Cultural Aspects of the Victorian Age Reflected in Literature
Lect. univ. dr. Anca Mihaela DOBRINESCU
Universitatea “Petrol-Gaze” Ploiesti
No matter how controversial the issues relating to the Victorian age may have been when
the term ‘Victorianism’ imposed itself as indispensable to the history of culture and civilisation in
the nineteenth century, consensus has been reached that this period was one of unprecedented
development in all the fields of England’s economic, social and political life. Referred to from the
standpoint of the twentieth century, Queen Victoria’s age is undoubtedly perceived as a period of
stability and equilibrium underlain by a solid and reliable value system, with the idea of God
looming large at its centre. Far from being a period of perfect harmony, free of any conflicting
states, Victorianism still enjoys the benefits of some strongholds on whose unquestionable stability
one is invited to rely. The most important one is the figure of Queen Victoria herself and the
institution the queen represented - the monarchy.
Queen Victoria was the longest reigning monarch in English history and she is primarily
remembered for her having established the monarchy as a respected and popular institution. The
monarchy – “the apex of the court and of polite society generally”1 – flourished under Queen
Victoria. “The monarchy represented the timeless quality of what was taken to be a pre-industrial
order. In an increasingly urbanised society, it balanced the Industrial revolution: the more urban
Britain became, the more stylised, ritualised, and popular became its monarchy, for the values
which it claimed to personify stood outside the competitive egalitarianism of capitalist society.”2
Victoria gained enormous popular esteem for supporting the imperialistic policies and, in
1876, she also became Empress of India. Great Britain turned into one of the world’s most extended
empires. It occupied a position in the world that engendered a feeling of self-confidence, of trust in
the individual’s power and in an unlimited possibility of progress, all the more so for Britain also
being the cradle of the Industrial Revolution. Dictated by a tough competition with other European
nations, the British Empire expanded with a view to establishing new spheres of influence and
gaining control over previously unexplored areas that represented fresh opportunities for trade and
new sources of wealth. A feeling of national pride was also associated with Britain’s expansionistic
tendencies in the nineteenth century, which undoubtedly accounts for part of the apparent stability
of the Victorian society. The Empire was, thus, another stronghold of the Victorian age, on whose
strength much of the spirit of the period depended.
On the occasion of the Great Exhibition of 1851, proudly opened by Queen Victoria and
Prince Albert in London, E. P. Hood, the inventor of the term ‘Victorian’ stated with immeasurable
pride. “The Englishman lives to move and to struggle, to conquer and to build; to visit all seas, to
diffuse the genius of his character over all nations. Industry, Protestantism, Liberty seem born of the
Teutonic race – that race to whom God has committed the conservation as well as the spread of
Truth and on whom mainly depend the civilisation and progress of the world.”3
The boom in wealth generated a boom in birth rate. In the public opinion, the traditional
picture of the family reigned supreme. The large family was the rule in the Victorian society. Many
1
Morgan , Kenneth O. (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain, Oxford University Press, 2000, p.493
ibid., p.496
3
Hood, E.P., The Age and Its Architects quoted in Bedarida, F., A Social History of England 1851-1990, Routledge,
1994
2
children, gathered under the protective wing of a caring mother, materially depended on the effort,
and consequent success, of the father, who could be seen as a dignified epitome of God on earth.
Much of the stability and solidity of the Victorian age were given by people’s perceiving the
family, the monarchy and the empire as solid, incontestable and wealth providing institutions.
Although the Victorian prosperity was only one side of the coin, the other being the victims, the
multitude of the crushed and the oppressed, few Victorian people ever seriously thought of
contesting the beneficial role of these institutions in the Victorian society. Dissatisfaction may have
been formulated with any other social, economic or political aspects. The monarch and the
institution she led, the imperialist expansionism and the family as the basic social unit of the society
were never questioned.
Literature, and especially fiction, reflects the reality in a certain period of time. The Victorian
novel, constructed according to the conventions of realism is, thus, expected to be in various ways a
reflection, or better said, a representation of the Victorian society, with all its underlying values.
