the life of a
provincial town, focused on the thwarted idealism of her two principal
characters. George Eliot is a realist, but her realism involves a scientific
analysis of the interior processes of social and personal existence.
Her fellow realist
Anthony Trollope published his first novel in 1847 but only established his
distinctive manner with The Warden (1855), the first of a series of six novels
set in the fictional county of Barsetshire and completed in 1867. This sequence
was followed by a further series, the six-volume Palliser group (1864–80), set
in the world of British parliamentary politics. Trollope published an
astonishing total of 47 novels, and his Autobiography (1883) is a uniquely
candid account of the working life of a Victorian writer.
The third major novelist
of the 1870s was George Meredith, who also worked as a poet, a journalist, and
a publisher’s reader. His prose style is eccentric and his achievement uneven.
His greatest work of fiction, The Egoist (1879), however, is an incisive comic
novel that embodies the distinctive theory of the corrective and therapeutic
powers of laughter expressed in his lecture “The Idea of Comedy” (1877).
In the 1880s the
three-volume novel, with its panoramic vistas and proliferating subplots, began
to give way to more narrowly focused one-volume novels. At the same time, a gap
started to open between popular fiction and the “literary” or “art” novel. The
flowering of realist fiction was also accompanied, perhaps inevitably, by a
revival of its opposite, the romance. The 1860s had produced a new subgenre,
the sensation novel, seen at its best in the work of Wilkie Collins. Gothic
novels and romances by Sheridan Le Fanu, Robert Louis Stevenson, William
Morris, and Oscar Wilde; utopian fiction by Morris and Samuel Butler; and the
early science fiction of H.G. Wells make it possible to speak of a full-scale
romance revival.
Realism continued to
flourish, however, sometimes encouraged by the example of European realist and
naturalist novelists. Both George Moore and George Gissing were influenced by
Émile Zola, though both also reacted against him. The 1890s saw intense concern
with the social role of women, reflected in the New Woman fiction of Grant
Allen (The Woman Who Did, 1895), Sarah Grand (The Heavenly Twins, 1893), and
George Egerton (Keynotes, 1893). The heroines of such texts breach conventional
assumptions by supporting woman suffrage, smoking, adopting “rational” dress,
and rejecting traditional double standards in sexual behavior.
The greatest novelist of
this generation, however, was Thomas Hardy. His first published novel,
Desperate Remedies, appeared in 1871 and was followed by 13 more before he
abandoned prose to publish (in the 20th century) only poetry. His major fiction
consists of the tragic novels of rural life, The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886),
Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895). In these novels
his brilliant evocation of the landscape and people of his fictional Wessex is
combined with a sophisticated sense of the “ache of modernism.”
Verse
The Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood, formed in 1848 and unofficially reinforced a decade later, was
founded as a group of painters but also functioned as a school of writers who
linked the incipient Aestheticism of Keats and De Quincey to the Decadent
movement of the fin de siècle. Dante Gabriel Rossetti collected his early
writing in Poems (1870), a volume that led the critic Robert Buchanan to attack
him as the leader of “The Fleshly School of Poetry.” Rossetti combined some
subtle treatments of contemporary life with a new kind of medievalism, seen
also in The Defence of Guenevere (1858) by William Morris. The earnest
political use of the Middle Ages found in Carlyle and Ruskin did not die
out—Morris himself continued it and linked it, in the 1880s, with Marxism. But
these writers also used medieval settings as a context that made possible an
uninhibited treatment of sex and violence. The shocking subject matter and
vivid imagery of Morris’s first volume were further developed by Algernon
Charles Swinburne, who, in Atalanta in Calydon (1865) and Poems and Ballads
(1866), combined them with an intoxicating metrical power. His second series of
Poems and Ballads (1878), with its moving elegies for Charles Baudelaire and
Théophile Gautier, displays a sophisticated command of recent developments in
avant-garde French verse.
