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WHISTLING SHADE |
by Joel Van Valin
Literarily speaking, the Victorians are just next door to us. Their English is more or less our English, and many of their concerns still perplex us today (see Thomas R. Smith’s article “Reading Dickens in the Second 19th Century” in this issue). Yet they are different enough now that they give the New Millennium reader the experience of traveling to a slightly foreign country. Time has added a pinch of spice to the sentimental tea of Victorian poetry and the realist pudding of Victorian prose. So whether you are studiously pursuing moral improvement of character, or just looking for some entertainment to take to the beach (where you will lie—dear god!—all but naked in the sun), the writers of the Pax Brittanica are here to help. This field guide was designed to assist you in planning your 19th century expedition, outlining the major attractions, and a few minor ones as well. Happy hunting!
A leading feminist of the Victorian era, the beautiful Caroline
Norton was the granddaughter of the playwright Richard
Sheridan. She suffered through a failed marriage with a jealous
husband who, for some time, kept their children in Scotland
and refused her access to them. Her close friendship with Lord
Melbourne, then Prime Minister, caused a scandal that nearly
brought down the government in the 1830s. Thereafter she
became a political advocate for divorced women, and the Custody
of Infants Act of 1839, allowing
mothers to petition the court
for custody of children up to the
age of 7, was passed partly due to
her campaigning. Much of her best
poetry was written in her early
twenties, and includes emphatically
romantic tales such as The
Sorrows of Rosalie, along with short,
charming lyrical pieces (“I Do Not
Love Thee!”; “But Thou!”).
Judging by his heightened style and the noble themes of his poetry, one would assume that Alfred, Lord Tennyson was an aristocrat. He was, in fact, a Lincolnshire rector’s son, and wrote obscurely for many years before becoming the most famous of the Victorian poets. A studious, sensitive boy, Tennyson attended Cambridge beginning in 1828, and won a medal there for his early poem “Timbuctoo”. His first collection, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical was published soon after, in 1830, and won some critical acclaim, though his follow-up volume, Poems (1833), was harshly criticized. In the meantime his father had died, leaving Tennyson the head of the family. He moved them to Essex, and then, around 1840, London. An expanded version of Poems in 1842 was a great success, but it was In Memoriam A.H.H., about the death of Tennyson’s best friend Arthur Hallam in 1833, that catapulted him to stardom. The year it was published, 1850, turned out to be a banner one: he married Emily Sellwood, the niece of the explorer Sir John Franklin, and was named Poet Laureate on Wordsworth’s death (Elizabeth Barrett Browning was the other serious contender). His main supporter was Prince Albert, though after Albert’s death, Queen Victoria was “much soothed & pleased” by the eulogistic In Memoriam. Tennyson met her twice; she described him in her diary after their first meeting, in 1862: “Very peculiar looking, tall, dark, with a fine head, long black flowing hair & a beard,—oddly dressed, but there is no affectation about him.”
Shortly after the birth of their son Hallam, Alfred and Emily Tennyson moved to a rented house on the Isle of Wight—in part to escape publicity, though tourists (and even Prince Albert on one occasion) would stop by their house. The family removed to Sussex in 1869, where he wrote some of his later Idylls of the King. The cycle of poems about Arthur, Merlin, Guinevere, Lancelot, Elaine, Geraint, and the other knights and ladies of the Round Table went beyond reviving the legend of Camelot, and started a full-blooded Arthurian mania (when the first set was published in 1859, 10,000 copies were sold in the first week). The latter part of his life was full of honors, including being raised to the peerage at the behest of Gladstone (he was made Baron Tennyson, with titles in Sussex and the Isle of Wight) and burial in Westminster after he died at the age of 83.