Yet, one and the same cultural, ideological and axiological background will generate different
distinct individual works. The main condition of existence of fiction is that it establishes a necessary
relationship with the external referent. When a mimetic attitude to literature is adopted, the fictional
work will create an illusion of reality, which can go from an apparent total overlap between fiction
and reality, to subtly or maybe strikingly divergent paths of the two. No matter which type of
illusion it creates, the work always is an original processing of the same material. It is the form and
the choice of method and technique that gives the work uniqueness and differentiates it from any
other individual work, even if the latter is inspired from the same referent.
Starting from the historical delimitation of the Victorian period, it is interesting to see how
different Victorian writers, or writers creating in the Victorian age, formulated their own standpoint
and related themselves to the Victorian values and conventions. The paper will try to demonstrate
that there is a clear relationship between the particular standpoint that a writer chooses to express
and the technique that he opts for in order to carry into effect the intended representation. To this
end, I have chosen for exemplification three novels by three novelists whose work displays a fairly
wide range of references to the Victorian period, but which, by a different option in point of
technique, produced a different representation of reality. The specific moment of time when the
three novels I selected were published is also relevant. Charles Dickens’ Bleak House came out in
1852-1853, i.e. about the same time the Great Exhibition took place in London. The Great
Exhibition marked a turning point in the history of the nineteenth century, delimiting the “Hungry
Forties” from the “Fabulous Fifties”. Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland appeared in
1865, i.e. a moment when the Victorian values indicative of wealth and prosperity, success and selfconfidence became the standard of the Victorian organisation. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
was written in 1899 and published only three years later in 1902, i.e. in a period when the Victorian
system, the Empire included, underwent a process of decline, when man’s value system got relative
under the influence of the turn-of-the-century scientific and technological discoveries. I will
approach the three novels, starting from some textual instances that I consider relevant to the
purpose of this paper. The three writers’ work will be dealt with in succession, given the fact that
the view of the world and the modifications of technique can be also interpreted as time-dependent.
Dickens confronts his reader with an image of the Victorian society rendered in the
conventions of the realist novel. Without claiming that he would reform manners and morals, or that
he would repair social injustice, Dickens constitutes himself, however, into a spokesperson of the
realities of his time. He has a view of both sides of the Victorian coin, but he chooses to emphasise
more the bad side of it, focusing on the deficiencies of the legal, social and political system.
Dickens is a keen observer of reality and he decides to present it as truthfully and as accurately as
possible. He chooses thus the narrative technique that could provide the proper bird’s-eye view of
the Victorian panorama. The point of view that Dickens uses is the omniscient, which means that,
no matter how sceptical about the values underlying the Victorian system he may be, he is not ready
to essentially question these values. The omniscient narrator is a God-like presence in the narrative
that parallels God’s central position to the Victorian man’s system of values. Consequently, critical
as Dickens is of England’s situation, the values underlying his thinking coincide to a certain extent
with those underlying the thinking of any Victorian individual. Dickens may criticise the
organisation of his contemporary England, but he will seldom, if ever, question the validity of this
organisation, in a subversive way. Dickens’ criticism can be effected in tones ranging from mild
irony, through satire to bitter sarcasm, but ultimately he will acknowledge the system as system, and
thus his novel will be an artistic representation of a society which is, after all, stable and solid.
Although England and the English political system are not too often the subject matter of
Dickens’ novels in explicit terms, the chapter ‘National and Domestic’ in Bleak House offers the
reader an almost straightforward representation of the country’s political deficiencies. There is one
ingredient that is purposefully avoided in the constitution of England – the Queen. One may easily
refer the two fictional characters in the fragment to the historical personages Benjamin Disraeli and
William Gladstone, both Prime Ministers having played a significant part during Queen Victoria’s
reign. Yet the monarch does not appear, although Dickens openly satirises the performance of the
two politicians, the former a Conservative, the latter a Liberal. Dickens’ message is that all political
alternatives are reduced to mere irrelevance when the judicial system is so ineffective and so
negatively reflected in the people’s life. Yet, the taboo subject of the queen, and implicitly of the
monarchy, is not tackled, which is clearly indicative of Dickens’ essential standpoint.