The carefully wrought
religious poetry of Christina Rossetti is perhaps truer to the original, pious
purposes of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Her first collection, Goblin Market
and Other Poems (1862), with its vivid but richly ambiguous title poem, established
her status as one of the outstanding lyric poets of the century. The other
outstanding religious poet of this period is Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit
priest whose work was first collected as Poems in 1918, nearly 30 years after
his death. Overpraised by Modernist critics, who saw him as the sole great poet
of the era, he was in fact an important minor talent and an ingenious technical
innovator.
Robert Browning’s
experiments with the dramatic monologue were further developed in the 1860s by
Augusta Webster, who used the form in Dramatic Studies (1866), A Woman Sold and
Other Poems (1867), and Portraits (1870) to produce penetrating accounts of female
experience. Her posthumously published sonnet sequence Mother & Daughter
(1895) is a lucid and unsentimental account of that relationship.
The 1890s witnessed a
flowering of lyric verse, influenced intellectually by the critic and novelist
Walter Pater and formally by contemporary French practice. Such writing was
widely attacked as “decadent” for its improper subject matter and its consciously
amoral doctrine of “art for art’s sake.” This stress upon artifice and the
freedom of art from conventional moral constraints went hand in hand, however,
with an exquisite craftsmanship and a devotion to intense emotional and sensory
effects. Outstanding among the numerous poets publishing in the final decade of
the century were John Davidson, Arthur Symons, Francis Thompson, Ernest Dowson,
Lionel Johnson, and A.E. Housman. In The Symbolist Movement in Literature
(1899), Symons suggested the links between this writing and European Symbolism
and Impressionism. Thompson provides a vivid example of the way in which a
decadent manner could, paradoxically, be combined with fierce religious
enthusiasm. A rather different note was struck by Rudyard Kipling, who combined
polemical force and sharp observation (particularly of colonial experience)
with a remarkable metrical vigor.
The Victorian
theater
Dramatist,
poet, and novelist Oscar Wilde
Dramatist, poet, and
novelist Oscar WildeOscar Wilde, photograph by Napoleon Sarony, 1882.
Early Victorian drama was
a popular art form, appealing to an uneducated audience that demanded emotional
excitement rather than intellectual subtlety. Vivacious melodramas did not,
however, hold exclusive possession of the stage. The mid-century saw lively
comedies by Dion Boucicault and Tom Taylor. In the 1860s T.W. Robertson
pioneered a new realist drama, an achievement later celebrated by Arthur Wing
Pinero in his charming sentimental comedy Trelawny of the “Wells” (1898). The
1890s were, however, the outstanding decade of dramatic innovation. Oscar Wilde
crowned his brief career as a playwright with one of the few great high
comedies in English, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). At the same time,
the influence of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen was helping to produce a new
genre of serious “problem plays,” such as Pinero’s The Second Mrs. Tanqueray
(1893). J.T. Grein founded the Independent Theatre in 1891 to foster such work
and staged there the first plays of George Bernard Shaw and translations of
Ibsen.
Victorian
literary comedy
Victorian literature
began with such humorous books as Sartor Resartus and The Pickwick Papers.
Despite the crisis of faith, the “Condition of England” question, and the “ache
of modernism,” this note was sustained throughout the century. The comic novels
of Dickens and Thackeray, the squibs, sketches, and light verse of Thomas Hood
and Douglas Jerrold, the nonsense of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, and the
humorous light fiction of Jerome K. Jerome and George Grossmith and his brother
Weedon Grossmith are proof that this age, so often remembered for its gloomy
rectitude, may in fact have been the greatest era of comic writing in English
literature.
Nicholas
Shrimpton
The 20th
century
From 1900 to
1945
The Edwardians
The 20th century opened
with great hope but also with some apprehension, for the new century marked the
final approach to a new millennium. For many, humankind was entering upon an
unprecedented era. H.G. Wells’s utopian studies, the aptly titled Anticipations
of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and
Thought (1901) and A Modern Utopia (1905), both captured and qualified this
optimistic mood and gave expression to a common conviction that science and
technology would transform the world in the century ahead. To achieve such
transformation, outmoded institutions and ideals had to be replaced by ones
more suited to the growth and liberation of the human spirit. The death of
Queen Victoria in 1901 and the accession of Edward VII seemed to confirm that a
franker, less inhibited era had begun.
