Characteristics of Victorian Literature
The literature of the Victorian age (1837 – 1901, named for the reign of Queen Victoria) entered
in a new period after the romantic revival. The literature of this era expressed the fusion of pure
romance to gross realism. Though, the Victorian Age produced great poets, the age is also
remarkable for the excellence of its prose.
The discoveries of science have particular effects upon the literature of the age. If you study all
the great writers of this period, you will mark four general characteristics:
1. Literature of this age tends to come closer to daily life which reflects its practical
problems and interests. It becomes a powerful instrument for human progress. Socially
& economically, Industrialism was on the rise and various reform movements like
emancipation, child labor, women’s rights, and evolution.
2. Moral Purpose: The Victorian literature seems to deviate from "art for art's sake" and
asserts its moral purpose. Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle, Ruskin - all were the teachers of
England with the faith in their moral message to instruct the world.
3. Idealism: It is often considered as an age of doubt and pessimism. The influence of
science is felt here. The whole age seems to be caught in the conception of man in
relation to the universe with the idea of evolution.
4. Though, the age is characterized as practical and materialistic, most of the writers exalt
a purely ideal life. It is an idealistic age where the great ideals like truth, justice, love,
brotherhood are emphasized by poets, essayists and novelists of the age.
The Style of the Victorian Novel
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. They tended to be of an improving nature with a central moral lesson at heart. While
this formula was the basis for much of earlier Victorian fiction, the situation became more
complex as the century progressed.
Victorian literature is the literature produced during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901)
and corresponds to the Victorian era. It forms a link and transition between the writers of the
romantic period and the very different literature of the 20th century.
The 19th century saw the novel become the leading form of literature in English. The works by
pre-Victorian writers such as Jane Austen and Walter Scott had perfected both closely-observed
social satire and adventure stories. Popular works opened a market for the novel amongst a
reading public. The 19th century is often regarded as a high point in British literature as well as in
other countries such as France, the United States and Russia. Books, and novels in particular,
became ubiquitous, and the "Victorian novelist" created legacy works with continuing appeal.
Significant Victorian novelists and poets include: Matthew Arnold, the Brontë sisters (Emily,
Anne and Charlotte Brontë), Christina Rossetti, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
Joseph Conrad, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli,
George Eliot, George Meredith, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Gissing, Richard Jefferies, Thomas
Hardy, A. E. Housman, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis
Stevenson, Bram Stoker, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Philip Meadows Taylor, Alfred Lord
Tennyson, William Thackeray, Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll and H. G. Wells (although many
people consider his writing to be more of the Edwardian age).
The term postmodernism implies a movement away from and
perhaps a reaction against modernism. Both terms are often used
to describe a broad spectrum of attitudes and broad approaches to
the novel.
Some Definitions of Terms
In general premodernism assumes that man is ruled by authority (e.g.,
the Catholic Church) and tradition.
With modernism, influenced by humanism and the Enlightenment, man
rejects tradition and authority in favor of a reliance on reason and on
scientific discovery.
Postmodernism stretches and breaks away from the idea that man can
achieve understanding through a reliance on reason and science.
Discoveries such as Einstein's Theory of Relativity, Heisenburg's
Uncertainty Principle, and the weird behavior of particles in quantum
physics convey the belief that the universe cannot be explained by reason
alone.
Discoveries such as Einstein's Theory of Relativity, Heisenburg's
Uncertainty Principle, and the weird behavior of particles in quantum
physics convey the belief that the universe cannot be explained by reason
alone.
Modernity is fundamentally about order: about rationality and
rationalization, creating order out of chaos. The assumption is that
creating more rationality is conducive to creating more order, and that the
more ordered a society is, the better [i.e., the more rationally]. . .it will
function.
In Modernist Fiction Randall Stevenson says:
Postmodernism extends modernist uncertainty, often by assuming
that reality, if it exists at all, is unknowable or inaccessible through
a language grown detached from it.
Characteristics of Postmodernism in Fiction
Postmodernist fiction is generally marked by one or more of the
following characteristics:
 playfulness with language
 experimentation in the form of the novel
 less reliance on traditional narrative form
 less reliance on traditional character development
 experimentation with point of view
 experimentation with the way time is conveyed in the novel
 mixture of "high art" and popular culture
 interest in metafiction, that is, fiction about the nature of
fiction