England had been in a dreadful state for some weeks. Lord Coodle would go out, Sir Thomas Doodle
wouldn’t come in, and there being nobody in Great Britain (to speak of) except Coodle and Doodle, there
has been no Government. It is a mercy that the hostile meeting between the two great men, which at one
time seemed inevitable, did not come off; because if both pistols had taken effect, and Coodle and Doodle
had killed each other, it is to be presumed that England must have waited to be governed until young Coodle
and young Doodle, now in frocks and long stockings, were grown up. This stupendous national calamity,
however, was averted by Lord Coodle’s making the timely discovery that, if in the heat of debate he had said
that he scorned and despised the whole ignoble career of Sir Thomas Doodle, he had merely meant to say
that party difference should never induce him to withhold from it the tribute of his warmest admiration;
while it as opportunely turned out, on the other hand, that Sir Thomas Doodle had in his own bosom
expressly booked Lord Coodle to go down to posterity as the mirror of virtue and honour. Still England has
been some weeks in the dismal strait of having no pilot (as was well observed by Sir Leicester Dedlock) to
weather the storm; and the marvellous part of the matter is, that England has not appeared to care very much
about it, but has gone on eating and drinking and marrying and giving in marriage, as the old world did in
the days before the flood.4
The irony underlying the text is evident. The names of the two ‘great men’ come into derisive
discrepancy with their indispensability to the fate of Britannia, as England is referred to some lines
downwards by Dickens, in remembrance of the heroic days of the Roman province. The common
noun ‘doodle’5 turned into a proper one and, more importantly, assigned to a person on whose
shoulders the responsibility of a country lies suggests Dickens’ clear intention of mocking at the
whole political system that both Conservatives and Liberals represented. The name ‘Coodle’ is only
an invention to make political irresponsibility rhyme. Dickens has the same critical attitude when he
considers the political discourse in the Victorian period. He points to the ambiguity and lack of
coherence of this discourse, which may be mildly termed diplomatic, but which shows nothing but
the indifference, lack of consistency, even rude manners of the politicians at that, and other coming,
time. Similarly, he questions, by attacking it, the hereditary right of the aristocratic class to the
government of the country. Yet what the reader discovers, in surprise is that, in the Victorian
writer’s opinion, the country could manage without the two, which indicates, in an implicit way that
the structure was seen as stable and strong enough to resist in absence of government. This is the
4
5
Dickens, Ch., Bleak House, Penguin Books, 1994, pp.516
doodle: meaningless scrawls and scribbles, while one is or ought to be paying attention to something else
reason why the Queen is not held responsible. She was a guarantee to the country’s stability and
prosperity. Her privileged place in the Victorian mentality prevented Dickens from having her
artistically involved. The Queen, just like the other institutions mentioned in the beginning of this
paper, was a taboo subject. Adopting an omniscient narrator’s perspective, it would have been
unlikely that Dickens should diverge from the main line of thought and mentality of the Victorian
age. He formulated an individual viewpoint, without taking the risk of offending the public one.
Just a few years later, Lewis Carroll represented the same Victorian period, but in a moment
when Victorian issues had, in a way, ceased to be seen as points of controversy. Things had started
to change for the better, and the Reform Bills relieved Great Britain’s political system. Under the
form of a nonsensical story, anticipating the twentieth-century literature of the absurd, Lewis
Carroll enlarges upon various Victorian topics, in a joking and apparently superficial way. The form
he adopts and the technique that he decides on – selective omniscience- indicate more than a change
in the tenets of literature. It was certainly difficult for Carroll to give an unbiased view of his time’s
society unless he decided to free his reader from a too strict control on the part of the omniscient
narrator. To be able to express a personal standpoint, he had to sacrifice the privilege of
omniscience to the freer perspective of a character who should not necessarily hold the system’s
values in reverence. Alice is indeed a dignified representative of the Victorian society, but she is a
child, so she has an incomplete and imperfect view of the society she was born in and educated to.