Many writers of the
Edwardian period, drawing widely upon the realistic and naturalistic
conventions of the 19th century (upon Ibsen in drama and Balzac, Turgenev,
Flaubert, Zola, Eliot, and Dickens in fiction) and in tune with the
anti-Aestheticism unleashed by the trial of the archetypal Aesthete, Oscar
Wilde, saw their task in the new century to be an unashamedly didactic one. In
a series of wittily iconoclastic plays, of which Man and Superman (performed
1905, published 1903) and Major Barbara (performed 1905, published 1907) are
the most substantial, George Bernard Shaw turned the Edwardian theater into an
arena for debate upon the principal concerns of the day: the question of
political organization, the morality of armaments and war, the function of
class and of the professions, the validity of the family and of marriage, and
the issue of female emancipation. Nor was he alone in this, even if he was
alone in the brilliance of his comedy. John Galsworthy made use of the theater
in Strife (1909) to explore the conflict between capital and labor, and in
Justice (1910) he lent his support to reform of the penal system, while Harley
Granville-Barker, whose revolutionary approach to stage direction did much to
change theatrical production in the period, dissected in The Voysey Inheritance
(performed 1905, published 1909) and Waste (performed 1907, published 1909) the
hypocrisies and deceit of upper-class and professional life.
Many Edwardian novelists
were similarly eager to explore the shortcomings of English social life.
Wells—in Love and Mr. Lewisham (1900); Kipps (1905); Ann Veronica (1909), his
pro-suffragist novel; and The History of Mr. Polly (1910)—captured the frustrations
of lower- and middle-class existence, even though he relieved his accounts with
many comic touches. In Anna of the Five Towns (1902), Arnold Bennett detailed
the constrictions of provincial life among the self-made business classes in
the area of England known as the Potteries; in The Man of Property (1906), the
first volume of The Forsyte Saga, Galsworthy described the destructive
possessiveness of the professional bourgeoisie; and, in Where Angels Fear to
Tread (1905) and The Longest Journey (1907), E.M. Forster portrayed with irony
the insensitivity, self-repression, and philistinism of the English middle
classes.
These novelists, however,
wrote more memorably when they allowed themselves a larger perspective. In The
Old Wives’ Tale (1908), Bennett showed the destructive effects of time on the
lives of individuals and communities and evoked a quality of pathos that he
never matched in his other fiction; in Tono-Bungay (1909), Wells showed the
ominous consequences of the uncontrolled developments taking place within a
British society still dependent upon the institutions of a long-defunct landed
aristocracy; and in Howards End (1910), Forster showed how little the rootless
and self-important world of contemporary commerce cared for the more rooted
world of culture, although he acknowledged that commerce was a necessary evil.
Nevertheless, even as they perceived the difficulties of the present, most
Edwardian novelists, like their counterparts in the theater, held firmly to the
belief not only that constructive change was possible but also that this change
could in some measure be advanced by their writing.
Other writers, including
Thomas Hardy and Rudyard Kipling, who had established their reputations during
the previous century, and Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, and Edward Thomas,
who established their reputations in the first decade of the new century, were
less confident about the future and sought to revive the traditional forms—the
ballad, the narrative poem, the satire, the fantasy, the topographical poem,
and the essay—that in their view preserved traditional sentiments and
perceptions. The revival of traditional forms in the late 19th and early 20th
century was not a unique event. There were many such revivals during the 20th
century, and the traditional poetry of A.E. Housman (whose book A Shropshire
Lad, originally published in 1896, enjoyed huge popular success during World
War I), Walter de la Mare, John Masefield, Robert Graves, and Edmund Blunden
represents an important and often neglected strand of English literature in the
first half of the century.