In the late Victorian era Tennyson reigned supreme, as popular in verse as Dickens was in fiction, and more beloved by critics. In the 20th century his reputation faded somewhat, as modernist poets owed more to Browning and Arnold. Idylls is perhaps his most enduring work, timeless and lyrically resonant, written in Tennyson’s brave and matchless style. Other poems, such as “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and “The Lady of Shalott”, are still well known. In the end of his “Ulysses” Tennyson seems to speak for his entire age:
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,—
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
If there was one rival to challenge Tennyson to the throne of English verse in the 19th century, it was Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She was the precocious daughter of a Jamaican plantation owner. The Emancipation Act of 1833, which abolished slavery, forced her father to sell their estate in Herefordshire and move to London. There she was introduced to Wordsworth and Coleridge (then the elderly statesmen of Romantic poetry) and Tennyson himself. Her poor health—she probably suffered from tuberculosis—exempted her from household duties and left her at liberty to write profusely. She wrote poetry against slavery and child labor, and her 1844 Poems was a bestseller. But it was the young poet Robert Browning that inspired her finest work.
Six years her junior, Robert was a fan as well as an ambitious poet in his own right. The son of a bank clerk, he was a child prodigy who composed his first book of poems at the age of 12. Pauline (an homage to Shelley, his favorite Romantic) was published in 1832, when he was just twenty. It and Paracelsus (1835) were privately financed by his family. The latter book, about a 16th century physician and occultist, had some success, and was read by Dickens and Landor. In the early 1840s he began publishing his now-famous dramatic monologues, including “My Last Duchess” and the verse drama Pippa Passes, which contains the famous line “All’s right with the world!” He had also traveled in Italy, where he wrote “Home- Thoughts, from Abroad” with its well-known beginning:
Oh, to be in England
Now that April's there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England—now!
Still, it was Elizabeth Barrett who was by far the better known poet when they first met in person, having corresponded through letters. During his courtship she penned her famous Sonnets from the Portuguese, a love sequence that, contrary to the title, is not a translation but a wholly original work (“my little Portuguese” was Robert’s pet name for Elizabeth).
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
Robert declared them the best series of English-language sonnets since Shakespeare, and he was probably right. She also wrote Aurora Leigh, a nine-book marathon in blank verse, during this period. But her romance with Browning was not welcomed by her father and brothers, who thought him socially inferior. After their marriage (conducted in secret) Elizabeth Browning was disinherited and estranged from the Barretts. The couple settled in Italy, where their one son, Robert Barrett Browning, was born. There Robert Browning published his famous collection Men and Women, containing the foreboding “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”, among other gems.
In spite of the Mediterranean climate, Elizabeth’s health waned again in her fifties, and she died in Florence in 1861, in Robert’s arms. After her death, Robert Browning returned to London and soldiered on with poetry for nearly thirty years, publishing his tour de force The Ring and the Book, a blank verse epic surrounding a murder trial in 17th century Rome, in 1868-69. He died in 1889, and was buried next to Tennyson in Poets’ Corner.
Viewers of Masterpiece Theatre will be acquainted with Elizabeth Gaskell’s major novels: Cranford, North and South, and Wives and Daughters. The daughter and husband of Unitarian ministers, Gaskell (born Elizabeth Stevens) began writing after the death of an infant son. Though of the genteel classes, she had great sympathy for the workers of the industrial era, and her “Sketches among the Poor” appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine. Her first novel, Mary Barton (1848) surrounds two working class families in Manchester. Dickens admired her work, and Cranford was serialized in his magazine Household Words in 1851. She was also a friend of Charlotte Brontë’s, and after Charlotte’s death her father, Patrick Brontë, asked Gaskell to write her biography. The Life of Charlotte Brontë appeared in 1857. Ruth, the story of a “fallen woman”, caused some controversy when it was published in 1853.
In style, Gaskell resembles Jane Austen, though her focus is on the industrial working class rather than the country aristocracy. Like Austen, her novels, in particular Cranford, are loosely plotted around minor events involving several families, seen from the perspective of a strong female heroine. She also had, however, Dickens’ knack for dialect writing, if in a more studious, conventional style. Throughout Gaskell’s work there is an injunction to moral improvement and reform, and the idea of the novel as a device for instruction that was so popular in the Victorian era. This may explain why her novels are mostly known today through television adaptations.
