The Victorian Novel: A Bit Of A Good, Hard Slog
What makes a book boring and difficult to focus upon for the modern reader?
- Being very long, yet with very little happening
- Being very slow-moving, with many pages before something happens
- Having extremely long, complicated sentences with a lot of big words
- Being full of endless conversations with very little happening
- Having lengthy descriptive passages with very little happening
- Having a large number of characters, not all of which play much of a role in what’s (slowly) happening
- Using an extremely formal tone, with a very large vocabulary required to understand what’s happening.
- Being extremely interested in manners and propriety and behaviour,
- Being focused, quite often, more upon ideas than upon events
- Purposely attempting to be very eloquent, rather than very dramatic or very exciting
- Having an obvious moral lesson, and protagonists who are well-behaved and virtuous to (and past) the point of being prissy, preachy or annoying
This is a pretty accurate description of a Victorian novel. Victorian novels today are deeply admired for their eloquence, and also find themselves almost irresistible targets for parody. After all, the more serious and eloquent someone is trying to be, the more fun it is to make jokes.
Books have evolved and developed over the years to be continually ever more attention-grabbing and concise, and more and more accessible to weaker and weaker readers. The vocabulary required to read J.K. Rowling or Stephenie Meyer is miniscule (tiny) compared to the one required to read Charles Dickens, who is redoubtable, even sesquipedalistic in his verbiage.
The 1800s saw the novel come into prominence as the dominant form of literature in the Western world. This was due in part to the sudden proliferation of literacy in Great Britain and her colonies.
Victorian novels (written predominantly in English, and generally, in the British Isles in the 1800s when Queen Victoria held sway) fell chronologically and stylistically between literature of the Romantic period on the one hand, and the realism movement which characterized 20th century work on the other.
(to word that in a less eloquent and stuffy way and one more cynically calculated to delight and astound a more modern audience:
In the 1800s, books were suddenly a big thing. Big as Blu-Ray and XBOX, no doubt.
The fact that suddenly almost everyone could read probably really helped out with that, right?
Victorian novels are called that because Victoria was queen that century.
Victorian novels aren’t quite like the Romantic ones people had before that.
They’re also not exactly like the realistic ones in the 1900s.)
The romantic era had been wildly dramatic (and quite often interested in the supernatural). This can be seen in the work of romantic American superstar Edgar Allan Poe, who lived in the Victorian era, but wrote in the old-fashioned style of the previous, Romantic one. It was extremely dark literature and was a response to the scientific, landscape and country-life wrecking inroads of the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution tore up trees, knocked down castles and mansions, moved everyone into the cities, split up families, and filled the British air with coal smoke and the fields and rivers with chemicals. The creeping, hellish factories resulted in a century of fatal and near-fatal accidents in facilities which often employed children who were sometimes literally worked to death. This was before labour laws, and definitely before minimum wage and unions fighting for safe working conditions and fair hours. Romantic era people wanted lovely, heroic, unrealistic stories about heroes and knights roaming green forests, by lakes inhabited by ladies swathed in gowns of shimmering samite which outshone the sun, or mysterious, dark supernatural horror stories with ghosts, vampires, tombs and curses and not a lick of science. Sometimes, the fictional monsters, vampires, witches, ghosts and curses were meant to represent the real-world evils being genuinely caused by careless experimentation with science and technology.
The Victorian era fell squarely between the influence of this Romantic period, and a movement toward the calm, quiet everyday quality of the realism period which would follow. Most Victorian works are a bit brightly or darkly romantic and a bit everyday realistic.
From Wikipedia: Victorian novels tend to be idealized portraits of difficult lives in which hard work, perseverance, love and luck win out in the end; virtue would be rewarded and wrongdoers are suitably punished.
Did you know...
... that the former Union Free School in Le Roy, New York, is now a museum devoted to Jell-O?
... that the first automobile in Canada was first operated by parish priest Georges-Antoine Belcourt in 1866?
Victorian novels tend to be:
- Very long, dry, understated and wordy
- In fact, they’re as eloquently, formally and fancily written as possible. If you can’t understand them, rather than considering toning down the language, the author generally seems to feel that this is just too bad and you are probably dumb.
- Mostly made up of conversations, reminiscences and/or letters, rather than events playing out in “real-time.” Some Victorian novels are nothing more than a series of flashbacks within flashbacks.