For this reason, the action being filtered through her eyes, she has the capacity of coping with the
topical issues of the Victorian age in a freer manner and thus formulating a viewpoint different from
that of Dickens. Alice’s eye functions as a mirror, but due to the incompleteness of her knowledge,
as an imperfect, sometimes distorted mirror. The impression of distortion is accentuated further
more by the story being transferred to a realm of dream. Beside the narrative precautions that
Carroll took to enable him to move more freely within the established value system, cherished by
the Victorian public opinion, he also resorted to a method of demonstration borrowed from
mathematics, the reductio ad absurdum one6. Thus all Carroll’s story acquires an in-the-mirror
quality. The imperfect and distorted mirror reflects the image of the Victorian society, without the
writer committing himself to the sense and value of the mirror reflections.
Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that Alice admits the court and the queen in her
representations of the Victorian society. She had had access to the incontestable meaning of this
institution only through books, that is her discourse becomes a second degree one, and for this much
less implicating. What Alice does in the encounter with the underground dream world is nothing but
to assign appropriate roles, whose knowledge and linguistic labels she had acquired from books, to
beings she meets. It is only through language that Alice’s whole world is constructed, which is not
different from how fiction linguistically constructs itself starting from facts of the real. Due to this
strategy, Carroll’s criticism, if there is any at all, and his representation of the Victorian society are
liberated from the constraints of the Victorian mentality.
The King and Queen of Hearts were seated on their throne when they arrived, with a great crowd assembled
about them […].
Alice had never been in a court of justice before, but she had read about them in books, and she was quite
pleased to find that she knew the name of nearly everything there. ‘That’s the judge,’ she said to herself,
‘because of his great wig.’
The judge, by the way, was the King; and as he wore his crown over the wig, (look at the frontispiece if you
want to see how he did it,) he did not look at all comfortable, and it was certainly not becoming.
‘And that’s the jury-box,’ thought Alice, ‘and those twelve creatures,’ (she was obliged to say ‘creatures’,
you see, because some of them were animals, and some were birds.) I suppose they are the jurors.’ She said
this last word two or three times over to herself, being rather proud of it: for she thought, and rightly too, that
very few little girls of her age knew the meaning of it all. However, ‘jury-men’ would have done just as
well.7
6
7
reductio ad absurdum: the disproof of a proposition by showing that its conclusion can be only absurd
Carroll, L., Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Penguin Books, 1994, pp. 128-129
In Conrad’s case, the representation strategies are more complicated. Conrad is a turn-of-thecentury writer. The Victorian value system starts to give way under the pressure of a new, not yet
definite, one. Conrad’s works faces the crisis of the Victorian value system and so it represents a
Victorian society that strives to preserve their feeling of self-confidence by giving prominence to
the imperialistic values. The British Empire reached its climax in the last years of the nineteenth
century and, as a matter of fact, its supremacy had never been contested before in the Victorian
literature. It seems that it was only an exile, such as Conrad was, a man of Europe and not a British
subject, to come to grips with the obvious controversial aspects of Britain’s imperialistic
experience. “The imperial idea, which reached its zenith between 1880 and 1914, was a strange
compound of widely different ingredients: the will to power, the profit motive, national pride,
Christian zeal, humanitarian feeling – an extraordinary mixture of cold calculation and passion,
reason and sentiment, all combined in one irresistible thrust.”8
For all its civilising dimensions, the springs of the imperialistic experience were mainly
material. However, the moral aspect had been always seen as inherent in the mechanisms and
ideologies of the empire. Thus many considered it the duty and obligation of the whites to civilise
the savages, to impart their knowledge to the uncultured brutes, to pass on the European cultural
standards to the native inhabitants. With all this moral camouflage, it is not surprising that the
imperialistic ideas were more often than not perceived as positive within the general framework of
the Victorian value system.