As a young boy traveling from India to England in 1816, he saw the figure of Napoleon stalking the beach of his prison on St. Helena. Perhaps Bonaparte transmitted some impulse of malevolence to the child, his parting shot at the despised English. In any case, William Makepeace Thackeray became the most savage and satirical writer of the Victorian era, most famously in his novel Vanity Fair. Born in Calcutta to an East India Company secretary, Thackeray graduated from Cambridge and then quickly managed to lose his inheritance to gambling and bad business decisions. Marriage to Isabella Shawe in 1836 forced him to work for a living, and, like Dickens, he turned to journalism. He wrote for Fraser’s Magazine, The Times, and the newly-launched Punch, where The Snobs Papers brought him popularity. It was Vanity Fair, however, that made his reputation. Borrowing its title from Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, the novel follows the exploits of his social-climbing heroine, the appropriately-named Becky Sharp. Throughout the mean-spirited story, Thackeray shows how society distorts and twists human nature, rewarding selfish and deceitful rogues at the expense of the virtuous and selfless. His own personal life was far from merry—after the birth of their third child, Isabella fell into a state of depression that became nearly catatonic, and had to be institutionalized. Known for his gluttony, he himself died of a stroke at 52. Thackeray was at one time considered second only to Dickens as the preeminent novelist of the age; but in gaining wealth and fame he lost his zeal for attacking the pillars of society. Of all the Victorian writers, he would probably be the most successful writing in our own era, with his seeming delight at showing the world at its worst. Truman Capote and William T. Vollmann could be considered his heirs.
Dickens was the preeminent Victorian novelist—so much so that the era is sometimes referred to as Dickensian England. He was then—and remains today—a wildly popular writer whose creations (Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Mr. Micawber, Miss Havisham) are still household names.
The middle-class son of a naval clerk, Dickens’ schooling was irregular. For a time, while his father and most of the rest of the family were in debtor’s prison, young Charles worked ten-hour days pasting labels on cans of boot blacking. At fifteen he found a position as a junior law clerk, and from there launched a career as a free-lance court reporter and (later) a political journalist. In the 19th century journalism had a broader compass than it now does, and Dickens had a variety of character sketches, place descriptions, social observations and first person narratives published in British newspapers in the 1830s. He collected a number of these pieces in Sketches by Boz (1836), whose success led to an offer from Chapman and Hall to do a new series of vignettes to accompany some illustrations by Robert Seymour. The result was The Pickwick Papers, Dickens’ earliest masterpiece, and perhaps the best bit of writing he ever did. Mr. Pickwick leads his friends and fellow Pickwick Club members Mr. Winkle, Mr. Snodgrass and Mr. Tupman on an investigative tour of England, and various misadventures ensue. The diverse scenes of life captured in this quixotic novel—inn yards, cricket fields, hunting parties, Parliamentary elections, garden soirees, doctor’s offices, law courts and (of course) debtor’s prison—form a fascinating portrait of England at the dawn of the Victorian era. After the introduction of Mr. Pickwick’s servant Sam Weller (who bears a striking resemblance to Tolkien’s Sam Gamgee), sales of the serial increased dramatically, and the complete novel (first appearing in 1837) was the talk of the town. A young Queen Victoria stayed up late at night discussing it and Dickens’ follow- up serial, Oliver Twist.
Meanwhile Dickens had married Catherine Hogarth, the daughter of a newspaper editor. The couple had ten children, though they separated after Dickens fell madly in love with actress Ellen Ternan in 1858. By then he had become a major celebrity, regularly knocking out best-sellers like Nicholas Nickleby, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield and Bleak House, editing the weekly journal Household Words (later renamed All The Year Round), visiting America and going on extensive reading tours. He went on to write two late masterpieces, A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and Great Expectations (1861), and survived a railroad crash (comforting the injured with—what else?—a flask of brandy), before dying of a stroke in 1870.
