THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

In Carroll’s narratives paradox finds resolution once there has been assent to the idea of an ultimate and alternative
order in which the findings of science, philosophy, and religion are not in conflict. The two Alice books have a
commonsensical protagonist, a child insistent on the rightness of the values of middle-class society and of the
elementary education that she takes with her into landscapes which warp, overturn, and subvert ordinary perception.
Alice survives her nightmares perhaps because she is only partly aware that they are nightmares; her self-confidence
gives her a mental clarity which can counter the games, the formulae, and the twisted syllogisms which confront her.
When the universe periodically threatens to explode or dissolve around her, Alice the representative child is rendered
a survivor both by her own earnest assurance and by the circumambient, often riddling logic of the narrative. Alice
wakes from her dreams, or crosses back through the looking-glass into what child readers are led to assume is an
emotionally, physically, and intellectually secure world. Its securities proved far less certain to the generation of newly
mature writers whose work dominated the closing years of the nineteenth century
[end of Chapter 7]
[Andrew SANDERS: The Short Oxford History of English Literature, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1994]
[p. 457]
8
Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature 1880-1920
ON the title-page of his Past and Present of 1843 Thomas Carlyle had quoted Schiller’s strident sentiment ‘Ernst ist
das Leben’ (‘Life is earnest’). Some seven years later, in chapter 42 of David Copperfield, Dickens’s hero expresses
the opinion that šthere is no substitute for thorough-going, ardent, and sincere earnestness’. By the closing years of
the nineteenth century such mid-Victorian moral confidence had begun to sound oppressively, even comically,
outmoded. Oscar Wilde, for one, mocked at the very idea in the title of his ‘Trivial Comedy for Serious People’, The
Importance of Being Earnest (1895) and it was scarcely casually that Samuel Butler selected Ernest as the Christian
name of the intellectually and morally flabby hero of his The Way of Al1 Flesh (1903). By the 1880s, when Butler was
working on his novel, the virtues of old-fashioned earnestness — which entailed moral probity, religious orthodoxy,
sexual reserve, hard work, and a confident belief in personal and historical progress — were open to question or had
been supplanted by a new and more probing seriousness. In retrospect, the mid-Victorians looked both wrong, and,
when their influence could be escaped, funny.
Although Queen Victoria, that embodiment of matronly uprightness, reigned until January 1901, and although the
last years of her reign appeared to patriotic observers to mark the apogee of national and imperial glory, ‘Victorian’
values, beliefs, and standards of personal and social behaviour were already being challenged, sometimes angrily, by a
new generation of intellectuals and writers. The literature of the last twenty years of the century engages in an
extended and various discourse which attempts to re-evaluate the assumptions of the 1850s and 1860s and to work out
the implications of new concepts of liberation and evolutionary development. If the writers of the first two-thirds of
the century can be seen as struggling to come to terms with a multiplicity of impressions, convictions, facts, beliefs,
and unbeliefs, their immediate successors reworked ideas and sought parallels, analogues, or images in contemporary
scientific thought. They also agonized over disturbing new conclusions. When the instinctive Tess Durbeyfield voices
a vague but
[p. 458]
ominous dread of ‘life in general’ in Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), her interlocutor, Angel Clare,
perceives that she was ‘expressing in her own native phrases ... feelings which might almost have been called those of
the age — the ache of modernism’. If this aching ‘modernism’ produced relatively little experiment with new literary
forms, it did seem to imply that inherited literary forms should be adapted to express what many writers assumed was
a general unease. The stress of novelty fell on messages, not on media. If the bourgeois reader had to be shocked out
of his or her complacency, as Tess of the D’Urbervilles shocked some of its first readers, that shock of the new seemed
best administered through accepted and acceptable literary forms. Conservatism of form did not, however, serve to
blunt the frequent radicalism of content.
The shift in literary tastes in the 1890s is suggested by the glance back to the period offered in May Sinclair’s
novel Mary Olivier (1919). Sinclair points to the contrast between the bookshelves of her would-be liberated heroine,