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302 The nineteenth century
An old woman came to us last night and asked if we would take
her to the doctor. Her little grandchild led her in. Her husband
had knocked her eye out. She is stone blind now; for he knocked
out her right eye when she was fifty, and last night he knocked
her left eye out of its socket. I know six women close by this
house whose husbands have knocked their eyes out.
(In Darkest London)
A revolutionary tone pervades the work of all these ‘socialist’ writers,
and, perhaps because the English establishment has always kept down
revolutionary elements, these writers’ works have remained obscure. But
today’s readers would still find them striking and vivid, a useful further
viewpoint on the social conditions described by better-known writers.
George Eliot had handled similar themes in Janet’s Repentance (in Scenes
of Clerical Life, 1857–58), but with fictional intent balancing the anger which
Harkness’s writing reveals. Like so much of Victorian writing, these later
flourishings of working-class concern lead directly to the writings of Oscar
Wilde: in this case, to his essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891).
The development of fantasy writing, set in other worlds or expressing
other realities, became a popular phenomenon of the second half of
the nineteenth century. Of course, the exotic had been a theme in
literature from Mandeville to Beckford, and the Romantics had brought
many oriental themes into their writings. The bestselling book of its
day, Lalla Rookh (1817) by Thomas Moore (1779–1852), was a series
of oriental tales in verse, anticipating Edward Fitzgerald’s The Rubaiyat
of Omar Khayyam (1859) in its appeal.
Such fantasy expanded its range as the real Victorian world became
less and less positive and acceptable. The new genre of science fiction
was one result; the detective story, ghost stories (extending the Gothic
novel’s range), utopian writing, and fantasy writing for children, all
represent the escapist search for other worlds in ways which were to
become increasingly popular in the twentieth century.
Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and
Through the Looking Glass (1872) are the most lasting mid-Victorian
fantasies, requiring modern adjectives like ‘surreal’ and ‘absurd’ to
describe their dream-like transformations and humour. Unlike a great