routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

Victorian thought and Victorian novels
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explores psychological and moral issues in greater depth; but Thackeray
contributed substantially to the growth of the nineteenth-century novel.
The Newcomes (1853–55) even experiments with a kind of ‘alternative
ending’, anticipating John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman
(1969) by over a century. Thackeray is the omniscient author par
excellence: he sees himself as a kind of puppet master, in control of
his characters and their destinies, as we see at the end of Vanity Fair:
Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum! which of us is happy in this world? Which
of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied? – Come, children, let
us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.
This self-conscious authorial role recalls Henry Fielding, but later
Victorian novelists tend to point their moral in a more compassionate
rather than manipulative way; the author’s point of view becomes
more sympathetic, often almost participatory.
The growth of the provincial novel in both Ireland and Scotland is
an important development in the early nineteenth century. Two novels
by Lady Morgan, The Wild Irish Girl (1806) and The O’Briens and the
O’Flahertys (1827), are significant ‘national tales’ which brought their
author such renown that she was the first woman to be granted an
annual pension for her services to the world of letters. The works of
Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan open up areas of non-cosmopolitan
experience, but, equally significantly, begin to give a clear identity to
the province of Ireland. This would grow and develop throughout the
century, eventually leading to political separation in the twentieth
century. Many writers are now described as Anglo-Irish, and the
distinction between Irish and Anglo-Irish will assume greater
importance in all later discussions of writing in and about Ireland.
The English novelist Anthony Trollope, for example, set his first
two novels in Ireland: The Macdermots of Ballycloran (1847) and The
Kellys and the O’Kellys (1848) remain important portrayals of Ireland,
published at a time when it was much talked about because of the
Great Famine. Trollope was to return twice more to the subject of
Ireland, in Castle Richmond (1860) and the unfinished The Landleaguers
(1882). Two out of four of his titles echo Edgeworth and Morgan’s