While always a darling with the masses, Dickens’ implausible plot twists, melodrama, and dripping sentimentality did not always endear him to critics. For a blacksmith’s apprentice, say, to suddenly be lifted to the station of a gentleman from a fortune made by an escaped convict in Australia is, to put it lightly, rather far-fetched—yet simply a matter of course in a Dickens novel. Still, his ability to capture the spirit of a character, a locale, a way of life in a quick sketch was prodigious and unique. Dickens’ best work may be that which contains his famous personalities without having to travel down the sensational, maudlin or lugubrious avenues the novel led him into— as in the brilliant Pickwick Papers.
A prolific and bestselling writer, Anthony Trollope’s novels still entertain readers today. The Warden (1855), Barchester Towers (1857) and The Way We Live Now (1875) are light satires on English society, written in an easy, conventional style. A postal clerk for many years, Trollope lived in England and Ireland, and traveled much in both countries, providing him the realistic detail that his novels are acclaimed for. He sometimes took letters from the “lost letter” box to get ideas for his books. He was friends with Thackeray, who he resembles in some respects—but Trollope was a gentler, more commercial writer. He played within the rules of the novel game, even if he sometimes allowed himself to step outside the ring, as it were, and address his reader directly, as in the last chapter of Barchester Towers: “The end of a novel, like the end of a children’s dinner-party, must be made up of sweetmeats and sugar-plums.”
Though Charlotte and Emily Brontë lived well into the early Victorian era, they belong to the Romantic tradition of Byron and Scott. The gothic melodrama of Jane Eyre and the untamed landscapes of Wuthering Heights seem from a different age than The Pickwick Papers, though Dickens’ novel was published over a decade earlier. Rochester and Heathcliff are both Byronic heroes, worlds away from Fred Vincy of Middlemarch —which is not surprising, considering the family lived for the most part in the Yorkshire village of Haworth, far from the literary currents of London. Romanticism colors the writings of other Victorians as well—the Pre-Raphaelites, for example. Even late in the Victorian age, novels like Bram Stoker’s Dracula were steeped in a Romantic sentiment that ran as an uneasy counter-current to Victorian morals and realism.
The guiding genius of the Victorian era, Ruskin’s influence was felt well into the 20th century. His essays on art and society inspired the Pre-Raphaelites, the Arts and Crafts movement, the philosophy of aestheticism and the Gothic revival. Proust, Tolstoy, and Gandhi were among his admirers.
The son of a wine and sherry merchant, he attended Oxford in the late 1830s, writing some poetry and a fairy tale. It was a series of essays he wrote defending the paintings of Joseph William Turner, however, that brought him fame. In Modern Painters (1843) he asserts that artists should paint from nature, rather than adhering to learned conventions. He elaborated this philosophy in later works, such as The Stones of Venice, which praises Gothic architecture and is critical of the rules of Classicism. To Ruskin, art was not mere decoration but a natural and necessary expression of the spirit of a people and its organic relationship with nature. In literature, he favored realism, and capturing the true likeness of a society.
Toward the end of his life Ruskin’s essays broadened to social and political criticism as well (Unto This Last). He urged simple country living, handmade crafts, and a socialistic community government instead of the divisions of labor and the mechanization of the Industrial Revolution—and went so far as to found a utopian society, the Guild of St. George (which, however, had little success, except from the point of view of Ruskin’s finances). He was also an art professor at Oxford from 1869, where he took his undergraduates out to repair roads. “The art of any country,” he said in one famous lecture, “is the exponent of its social and political views.” A sharp critic, Ruskin was once sued for libel by James McNeill Whistler, after he called one Whistler painting “…flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” (Ruskin was fined one farthing.) He married Effie Gray in 1848, but in six years the marriage was never consummated, and was eventually annulled. When he was 48 he proposed marriage to eighteenyear- old Rose La Touche, but was turned down. He died in 1900, a year before Victoria herself. Their respective reigns— his of critical thought, hers of the British Empire—almost exactly coincided.
