The ideas of the Victorian Age~political and moral, scientific and religious~helped to define the Victorians themselves. Education was spreading in the Victorian Age, and as literacy increased, so did the impact of the written word. Probably at no other time before or since did books enjoy such enormous popularity and influence.
The Romantic movement continued to influence writers of the Victorian Age, but new styles of writing came into vogue. Romanticism had begun as a radical departure from literary practice; now it was part of mainstream culture, safe but slightly stale. A new generation of writers, coming of age in a time of rapid technological change, began to examine the social effects of that change. The heroes of the new generation's literature would be ordinary people facing the day~to~day problems of life. Life would be presented as it is, rather than as it might be. We call this new literary movement realism, because it sought to portray human life realistically, as it is actually lived, without sugar coating.
Romantic thinking had lent itself to poetic language, and we study the Romantic Age chiefly for its poetry. Realism, on the other hand, focused on more down to earth or prosaic events especially suited to prose. The shift in style helped to make the Victorian Age the great age of the British novel.
By focusing on ordinary people, realist literature reflected the nineteenth~century trend to democracy and appealed to a growing middle~class audience. Realist writing often dealt with family relationships, religion and morality, social change, and social reform~topics of special interest to middle~class readers.
New ideas in science also made their mark on Victorian literature. A movement known as naturalism~an outgrowth of realism~sought to apply the techniques of scientific observation to writing about life in the industrial age. Naturalists crammed their novels with details~the sour smells of poverty, the harsh sounds of factory life~often with the aim of promoting social reform. Naturalist writers directly contradicted he romactic view of nature as kindly and benevolent. To naturalist writers portrayed nature as harsh and indifferent to the human suffering it often caused.
It would be a mistake to assume that Victorian writers abandoned romanticism altogether. Some writers blended romanticism with realism or naturalism; others sought to revive romanticism as the radical force it once had been. Two Victorian literary movements deserve special mention here. One is a group of painters and poets known as the Pre~Raphaelite Brotherhood. Formed in 1848, this short~lived group sought to ignore the ugliness of industrial life by portraying nature with the fidelity found in medieval Italian art before the Renaissance painter Raphael (1483~1520). The leading Pre~Raphaelite was Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828~1882), who excelled both as a painter and as a poet. The second group, known as the aesthetic movement, appeared toward the end of the Victorian Age. Aesthetes like the writer Oscar Wilde (1854~1900) turned away from everyday world and sought to create "art for art's sake"--works whose sole reason for being was their perfection or beauty. |
