o the Victorians, theirs was the age of the novel, just as the Elizabethan and Jacobean period had been the age of drama. In an article entitled 'The Novel and the Drama', the Saturday Review claimed that 'the novel has displaced the stage. The theatre hardly exists, as an intellectual influence. And this perhaps may be accepted as proof that what was once the strongest current of our literature has been diverted to another channel'(17 12 March 1864, 312-14). According to Eneas Sweetland Dallas, one of the leading critics of the time,
within the space of thirty-six days, not long ago, no less than forty-six novels were offered for subscription in Paternoster Row – that is, nine every week for five successive weeks. The number seems to be prodigious, but in truth it gives no adequate idea of the quantity of fiction which is written and printed, published and read, year by year in this country. Not only are there heaps of stories, great and small, produced in single, in double, and in treble volumes, each one by itself, but let it be remembered that there are an infinity of periodicals, weekly and monthly, varying in price from a halfpenny to half-a-crown, which have, with scarcely an exception, each a story on foot, and some of them two. [(]The Gay Science, 2 vols, 1866, II, 284/ 'The Gay Science' is Dallas' translation of the medieval Provençal for poetry: 'el gai saber']
In On a Lazy Idle Boy', the first of the ‘Roundabout Papers’ that appeared in the January 1980 Cornhill Magazine William Makepeace Thackeray reported an 'appetite for novels extending to the end of the world', and imagined 'far away in the frozen deep, the sailors reading them to one another during the endless night' (124-8). Indeed a box of books from Mudie's circulating library had even accompanied Sir John Franklin on his fatal arctic expedition of 1845-1847.
The Nineteenth-Century Novel — Sign of Cultural Health or Cultural Decline?
For Leigh Hunt the survival of fantastic fiction, like the Arabian Nights, into the age of utilitarianism represented a victory for the human imagination: ‘Well may the lovers of fiction triumph over the prophecy, that was to see an end put to all poetry and romance by the progress of science;- to care for nothing but what the chemist could analyse, and the manufacturer realize; and take no further delight in nymphs and gnomes, because Sir Humphrey Davy had made a lamp … '('New Translations of the Arabian Nights', Westminster Review 33 January 1840, 101-37). For some, the phenomenon spelt cultural decline: 'There has never been anything like it before. To the literary historian it is an unparalleled phenomenon, and brings to mind the remark of Lord Lytton, that the literature of Greece began to exist in poetical literature and expired in prose fiction' (Dallas II 285).
In a review of Boswell's Life of Johnson in the 1832 Fraser's Magazine, the greatest of the nineteenth-century 'prophets', Thomas Carlyle, had mocked the fashionable novelist:
Of no given Book, not even of a Fashionable Novel, can you predicate with certainty that its vacuity is absolute; that there are not other vacuities which shall partially replenish themselves therefrom, and esteem it a plenum. How knowest thou, may the distressed Novelwright exclaim, that I, here where I sit, am the Foolishest of existing mortals; that this my Long-ear of a Fictitious Biography shall not find one and the other, into whose still longer ears it may be the means, under Providence, of instilling somewhat? We answer, None knows, none can certainly know: therefore, write on, worthy Brother, even as thou canst, even as it has been given thee. [April-May 1832), 253-60 and 379-413]
Although Carlyle's specifically attacked fashionable fiction, many later writers, including two successful novelists of modern life, took it as a general remark on the novel. Thackeray draws the novelist in 'Vanity Fair' as a long-eared clown, addressing long-eared listeners, while over forty years after Carlyle's attack, Anthony Trollope still takes the trouble to reply to it when he is writing his Autobiography in the 1870s. In contrast, Sir Walter Scott was always exempt from this kind of criticism throughout the period, and remained for succeeding generations a stable point of reference when the quality or morality of fiction was under discussion.
