routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

318 The nineteenth century
justifies and pauses in her actions and her thoughts about the relationship
with her father. The ‘outsiders’ sense is vital to the ability of James and
other writers to look at society objectively, to criticise it from a secure
viewpoint and to create a fully realised world in their works.
These writers could bring a multiplicity of viewpoints and subject
areas into the novel, which contrast with the London-centred viewpoints
of many Victorian writers. The novel begins to represent a worldview
rather than a national or regional concern, and its horizons begin to
expand outwards geographically at the same time as the earliest studies
in psychology begin to expand characters’ inner horizons as well. It is
perhaps no accident that the term ‘stream of consciousness’ was a concept
first described in 1890 by the American psychologist, William James,
who was brother of the novelist Henry James. In the twentieth century,
as concepts of society changed and things (as the poet W.B. Yeats said)
began to ‘fall apart’, the fragmentation of all that held society together
was expressed in the novel partly by the use of ‘stream of consciousness’,
allowing the psychological revelation of what a character feels deep
inside through constantly fluctuating points of view and by a fluid
expansion and contraction of time. Although these emphases were new,
and do depart from conventional representation in the nineteenth-century
novel, the seeds of such developments lie in the techniques used in the
eighteenth century by Laurence Sterne, especially in Tristram Shandy,
in the ‘monologues’ of some of Charles Dickens’s characters, such as
Mrs Lirriper in the Christmas story Mrs Lirriper’s Lodgings (1863), and in
the experiments with viewpoint in Jane Austen and George Eliot’s
depiction of characters.
Something of an outsider in literary life, John Meade Falkner was
an industrialist; but he wrote three remarkable novels, each of which
is unique in its way. Moonfleet (1898) is a classic adventure yarn of
smugglers, set on the south coast of England. The Nebuly Coat (1903)
has echoes of Hardy in its setting and its vivid picture of the ending of
a society. The Lost Stradivarius (1895) is a mysterious tale of drugs
and decadence, set in Naples. Falkner has a fascination with word
games, heraldry, and tradition, which lends his stories a mixture of
puzzle, history and the unusual.
Adventure novels came to enjoy enormous popularity. They reached
a high point towards the end of the nineteenth century in the jingoistic
colonial tales of H. Rider Haggard (such as King Solomon’s Mines, 1886,