The most significant
writing of the period, traditionalist or modern, was inspired by neither hope
nor apprehension but by bleaker feelings that the new century would witness the
collapse of a whole civilization. The new century had begun with Great Britain
involved in the South African War (the Boer War; 1899–1902), and it seemed to
some that the British Empire was as doomed to destruction, both from within and
from without, as had been the Roman Empire. In his poems on the South African
War, Hardy (whose achievement as a poet in the 20th century rivaled his
achievement as a novelist in the 19th) questioned simply and sardonically the
human cost of empire building and established a tone and style that many
British poets were to use in the course of the century, while Kipling, who had
done much to engender pride in empire, began to speak in his verse and short
stories of the burden of empire and the tribulations it would bring.
Novelist Henry
James
Novelist Henry James Henry
James, glass plate negative, c. 1910.
No one captured the sense
of an imperial civilization in decline more fully or subtly than the expatriate
American novelist Henry James. In The Portrait of a Lady (1881), he had briefly
anatomized the fatal loss of energy of the English ruling class and, in The
Princess Casamassima (1886), had described more directly the various
instabilities that threatened its paternalistic rule. He did so with regret:
the patrician American admired in the English upper class its sense of moral
obligation to the community. By the turn of the century, however, he had noted
a disturbing change. In The Spoils of Poynton (1897) and What Maisie Knew
(1897), members of the upper class no longer seem troubled by the means adopted
to achieve their morally dubious ends. Great Britain had become
indistinguishable from the other nations of the Old World, in which an ugly
rapacity had never been far from the surface. James’s dismay at this condition
gave to his subtle and compressed late fiction, The Wings of the Dove (1902),
The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904), much of its gravity and air
of disenchantment.
James’s awareness of
crisis affected the very form and style of his writing, for he was no longer
assured that the world about which he wrote was either coherent in itself or
unambiguously intelligible to its inhabitants. His fiction still presented characters
within an identifiable social world, but he found his characters and their
world increasingly elusive and enigmatic and his own grasp upon them, as he
made clear in The Sacred Fount (1901), the questionable consequence of artistic
will.
Another expatriate
novelist, Joseph Conrad (pseudonym of Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, born in
the Ukraine of Polish parents), shared James’s sense of crisis but attributed
it less to the decline of a specific civilization than to human failings. Man
was a solitary, romantic creature of will who at any cost imposed his meaning
upon the world because he could not endure a world that did not reflect his
central place within it. In Almayer’s Folly (1895) and Lord Jim (1900), he had
seemed to sympathize with this predicament; but in Heart of Darkness (1902),
Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), and Under Western Eyes (1911), he
detailed such imposition, and the psychological pathologies he increasingly
associated with it, without sympathy. He did so as a philosophical novelist
whose concern with the mocking limits of human knowledge affected not only the
content of his fiction but also its very structure. His writing itself is
marked by gaps in the narrative, by narrators who do not fully grasp the significance
of the events they are retelling, and by characters who are unable to make
themselves understood. James and Conrad used many of the conventions of
19th-century realism but transformed them to express what are considered to be
peculiarly 20th-century preoccupations and anxieties.
The Modernist
revolution
Anglo-American Modernism:
Pound, Lewis, Lawrence, and Eliot
From 1908 to 1914 there
was a remarkably productive period of innovation and experiment as novelists
and poets undertook, in anthologies and magazines, to challenge the literary
conventions not just of the recent past but of the entire post-Romantic era.
For a brief moment, London, which up to that point had been culturally one of
the dullest of the European capitals, boasted an avant-garde to rival those of
Paris, Vienna, and Berlin, even if its leading personality, Ezra Pound, and
many of its most notable figures were American.
The spirit of Modernism—a
radical and utopian spirit stimulated by new ideas in anthropology, psychology,
philosophy, political theory, and psychoanalysis—was in the air, expressed
rather mutedly by the pastoral and often anti-Modern poets of the Georgian
movement (1912–22; see Georgian poetry) and more authentically by the English
and American poets of the Imagist movement, to which Pound first drew attention
in Ripostes (1912), a volume of his own poetry, and in Des Imagistes (1914), an
anthology. Prominent among the Imagists were the English poets T.E. Hulme, F.S.