Critics clearly saw the importance of prose fiction, and being generally unable to grant to later historical novels the high status they accorded Scott's, they looked for ways to explain the interest they took in the novel of contemporary life. Even the negative aspects of the 'fictitious Biography' Carlyle professed to despise could be turned to advantage, as Dallas explains in The Gay Science:
Our interest in the private life of our fellow-men has been developed into a system, and there is nothing in the way of study which people seem now to desire so much as to peep into the house of a neighbour, to watch his ways, and to calculate the ups and downs of fortunes. … To this gossipping sense the novelist appeals. A novel may be described as gossip etherealized, family talk generalized. … To transport us into new villages which we have never known, to lodge us in strange houses which we have never dreamt of, to make us at home among new circles of our fellow-creatures, to teach us to sympathizein all their little pursuits, to love their trifling gauds, to partake of their filmy hopes and fears, to be one of them and to join in the petty fluctuations of contracted lives – this may not be a lofty occupation, nor need great genius for its perfect exercise; nevertheless, it is good healthy work, and I know not who in this generation is better employed than he who – even if he cannot boast of genius, yet with tact and clearness – widens through fiction the range of our sympathies, and teaches us not less to care for the narrow aims of small people than for the vast schemes of the great and mighty. … Oh, happy art of fiction which can thus adjust the balance of fortune, raising the humble and weak to an equality in our hearts with the proud and the great! [285-86]
Early and mid-Victorian critics displayed a concern for the well-being of literature because to them it was an indication of a healthy or a sick state of society. From a safe distance it is possible to mock their worries, assuming that these are merely another manifestation of the stifling moralism of the Victorian period. Yet their concern for the education and mental development of the population was real, and their fears of corrupting influences were no more absurd than those of later centuries, when television and digital games have become the objects of anxiety. We of course are only aware of a small election of the vast novelistic output than has survived changes in taste and fashion. James Payn, himself a prolific novelist, pointed to the existence of a literary 'underclass' of readers:
It is now nearly a quarter of a century ago since a popular novelist [Wilkie Collins] revealed to the world … the existence of the 'Unknown Public;' and a very curious revelation it was. He showed us that the few thousands of persons who had hitherto imagined themselves to be the public … were in fact nothing of the kind; that the subscription to the circulating libraries, the numbers of book clubs, the purchasers of magazines and railway novels, might indeed have their favourites, but that these last were 'nowhere,' as respected the number of their backers, in comparison with novelists whose names and works appear in penny journals and nowhere else ('Penny Fiction', in his Some Private Views 1881, p. 116).
Growing levels of literacy were clearly a good thing, but many Victorians, like Matthew Arnold, doubted whether 'the consumption of the bad and the middling in literature does, of itself, necessarily engender a taste for the good'; and the question of what constituted 'the good' in literature occupied much of Arnold's attention throughout his life. He rarely seems to have included novels in the category, while on the other hand many writers did devote a great deal of trouble to discriminations between different kinds and qualities of fiction. Our evidence necessarily comes mainly from ephemeral articles, as very little criticism of the novel appeared in the form of books. (David Masson's book, British Novelists and Their Styles (18??) was unique in this respect.) Sensing that a lack of aesthetic respect for prose fiction arose from a lack of 'rules' for assessing the art form, writers such as Trollope, George Henry Lewes and Walter Besant concentrated on guiding the tyro novelist, and left it for a later age to produce a systematic criticism. Yet novelists were adventurers, as a study of the experiments of Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontës, Collins and Trollope, for example, proves, it was left to Henry James and his disciples to make analysis of 'the art of the novel' an intellectually and even academically respectable activity in later years.
