THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

High Victorian Literature 1830-1880
A GREAT deal of Victorian intellectual effort was spent in trying to hold together a universe which was exploding. It
was an age of conflicting explanations and theories, of scientific and economic confidence and of social and spiritual
pessimism, of a sharpened awareness of the inevitability of progress and of deep disquiet as to the nature of the
present. Traditional solutions, universally acknowledged truths, and panaceas were generally discovered to be
wanting, and the resultant philosophical and ideological tensions are evident in the literature of the period from
Carlyle’s diatribes of the 1830s and Dickens’s social novels of the 1840s to Arnold’s speculations of the 1870s and
Morris’s socialist prophecies of the 1880s, from the troubled early poetry of Tennyson to the often dazzled theology of
Hopkins.
Like all ages it was an age of paradox, but the paradoxes of the mid-nineteenth century struck contemporaries as
more stark and disturbing than those which had faced their ancestors. Despite the shocks to complacency occasioned
by the 1851 religious census — which revealed that out of the now swollen population of 17,927,609 for England and
Wales only 7,261,032 attended some kind of service on the census Sunday in March — there remained a high degree
of Christian commitment. Even given the token nature of much of this commitment, religion remained a powerful
force in Victorian life and literature. The census revealed that there were still large numbers who adhered to the
increasing diversity of the Church of England, but the majority of them lived in the south and east of the island. In a
burgeoning northern industrial city, such as Leeds, only 15 per cent of the population went to an Anglican church,
while some 31 per cent attended a Dissenting chapel. Dissenters also formed a comfortable majority of Sunday
worshippers in both Manchester and Birmingham, and in Wales they outnumbered Anglicans by four to one. In
Scotland, where a similar census was held three years later, it was found, somewhat more encouragingly to the
religious authorities, that just over 60 per cent of the population went to church. If the vast number of those who failed
to attend public worship on the census Sundays were working-class men and
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women who easily found alternative and more agreeable ways of spending the one day of rest allowed to them, there
were also, amongst the educated classes, deep and growing doubts as to the very doctrinal and historical bases of
Christianity. These doubts were often dryly rooted in German biblical scholarship (known as the ‘Higher Criticism’);
they were fostered and emboldened by the appearance in 1859 of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by means
of Natural Selection, by the steady development of Darwin’s theories by his disciples, and by an intellectual culture
increasingly influenced by scientific materialism.
Mid-Victorian society was still held together by the cement of Christian moral teaching and constricted by the
triumph of puritan sexual mores. It laid a particular stress on the virtues of monogamy and family life, but it was also
publicly aware of flagrant moral anomalies throughout the social system. Although the supposed blessings of ordered
family life were generally proclaimed to be paramount, many individual Victorians saw the family as an agent of
oppression and as the chief vehicle of encompassing conformity. The period which saw the first real stirrings of the
modern women’s movement also received and revered the matronly model provided by Queen Victoria herself and
acquiesced to the stereotype of virtuous womanhood propagated by many of its novelists and poets. It was not idly that
Thackeray complained in his Preface to Pendennis in 1849 that ‘since the author of Tom Jones was buried, no writer
of fiction among us has been permitted to depict to his utmost power a MAN’. Many ladies, he claimed, had
remonstrated with him because he had described a young man ‘resisting and affected by temptation’. Thackeray did
not actually use the words ‘sex’ and ‘sexual temptation’, but his readers would have known what he was talking
about. Lest we assume too readily that Thackeray was a representative voice raised against English double standards,
and against enforced limitations to his art, it is worth remembering that in the fourth chapter of Dickens’s David
Copperfield (which also appeared in 1849) David notes of the imaginative influence of his boyhood reading that he
had ‘been Tom Jones (a child’s Tom Jones, a harmless creature) for a week together’. As David Copperfield seems
anxious to point out, innocence too had its premium. It was, moreover, a tactful influence that most mid-Victorian
novel readers seem to have appreciated.
The Victorian age had its continuities, its revivals, and its battles of styles in painting and architecture as much as
in literature. It was as much an age in which the Greek, the Gothic, and the Italianate could vie with one another as
advanced and inventive expressions of the Zeitgeist as it was an age of experimental engineering. It produced both the
intricate Gothic of the new Palace of Westminster and the functional classical ironwork of the Great Exhibition
pavilion (which the satirical magazine Punch dubbed the ‘Crystal Palace’). As the Great Exhibition of 1851 proudly
demonstrated, this was the age both of applied art and of the application of new technologies to all aspects of design
and production. This first true ‘machine age’ reaped both the