If asked to pick one novel to typify the Victorian era, many critics would tip their hats to George Eliot’s Middlemarch. She began her masterpiece in 1869, the same year Tolstoy published War and Peace, and Middlemarch is spun of much the same stuff. Grand in scope and realist in style, the novel is historical, taking place some forty years earlier at the dawn of the Victorian era. Memorable characters include Dorothea Brooke, who marries based on principal rather than love, and the fun-loving Fred Vincy, entirely unfit for the clergyman career his family has charted for him. Its middle class characters and everyday problems are part of what makes Middlemarch still relevant— and very much enjoyed—nearly 150 years after its publication.
Eliot herself was middle class, and lived much of her life in Coventry, thought to be the model for the Midlands town of Middlemarch. Born Mary Ann Evans, she was the daughter of a Warwickshire estate manager. Being homely of appearance, her father sent her to school, and she had access to the estate library, which gave her a strong Classical background. When she was sixteen her mother died, and she kept house for her father. They moved to Coventry in 1841, and the twenty-one-year-old Evans became part of the progressive, intellectual society surrounding Charles and Cara Bray, at whose home she met Ralph Waldo Emerson. When her father died, she visited Switzerland with the Brays, then settled in London as the editor of John Chapman’s The Westminster Review. The great love of her life was George Lewes, whom she met in 1851, and with whom she lived from 1854 to his death in 1878. Lewes was in an open marriage with his wife, Agnes Jervis (Leigh Hunt’s son, Thornton, was her lover); he and Eliot considered themselves married, but the unconventional nature of their relationship is part of the reason why Evans chose a pseudonym when she began publishing fiction— though her true identity was soon discovered.
Her first novel, Adam Bede (1859), is a love story whose hero is a village carpenter. It was widely acclaimed, and Queen Victoria was so fond of it she commissioned an artist to paint scenes from the book. Her other widely-read novels are The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, and the contemporary Daniel Deronda. Eliot wrote much poetry as well, including the popular dramatic poem The Spanish Gypsy; however it was for the careful objectivism of her fiction that she was remembered, and was ranked then (and now) with Dickens and Hardy as the finest of the Victorian novelists. She was denied burial in Poets’ Corner due to her lifestyle and religious views, the Victorians being Victorian; her final resting place is in Highgate Cemetery, near the grave of Karl Marx.
The poet and critic Matthew Arnold once referred to himself as “a plain citizen of the republic of letters.” Yet although his poetry in the main tends to be unvarnished and rather obtuse, he could on occasion rise to Tennyson’s level. The end of “Dover Beach” in particular captures the troubled waters of late Victorian England:
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
The son of a Headmaster at Rugby, he was for many years a school inspector. In 1857 he became a professor of poetry at Oxford. By then he had quietly published several volumes of verse, to little effect. His New Poems (1867), which included “Dover Beach”, had a better reception. Wordsworth, a friend of the family when Arnold was growing up, had a strong influence on his poetry—though, unlike Wordsworth, he found great value in criticism, and his literary essays are a pillar of modern literary theory in England. While he believed in objectively judging poems based on “high truth” and “high seriousness,” he did not support a particular type of “ism” in his literary essays. “To try and approach truth on one side after another,” he writes in the Preface to Essays in Criticism, “not to strive or cry, nor to persist in pressing forward, on any one side, with violence and self-will, it is only thus, it seems to me, that mortals may hope to gain any vision of the mysterious Goddess, whom we shall never see except in outline...”
When he was a boy attending boarding
school, a bully forced Wilkie Collins to
invent a story every night before he was
allowed to sleep. As an adult, he used his
knack of storytelling to keep other people
awake, writing page-turning novels that
established the mystery and suspense genres
(or, as they were known then, “sensation
novels”). He was the Dan Brown of the Victorian
age, though in style he was more refined— nearly literary
by today’s standards. The son of the famous landscape
painter William Collins, Wilkie worked for a time as a clerk
for tea merchants, while writing his early novels. Meeting
Dickens in 1851 changed his life; the two became fast friends,
collaborating on plays and taking walking tours together. It was
in Dickens’ magazine, All Year Round, that his two best-known
novels, The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868)
were first serialized. Both stories involve a mystery (a missing
woman, a vanished stone) and both employ multiple narrators.