It must be admitted that not all Victorian criticism reaches a level of intellectual respectability: and in this the period resembles any other. Yet when we look at the huge numbers of reviews that were published, the surprise is not that there was so much mediocrity, but that so much was good. Quite often reviews which appeared within a few days of the book concerned remain useful to this day, while it is the longer, more sober, considered articles that are less lively and less provocative. Reviews were the produce of a considerable body of 'men of letters' (there seems to have been no corresponding term for women writers), producing millions of words of essays, informative articles and criticism. Most of it was published anonymously, and anonymity was elevated to an ethical principle. We find Mowbray Morris, the manager of The Times rebuking Dallas for revealing that he had written the review of Tennyson's Maud, for example. Then, when Dallas asked to be allowed to use some of his reviews from the paper in a book, Morris replied in terms which reveal that anonymity enjoyed the heightened, irrational prestige of a fetish: 'The only objection that occurs to me against your unacknowledged quotation of what has appeared in the Times is, that if some clever critic should detect & expose the plagiarism, you would have to submit to the charge without explanation' (MS letter-books of The Times, vol. 5, 516 5 September 1855, and vol. 13, 618 1 November, 1865). The Fortnightly Review was one of the only periodicals which stood out against anonymity in reviewing.
Victorian Reviewers
Reviewers were rarely narrow specialists. Hutton, Lewes, Morley and Simcox, for example, were polymaths, with a sincere belief that all areas of intellectual enquiry were interconnected. Not for them a doctrine of 'two cultures', the humane and the scientific, each fortified against the other. The literary system was held together by social links too. The male novelists and critics had generally had a common classical education, and habitually used their shared intellectual heritage to maintain the cultural influence of the classically educated élite. (Dickens is, of course, a notable exception to this generalisation.) There was also a high degree of personal interaction between writers of novels and writers about novels in the period. Just as in a later century, the same person often filled both roles, though George Meredith's anonymous and not altogether favourable notice of his own Farina in the Westminster Review is an extreme case (G.S. Haight, 'George Meredith and the Westminster Review', Modern Language Review 53 January 1958, 1-16). Just as now, many writers and critics moved in the same limited social circles in London, such as the Garrick Club. They were often friends. To Trollope's disgust, Dickens presented Dallas with the bound manuscript of Our Mutual Friend in recognition of a favourable review (Autobiography 169-70). Trollope persuaded his friend Lewes to take the editorship of the new Fortnightly Review, and found his kind of fiction vigorously defended in the pages of that journal, in a series of articles which were later reprinted under the title The Principles of Success in Literature.
Lewes provides a good example of the range of interest of these 'men of letters'. He wrote novels, plays, theatre criticism, literary reviews, philosophical works, and books and articles popularising science. Richard Holt Hutton studied classics, theology and law, prepared for the Unitarian ministry, worked as assistant editor of the Economist, joint editor of the National Review and literary editor of the Spectator, and held the post of Professor of Mathematics at Bedford College, London from 1856 to 1865. Any of his knowledge might at any moment be brought into play in his reviews of belles-lettres, with the result that critics of a later age, with new ideas of the 'purity' of literary criticism, accused him of debasing criticism with 'political, or religious, or philosophical, or anthropological, or pantopragmatic adulteration' (George Saintsbury, A History of English Criticism, 1962, 496 first published 1900-1904). The low esteem in which critics of the 1890s and later held early- and mid-Victorian criticism of prose fiction accompanies a turning away from social and political aspects of the novel, such as the social origins of fiction, the expansion of the reading public, and speculation about the determination of fictional form and content by social and economic factors. Such concerns were supplanted for some later critics by technical questions of structure and narrative point of view, and by theories of art as the production of a creator standing apart from society as a gifted individual, and pursuing art purely for the sake of art. Nothing could less resemble the early- and mid-Victorian assumption that literature was inevitably involved in debate of all subjects of general public concern. This earlier form of critical interest in fiction can aptly be called 'sociological' (although the word was not current until the mid-1860s), and examples of it include the Economist's analysis of Dickens's Christmas Books in relation to political economy, and H.L. Mansel's socio-economic explanation of the origin and effect of sensational fiction. Unfortunately for the later reputation of the critics represented here there was a strong thread of moral judgment and social and moral control involved in all these strands of thought, and this has tended ever since to discredit the work of even the best critics of the period. Yet something of real richness was lost when these habits of thought were discarded in the desire to break with the moral imperatives of mid-Victorian cultural life.