- Filled with people of three classes (nobility, middle class and lower or poor class) People from different classes aren’t to mix, socialize or date. The rich own huge mansions and lands, which are often dark, creepy and decaying, and they employ a household of maids, cooks, butlers, gardeners, governesses and grooms to keep everything running. Wandering the countryside and lurking on street corners below even these employees of the rich are beggars, gypsies, peddlers, thieves, prostitutes and street urchins. Movement between these three classes was “not supposed” to occur, so 19th century audiences would delight in stories of a nine year prince who switched clothes with a street urchin who mysteriously looked just like him so each could try out the other’s life, or of a governess being suddenly and mysteriously left a castle in a long lost uncle’s will or a maid marrying the lord of the manor and becoming a lady, baroness, countess or the like.
- Dark and brooding, full of disease, poverty, accidents and death
- Peopled by orphans, quite often due to how many women actually died in childbirth in times before Caesarean sections were commonplace
- Usually spiced up by a hidden secret, usually involving long-lost twins or mysterious lookalikes, amnesia, insanity, out of wedlock pregnancy, crime, secret marriages, bastard children, lost fortunes, monsters, ghosts, pirates, exiles returned from prison or Australia and nasty workhouses, orphanages or factories.
- Where a modern movie would try for some cheap excitement by blowing something up, the Victorian equivalent is to have a fire, which is, if you think about it, just a really, really slow explosion going off and unfolding for hours instead of a fraction of a second. When houses were lit by candles and nightwear had long, flowing sleeves, fires were quite common.
The Victorian era saw huge inroads in the publishing of:
- Romantic books for and by women, like Emma, Jane Eyre, and Wuthering Heights
- Children’s books like Alice in Wonderland , Black Beauty, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn
- Adventure books like Robert Louis Stephenson’s Treasure Island and Kidnapped, Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, and The Three Musketeers, Sir Walter Scott’s Rob Roy and Ivanhoe, Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, which inspired the Indiana Jones movies.
- The Victorian Era also saw great inroads in the writing of Horror fiction which was gradually replaced by a mania for what came to be known as science fiction
Books By Women, For Women
Even today, in a stereotypical chick flick or “woman’s book,” (e.g. Bridget Jones’ Diary) the heroine must choose between two men. The exciting one is usually a jerk. The nice one is boring. How to choose?
The traditional solution, in novels, anyway, is to “tame” or “reform” the exciting boor. Note: this works less well in real life. Read Cosmo for further exhaustive and scientifically reliable research information.
Jane Austen writes “Comedy of Manners” after “Comedy of Manners”
Jane Austen was ahead of her time. Her novels, published just before the Victorian era properly started, were and are, hugely influential. They were about rich people deciding whom to marry, and being extremely clever and witty and slightly mischievous in communities in which etiquette is all, and a woman without a rich husband is pretty much homeless. Knowing how to burn someone in front of people without just telling them to f**k right off was pretty much what her characters did.
Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility
Two sisters are orphaned and suddenly poor. They need to rebuild their lives, and find good men to marry. A great deal of women gossiping and worrying about their own, and other women’s reputations occurs. Boring, nice men, and brash, exciting jerks abound.
Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice
Five sisters worry that they will be orphaned and poor, so set about establishing themselves as decent, attractive marriage prospects in rich society. The protagonist is annoyed by and interested in a rich jerk, so is a jerk back, which he seems to end up liking.
Jane Austen’s Emma
The sarcastic, bitchy protagonist named in the title feels she is a master matchmaker, and sets about trying to hook up and marry off every single person she knows, but stay single herself. Hearts are broken, afternoons are spoiled. Shenanigans ensue.
In the rural British countryside lived three sisters in the Bronte family. There were originally six children, but after their mother died at home after a long, painful sickness, the five girls were sent away to a harsh, grim school. As a result of poor nutrition, hygiene and heat, two of the five girls died. All of the Brontes died before or around age thirty. Shortly before they died, the three girls wrote novels, at first under male names. All of these novels are highly respected today.
Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre
An orphan girl who won’t do what she’s told or defer to “her betters” survives the most horrible foster parenting (a monstrously cruel old invalid lady) and boarding school, manages not to die of consumption like other children there, has two men to choose from (one boring, religious and nice, and the other a bit of an angry jerk, but rich and interesting). She needs to choose one, and get married rather than merely pregnant. There are secrets, lost fortunes, abandoned children, angst, poverty and fires.
Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (Edward Cullen’s favourite book)
On the blasted, windy, rainy moors, a poor gypsy orphan who is an exciting jerk and a woman who is out of his social reach are passionately in love. There is also a nice, kind, boring man who loves her who she is supposed to marry. The gypsy jerk (Heathcliffe) is shattered by this and stomps around and carries on. She marries the boring guy. Eventually she gets sick and dies, and the exciting orphaned gypsy boor ends up wailing and crying and trying to dig up her corpse. Then he becomes even more of a cruel idiot and angrily and cruelly raises his sickly, bastard son who he hates, while tormenting the daughter of his dead love. Eventually, when the daughter is in love with someone he doesn’t approve of, he goes insane, sees the ghost of his dead love, and dies. The end.