Collins’ real life also had an aura of mystery about it. He never
married, but for many years lived with Caroline Graves, a
widow who was passed off as his housekeeper to visitors. He
also had three children by Martha Rudd, an inn servant who
followed him to London after their initial meeting in Yarmouth.
Collins installed her at a separate residence, where
they were known as Mr. and Mrs. Dawson. Later in life he was
troubled by gout, and became addicted to the laudanum he
used in treating it.
The Anglo-Italian Rossetti family rivaled the Brontës for brilliance, but was based in London, at the center of Victorian taste and sensibility. The father, Gabriele Rossetti, was an Italian scholar and revolutionary who went to England in exile in 1821. There he met and married Frances Polidori, the sister of Byron’s physician, John Polidori.
Their oldest son, Dante Gabriel, was the chief impresario of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and an influential writer of the era, though he is first and foremost known as a painter. In many ways latter-day Romantics, the Pre-Raphaelite doctrine was to express feelings and ideals in a pure, unmannered form. Rossetti’s rich, mystical poetry is steeped in Blake, but tends to the didactic and only occasionally approaches Blake’s forceful symbolism. “The Blessed Damozel”, his best-known poem, has a fey, Medieval tone, picturing a lady waiting outside the gates of heaven for her lover to join her:
The blessed damozel leaned out
From the gold bar of Heaven;
Her eyes were deeper than the depth
Of waters stilled at even;
She had three lilies in her hand,
And the stars in her hair were seven.
When his wife, Elizabeth Siddal, died of a laudanum overdose in 1862, Dante Gabriel buried most of his unpublished poems with her; later he regretted it, and had them exhumed. His own drug of choice was chloral hydrate, the addiction to which contributed to his death in 1882. In the end his main contribution to poetry may be in his translations from the Italian, including the La Vita Nuova of his namesake, Dante Alighieri.
Dante’s sister, Christina Rossetti, was perhaps the better poet. Her famous lines from the poem “Song”,
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.
were, as it turned out, quite famously remembered, and nary an anthology of English verse is published without it. Her other short pieces, such as “A Birthday”, “Remember”, and “The Convent Threshold”, have fared better than the long and moralizing “Goblin Market”. Her work exudes a devout, otherworldly essence, but in fact she had a wide circle of acquaintance, including Algernon Charles Swinburne and her brother’s Pre-Raphaelite friends, was proposed to three times (she declined all three gentlemen, two on religious grounds), and campaigned against slavery and underage prostitution. Later on in life she suffered from Graves Disease, but continued writing poetry and children’s stories up to her death in 1894.
So she was considering in her own mind (as well as
she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and
stupid) whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would
be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies,
when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by
her.
In 1862 a famous boating party took place on the Isis river
near Oxford. No celebrities were present—it was merely the
three Liddell sisters, aged eight to thirteen, and an Oxford
mathematics lecturer named Charles Dodgson. Ten-year-old
Alice Liddell asked Charles to tell them a story, as he often did,
and he made up something involving a white rabbit with a
pocket watch jumping down a hole that led to a sort of fairy
kingdom where nonsense ruled. It was the genesis of one of
the most celebrated children’s books in the English language,
and one of the most imaginative works of the Victorian era.
Dodgson, who took the pseudonym of Lewis Carroll, published
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865, and its sequel,
Through the Looking-Glass, in 1871. The white rabbit, as well as
the hookah-smoking caterpillar, Mad Hatter, Cheshire-Cat,
and Queen of Hearts preside over a surreal landscape of talking
flowers and bottles labeled “DRINK ME,” where unicorns
cavort with nursery rhyme characters like Humpty Dumpty.
Dodgson’s own life, in contrast to his fantasy world, was a quiet one; he took up photography and invented children’s games in addition to his fiction and poetry, and as a mathematician contributed some new ideas to linear algebra. After the success of the Alice books, he met Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites, and was also friends with George Mac- Donald, who read an early version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and encouraged Dodgson to publish it. His interest in little girls, which might raise some eyebrows in our own time, was not at all thought inappropriate in the Victorian era—and he was, after all, a teacher, and fond of children. If he battled personal demons, Dodgson kept it to himself, leaving the world some delightful nonsense poetry (“Jabberwocky” and “The Hunting of the Snark”) and two priceless children’s books.