The Value of Victorian Reviews for Modern Readers
Tolerance is necessary in approaching the whole subject of early- and mid-Victorian criticism. For instance those today who most appreciate R.H. Hutton's almost semiological approach to characterisation and interpersonal perceptions in the 'drawing-room' novel (5.6 and 6.4), are least likely to be comfortable with his assumptions about female characterisation, or his insistence that literature should be written in the 'awe-struck awareness' of heaven above and hell beneath (introduction to Chapter 5 and 3.3). The truth is that any age takes from its predecessors what it wants of positive and negative, and this volume, even if it attempts some kind of 'fairness', must be guilty of the same fault in working out the terms of that 'fairness'. To use one of Carlyle's famous images, there is a boundless sea of knowledge surrounding us, of which any book can only include an infinitesimal part. Victorian literary criticism is like a large and complex city: a guided tour will show one aspect of selected buildings, but round the corner may be quite other features; squalor may be hidden behind respectability; and by turning round we might have seen townscapes made up of altogether different combinations of social and architectural styles.
At the time of publication, the future standing of a new novel cannot be known, and some of the most revealing criticism was then, as later, a response to less enduring works. Of course readers are always curious to know whether a particular novel or novelist found favour with contemporary reviewers, and like to know that in the 1830s it was commonly said that Dickens was too popular, and that having risen like a rocket, he would come down like a stick; that both Charlotte and Emily Brontë were attacked by the Tory press; that the best-educated critics generally wrote of Thackeray with admiration and affection; that Trollope was considered born to make the fortune of circulating libraries, and George Eliot everywhere spoken of in terms of intellectual respect. Such facts as these are relevant to literary biography, contribute to an understanding of the context in which the novelists' works appeared, and tell us a great deal of how the literary system worked.
It is arguable that on some occasions critical opinions on a book had a direct influence on a writer's subsequent work, but in general it is safe to agree with E.S. Dallas that it is not within the power of criticism to instruct perfect poets, any more than physics or chemistry textbooks make practitioners in those fields. The overt moralism of the age should not be allowed to obscure other things of interest in these reviews. 'Truth-to-life' – judged by how 'recognisable' the characters in the novel were – was regarded by most critics as an indispensable quality in fiction, and some critics, like Dallas and Lytton, were openly contemptuous of this naive mimetic standard. On the plus side, certain reviews, notably some in the Spectator while R.H. Hutton was literary editor, turn their attention to interpersonal perceptions and the 'language of manners', thus anticipating concerns of a century later, and opening up for perhaps the first time in British intellectual history the possibility of a semiotics of social behaviour. On the whole reviewers did as well then as they have ever done since.
Edith Simcox (writing under the nom de plume 'H. Lawrenny') put their problems in clear terms:
Contemporary criticism of great works is apt to prove unsatisfactory, for even when their greatness is recognised at once, the critic labours under a double disadvantage: an unwonted sense of responsibility restrains the free expression of unmotivated admiration, and the easy volubility of praise, which is enough for slighter merits, makes way for a guarded tone of respect that looks like coldness on the surface. Nor is this all; for the vocabulary of positive eulogium is soon exhausted; criticism to be significant must be comparative, and there is an obvious difficulty in estimating by old-fashioned standards of excellence a new work that may contain within itself a fresh standard for the guidance and imitation of futurity (1.8).
Despite glimpses of theory which might be susceptible to larger organisation, most of our critics were unsystematically empirical in their approach. Simcox goes on to make an attractively comfortable case for this approach:
For the theory of art is after all only a patchwork of inference from the practice of artists, and … in … the English novel … our ideal is simply one or other of the masterpieces of one or other of the great novelists between Fielding and George Eliot. Tom Jones, Clarissa Harlowe, Waverley, Pride and Prejudice, Vanity Fair, Adam Bede – to which some might wish to add Eugene Aram, Pickwick, and Jane Eyre – are the sources from whence all theories of the novel, as a prose narrative representation of manners, character and passion, ultimately derive.
She proceeds to add to Middlemarch list, and in this she has been followed by many critics since (review of Middlemarch, Academy 4 1 January 1873, 1).
Last modified 22 May 2022