Flint, and Richard Aldington and the Americans Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) and Amy
Lowell.
Reacting against what
they considered to be an exhausted poetic tradition, the Imagists wanted to
refine the language of poetry in order to make it a vehicle not for pastoral
sentiment or imperialistic rhetoric but for the exact description and evocation
of mood. To this end they experimented with free or irregular verse and made
the image their principal instrument. In contrast to the leisurely Georgians,
they worked with brief and economical forms.
Meanwhile, painters and
sculptors, grouped together by the painter and writer Wyndham Lewis under the
banner of Vorticism, combined the abstract art of the Cubists with the example
of the Italian Futurists who conveyed in their painting, sculpture, and literature
the new sensations of movement and scale associated with modern developments
such as automobiles and airplanes. With the typographically arresting Blast:
Review of the Great English Vortex (two editions, 1914 and 1915) Vorticism
found its polemical mouthpiece and in Lewis, its editor, its most active
propagandist and accomplished literary exponent. His experimental play Enemy of
the Stars, published in Blast in 1914, and his experimental novel Tarr (1918)
can still surprise with their violent exuberance.
World War I brought this
first period of the Modernist revolution to an end and, while not destroying
its radical and utopian impulse, made the Anglo-American Modernists all too
aware of the gulf between their ideals and the chaos of the present. Novelists
and poets parodied received forms and styles, in their view made redundant by
the immensity and horror of the war, but, as can be seen most clearly in
Pound’s angry and satirical Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), with a note of
anguish and with the wish that writers might again make form and style the
bearers of authentic meanings.
In his two most
innovative novels, The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920), D.H. Lawrence
traced the sickness of modern civilization—a civilization in his view only too
eager to participate in the mass slaughter of the war—to the effects of
industrialization upon the human psyche. Yet as he rejected the conventions of
the fictional tradition, which he had used to brilliant effect in his deeply
felt autobiographical novel of working-class family life, Sons and Lovers
(1913), he drew upon myth and symbol to hold out the hope that individual and
collective rebirth could come through human intensity and passion.
Recording of T.S. Eliot
reading his “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”Modernist writer T.S. Eliot
reading the first three stanzas of his poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock,” 1915.
On the other hand, the
poet and playwright T.S. Eliot, another American resident in London, in his
most innovative poetry, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) and The Waste
Land (1922), traced the sickness of modern civilization—a civilization that, on
the evidence of the war, preferred death or death-in-life to life—to the
spiritual emptiness and rootlessness of modern existence. As he rejected the
conventions of the poetic tradition, Eliot, like Lawrence, drew upon myth and
symbol to hold out the hope of individual and collective rebirth, but he
differed sharply from Lawrence by supposing that rebirth could come through
self-denial and self-abnegation. Even so, their satirical intensity, no less
than the seriousness and scope of their analyses of the failings of a
civilization that had voluntarily entered upon the First World War, ensured
that Lawrence and Eliot became the leading and most authoritative figures of
Anglo-American Modernism in England in the whole of the postwar period.
During the 1920s Lawrence
(who had left England in 1919) and Eliot began to develop viewpoints at odds
with the reputations they had established through their early work. In Kangaroo
(1923) and The Plumed Serpent (1926), Lawrence revealed the attraction to him
of charismatic, masculine leadership, while, in For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays
on Style and Order (1928), Eliot (whose influence as a literary critic now
rivaled his influence as a poet) announced that he was a “classicist in
literature, royalist in politics and anglo-catholic in religion” and committed
himself to hierarchy and order. Elitist and paternalistic, they did not,
however, adopt the extreme positions of Pound (who left England in 1920 and
settled permanently in Italy in 1925) or Lewis. Drawing upon the ideas of the
left and of the right, Pound and Lewis dismissed democracy as a sham and argued
that economic and ideological manipulation was the dominant factor. For some,
the antidemocratic views of the Anglo-American Modernists simply made explicit
the reactionary tendencies inherent in the movement from its beginning; for
others, they came from a tragic loss of balance occasioned by World War I. This
issue is a complex one, and judgments upon the literary merit and political
status of Pound’s ambitious but immensely difficult Imagist epic The Cantos
(1917–70) and Lewis’s powerful sequence of politico-theological novels The
Human Age (The Childermass, 1928; Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta, both 1955) are
sharply divided.