Known today mostly for his paintings and design, William Morris was part of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and founded a design firm with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Ford Madox Brown and others that eventually became known as Morris & Co. The company, which specialized in handcrafted stained glass, carvings, tapestries and other interior design, helped launch the Arts and Crafts movement. Morris was a devoted medievalist, and his artwork and writings have almost exclusively historical or otherworldly subjects. His published work, long neglected, deserves rediscovery. His romantic fantasy novels, such as The Well at the World’s among the first of their kind, and poems like the beautifully melancholy “The Haystack in the Floods” catch the last beams of fading Romanticism:
Had she come all the way for this,
To part at last without a kiss?
Yea, had she borne the dirt and rain
That her own eyes might see him slain
Beside the haystack in the floods?
Swinburne’s is the golden voice that sings at the close of the Victorian drama. An epicurean and confirmed bachelor, he wrote poetry for poetry’s sake, and his rich, mellifluous verses, often Classical in theme, made him England’s most popular poet in the late 19th century. The son of an earl’s daughter, the grandson of a baronet, he went to Oxford but left without a degree, eventually taking up rooms with George Meredith and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He was friends with the Pre-Raphaelites, and published his poetic drama Atalanta in Calydon in 1865. It’s most remembered today for its choruses, one of which begins:
When the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces,
The mother of months in meadow or plain
Fills the shadows and windy places
With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain
The next year saw the appearance of his first series of Poems and Ballads, some of which scandalized Victorian society with their allusions to Lesbianism (“Sapphics”) and hymns to pagan gods and goddesses (“Hymn to Proserpine”). He led a bohemian life and by 1879 had descended into serious alcoholism. The critic Theodore Watts- Dunton “rescued” him, installing Swinburne at his home in Putney, where he lived until his death in 1909. In Swinburne we see the turning away of poetry, and English literature in general, from contemporary issues and social activism and entering a more refined, aesthetic realm. If Pound and Eliot were the heirs to Robert Browning, Yeats and Millay were the successors of Swinburne, whose influence lasted well into the 20th century.
There is a scene late in Tess of the d’Urbervilles where Tess and Angel, now fugitives, rest at Stonehenge:
“Sleepy are you, dear? I think
you are lying on an altar.”
“I like very much to be here,”
she murmured. “It is so solemn
and lonely—after my great happiness—
with nothing but the sky
above my face. It seems as if there were no folk in the
world but we two; and I wish there were not—”
Then, out of the dawn, police come from every direction to arrest her and Angel. The image is a potent one, and symbolic of the conflict in all of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex novels. Propped up by the comforting traditions of a vaguely foreboding past, his characters are thrust forward into the harsh light of 19th century England. In the early novels like Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) and Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), a balance is struck between Hardy’s rustics and the larger world outside. But starting with The Return of the Native (1878) and continuing on through The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895), modern society fragments his pastoral communities to a greater and greater extent, and his outlook grows ever bleaker; rather than the atheism of some Victorian intellectuals, Hardy seemed to believe there was actually a force of malevolence ruling the world.
The son of a Dorset stonemason, Hardy trained as an architect and had ambitions to be a poet—but it was his novels that gained him a living as a writer. His writing style is literate and well constructed (as one would expect of an architect), with an extensive lexicon and a deep grounding in English history and country life. There is sometimes a tendency to melodrama in his fiction (as when the blood drips through the ceiling in Tess) but tragic events are always precipitated by internal conflicts within the story. Though his characters are typically simple villagers living in a bucolic setting, Hardy is of all the Victorian novelists the most modern in style and sensibility. William Faulkner adopted his concept of a fictional shire (Wessex) for his Yoknapatawpha County, and John Updike resembles him in both craftsmanship and a knack for close social observation. But no 20th century writer was able to portray a world as complete and self-encompassing as Hardy’s, or illustrate society’s troubles as feelingly. His poetry takes on a brighter tone, and pieces such as “The Darkling Thrush” leave us not quite without hope.