Dealing with such delicate issues in an age which had already announced its relativity, Conrad
needed, from a narrative as well as from an ideological point of view, the proper detachment that
could permit him to investigate the imperialistic discourse and to subversively assert his own
standpoint. Both the narrative and the ideological detachment are ensured in Conrad’s novels by
the adoption of a technique of indirectness, with Marlow as a narrator, observer, interpreter and
experiencer of the story.
References to the empire, a taboo subject in the Victorian novels, are always veiled and
subtle. Meanings of the empire are interwoven with a deeper meaning of man’s investigation of the
self. There are, however, portions in Heart of Darkness, where ideas relating to the empire are
clearly stated, although dealt with quite diplomatically. Conrad does not aim at shocking his
audiences. He simply wants to question and subvert the existing value system, which he manages to
do by an artful combination of acknowledged truths and ironically questioned ones. This flexibility
of approach would have never been possible without his eye witness narrator’s mediation.
As compared to his predecessors’ direct reference to Victorian aspects, in a more or less
ironic tone, Conrad handles topics relating to the empire more subtly and with much more insight.
He is more interested in the philosophy and ideology of the empire and their relevance to man’s
existence than in the institution as such.
We looked at the venerable stream not in the vivid flush of a short day that comes and departs for ever, but
in the august light of abiding memories. And indeed nothing is easier for a man who has, as the phrase goes,
‘followed the sea’ with reverence and affection, than to evoke the great spirit of the past upon the lower
reaches of the Thames. The tidal current runs to and fro in its unceasing service, crowded with memories of
men and ships it had borne to the rest of home or to the battles of the sea. It had known and served all the
men of whom the nation is proud, from Sir Francis Drake to Sir John Franklin, knights all, titled and untitled
– the great knights-errant of the sea. It had borne all the ships whose names are like jewels flashing in the
night of time, from the Golden Hind returning with her round flanks full of treasure, to be visited by the
Queen’s Highness and thus pass out of the gigantic tale, to the Erebus and Terror, bound on other conquests
– and that never returned. It had known the ships and the men. They had sailed from Deptford, from
Greenwich, from Erith – the adventurers and the settlers; kings’ ships and the ships of men on ’Change;
captains, admirals, the dark ‘interlopers’ of the Eastern Trade, and the commissioned ‘generals’ of East India
8
Bedarida, F., A Social History of England 1851-1990, 1994, p.145
fleets. Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and
often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. What
greatness had not floated in the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! … The dreams of
men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires. 9
The fragment synthesises Great Britain’s imperialistic experience from the times of the
Renaissance, to whose name much lustre was added by historians as regards the exploits of brave
lords-pirates such as Drake, to the modern times. England’s imperialistic history does not confine
itself to the Victorian times. The expansionist tendencies of Britain are inherent in the medieval
crusades, and the conquering of Canada and America. What Conrad suggests, by the way in which
he organises the historical information and adds to it his subtle ironic comments, is that man’s
propensity towards destruction and self-destruction, translated in expansion and conquest, is
inherent in human nature. What seems to be nothing but a sequence of events praising England’s
uninterrupted presence in the history of the world turns out to be a subversive dismantling of the
very building the text apparently puts up. Conrad gallantly refers to the Queen and her reassuring
presence, it is true that he means Queen Elizabeth I, but he implies Victoria as well as any other
monarch of England, while disclosing the monarch’s implication in the imperialistic
destructiveness. Conrad’s strategy is thus characterised by simultaneous assertion and subversion of
a value system, which is part of the modernity of his enterprise.
Bibliography
Bedarida, F., A Social History of England 1851-1990, 1994
Carroll, L., Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Penguin Books, 1994
Conrad, J., Heart of Darkness, Penguin Books, 1994
Dickens, Ch., Bleak House, Penguin Books, 1994
Morgan , Kenneth O. (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain, Oxford University Press,
2000
9
Conrad, J., Heart of Darkness, Penguin Books, 1994, pp. 6-7