Celtic
Modernism: Yeats, Joyce, Jones, and MacDiarmid
Pound, Lewis, Lawrence,
and Eliot were the principal male figures of Anglo-American Modernism, but
important contributions also were made by the Irish poet and playwright William
Butler Yeats and the Irish novelist James Joyce. By virtue of nationality, residence,
and, in Yeats’s case, an unjust reputation as a poet still steeped in Celtic
mythology, they had less immediate impact upon the British literary
intelligentsia in the late 1910s and early 1920s than Pound, Lewis, Lawrence,
and Eliot, although by the mid-1920s their influence had become direct and
substantial. Many critics today argue that Yeats’s work as a poet and Joyce’s
work as a novelist are the most important Modernist achievements of the period.
In his early verse and
drama, Yeats, who had been influenced as a young man by the Romantic and
Pre-Raphaelite movements, evoked a legendary and supernatural Ireland in
language that was often vague and grandiloquent. As an adherent of the cause of
Irish nationalism, he had hoped to instill pride in the Irish past. The poetry
of The Green Helmet (1910) and Responsibilities (1914), however, was marked not
only by a more concrete and colloquial style but also by a growing isolation
from the nationalist movement, for Yeats celebrated an aristocratic Ireland
epitomized for him by the family and country house of his friend and patron,
Lady Gregory.
Poet William
Butler Yeats
Poet William Butler
YeatsWilliam Butler Yeats, c. 1920s.
The grandeur of his
mature reflective poetry in The Wild Swans at Coole (1917), Michael Robartes
and the Dancer (1921), The Tower (1928), and The Winding Stair (1929) derived
in large measure from the way in which (caught up by the violent discords of contemporary
Irish history) he accepted the fact that his idealized Ireland was illusory. At
its best his mature style combined passion and precision with powerful symbol,
strong rhythm, and lucid diction; and even though his poetry often touched upon
public themes, he never ceased to reflect upon the Romantic themes of
creativity, selfhood, and the individual’s relationship to nature, time, and
history.
Joyce, who spent his
adult life on the continent of Europe, expressed in his fiction his sense of
the limits and possibilities of the Ireland he had left behind. In his
collection of short stories, Dubliners (1914), and his largely autobiographical
novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), he described in fiction
at once realist and symbolist the individual cost of the sexual and imaginative
oppressiveness of life in Ireland. As if by provocative contrast, his panoramic
novel of urban life, Ulysses (1922), was sexually frank and imaginatively
profuse. (Copies of the first edition were burned by the New York postal
authorities, and British customs officials seized the second edition in 1923.)
Employing extraordinary formal and linguistic inventiveness, including the
stream-of-consciousness method, Joyce depicted the experiences and the
fantasies of various men and women in Dublin on a summer’s day in June 1904.
Yet his purpose was not simply documentary, for he drew upon an encyclopaedic
range of European literature to stress the rich universality of life buried
beneath the provincialism of pre-independence Dublin, in 1904 a city still
within the British Empire. In his even more experimental Finnegans Wake (1939),
extracts of which had already appeared as Work in Progress from 1928 to 1937,
Joyce’s commitment to cultural universality became absolute. By means of a
strange, polyglot idiom of puns and portmanteau words, he not only explored the
relationship between the conscious and the unconscious but also suggested that
the languages and myths of Ireland were interwoven with the languages and myths
of many other cultures.
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