Victorian Publishing Superstar Charles Dickens
Dickens wrote mainly for magazines, publishing his stories in instalments which were later collected as novels. He specialized in writing with huge numbers of characters and numerous and complicated subplots. He was thought very funny in his day, but then, very few things are funny for more than 15 years.
Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist
A poor orphan escapes a workhouse (where he confounds everyone by asking “Please, sir, can I have some more” when the porridge is pretty brutal) only to fall into the clutches of a criminal who keeps a gang of child pickpockets. Nobly, Oliver won’t turn to crime. Executions, secrets and murders abound.
Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield
A half-orphaned boy is abused by his monstrous step-father, gets sent to a boarding school, must work in a nasty factory and tries to live his life. Executions, secrets, crime and murders abound. People go to Australia.
Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations
An orphan meets a criminal who later is sent to Australia and helps him escape his manacles. The orphan lives with his abusive sister until she is beaten and becomes a brain-damaged invalid, and he loves a girl who lives with a crazy, monstrously cruel, abusive old shut-in lady. There is darkness, cruelty, people sent to jail and Australia, and old ladies being lit on fire.
Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol
A cruel, stingy man (Ebenezer Scrooge) who does not help poor people, orphans and crippled children is visited by ghosts who convince him he’s a bit of a monster and frighten him into becoming more Christmassy.
Charles Dicken’s A Tale of Two Cities
Taking a break from the usual Industrial Revolution orphans, Dickens tackles some historical fiction about the French Revolution. Several protagonists and their various families deal with the ugliness leading up to and resulting from the social upheaval caused by the lower classes overthrowing the upper class and executing them. Lots of heads are cut off, or threatened to be cut off. Mysterious look-alikes figure importantly.
The Most Famous Detective Ever
Edgar Allan Poe had pretty much invented the detective story. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle took this idea and ran with it, creating the Sherlock Holmes novels and short stories based upon a doctor he knew who could guess all sorts of things about people, simply by looking at them.
With a great deal of focus upon conversations and letters, a detective (mainly from conversations he has with clients in his apartment) uncovers the facts about secret marriages, pregnancies, thefts, orphans, identical twins, brothers returned from Australia, lunatics, amnesiacs, fires and etc.
(Holmes/House, Watson/Wilson, Cocaine-morphine/Vicodin, 221B Baker Street)
Three Very Important Horror Novels
Just like now, Victorian audiences liked to be amazed and terrified by scary stories. In the real world, a real monster in the form of Jack the Ripper was slashing up prostitutes in London. Other monsters lived only in the novels of the day.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Really the first vampire book of note. A series of letters and conversations reveal, mostly in flashback, that a man is secretly a supernatural monster which defies scientific explanation, and has been murdering people and must be killed. With all the people dying of consumption, who’s going to notice two little holes in someone’s neck?
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
This is really a hold-over from the Romantic period, but was published in the 1800s and widely read at that time, despite it’s romantic vilification of science. A series of letters and conversations reveal, all in flashback, that a man secretly went against the natural order of things for a man, and simply created life, something only a woman should do, and that, certainly never through science. In so doing, he has made a monster, and it’s been murdering people and brooding over its fate, destiny and possible happiness. It sets out to demand answers from him and ruin his life by killing everyone he loves.
Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyl and Mr. Hyde
A series of letters and conversations reveal, mostly in flashback, that a man has secretly been using science to try to “cure” the bad part of himself so he can be a 100% good person. In so doing, he accidentally turns himself into a monster, which has been going around brutalizing and murdering people.
The Age of Science Fiction
As the supernatural focus of the Romantic Era really and truly died out, stories with pseudo-scientific explanations for the unfolding wonderments and oddments proliferated.
As the supernatural focus of the Romantic Era really and truly died out, stories with pseudo-scientific explanations for the unfolding wonderments and oddments proliferated.
Jules Verne wrote science fiction stories such as A Journey to the Centre of the Earth, From the Earth to the Moon, and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, which was about a new invention being then worked on, which would be called a submarine. H.G. Wells wrote science fiction stories such as The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds (about a Martian invasion of Earth) and The Island of Doctor Moreau, about a scientist performing experiments upon animals to make them into grotesque animal-human hybrids.
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