For many years Thomas Hardy was trapped in a loveless marriage with his first wife, Emma Gifford. As a widower, at the age of 74, he married again—this time to his longtime secretary, Florence Dugdale. His ashes rest next to Dickens in Poets’ Corner.
Like Emily Dickinson in America, Gerard Manley Hopkins was a 19th century poet who became well known only in the 20th. The son of a marine insurance salesman who was also 16 a poet, Hopkins wrote poetry in the early 1860s at Oxford, where his tutor was Walter Pater and his idol Christina Rossetti. About the time he graduated Oxford with honors, Hopkins, who had become a follower of the Oxford Movement, converted to Catholicism. He made a bonfire of his poems, stopped writing for seven years, and eventually became a Jesuit priest. In 1875, while studying theology in Wales, he was asked to write a poem in memory of five nuns lost in a shipwreck, and composed “The Wreck of the Deutschland”, which began his more mature period. Inspired by Welsh poetry, he developed his own “sprung rhythm” in the place of the traditional feet in English meter. His best poems—“Pied Beauty”, “Felix Randal”, “Spring and Fall, to a Young Child”—all exhibit his metrical innovations, as well as Anglo Saxon-style alliteration. Spending his last years as a professor of Greek and Latin at University College Dublin, Hopkins remained obscure to the end. It was only when his good friend Robert Bridges (then Poet Laureate) published a collection of his poems in 1918 that he became read by the wider world—which was, by then, ready to appreciate his freer form of verse. Even today, his poems seem fresh and contemporary, as in the eco-minded ending of “Binsey Poplars”:
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
Strokes of havoc unselve
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,
Sweet especial rural scene.
In the late Victorian era, Robert Louis Stevenson’s fiction was like a tonic for the brooding angst brought on by industrialism and scientific progress. Even as an adult, he delighted in boyhood and romantic adventure. Loss of faith, loss of joy in labor—how could such things be troubling, when one-legged Long John Silver is after you, and Dr. Jekyll has just drunk his serum?
The son of an Edinburgh lighthouse engineer, Stevenson had delicate health from childhood, probably from a lung disease such as tuberculosis. He studied law but never practiced, spending his youth instead in cheap pubs and adventurous excursions—he went on a canoe trip through Belgium and France, and traveled through the Cévennes mountains in France on a donkey. Both trips inspired travel books, which were his first major publications. In 1880 he sailed to San Francisco to marry an American divorcee, Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, that he had met on his canoe trip. Treasure Island (1883) was his first great success, and in 1886 he published Kidnapped and the novella The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (the idea of which had come to him in a fever dream). He also wrote poetry and some of the best short stories of the century, including “The Body Snatcher”, a ghost story involving two medical students who procure cadavers for dissection by robbing graves.
Due to Robert’s health, the Stevensons moved to various residences in Britain, often wintering in France. They lived in Saranac Lake, New York for a time, and went on a journey to the South Pacific, meeting Hawaii’s King Kalākaua before settling in Samoa. The Samoans called him Tusitala (storyteller), and it is there he penned his charming story collection Island Nights’ Entertainments. He died at age 44, probably from a cerebral hemorrhage. His tomb in Samoa is inscribed with a passage from his famous “Requiem”:
Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
Though Irish by birth, Oscar Wilde worked mainly out of London, and took part in the rich literary life of the late Victorian age. The son of a Dublin ear and eye surgeon, Wilde attended Oxford, where he was tutored by John Ruskin and Walter Pater, and he became steeped in the philosophy of aestheticism. After graduation he returned to Dublin but found his childhood sweetheart, Florence Balcombe, was engaged to Bram Stoker. After touring America, lecturing on aestheticism, he settled down in London, marrying the wealthy Constance Lloyd in 1884 and becoming the editor of The Woman’s World magazine. He began expanding his writing to include stories and essays, and in 1890 published a novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. Wilde then concentrated on satirical plays, the finest of which was The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). By this time he was a celebrity in London and Paris, and lived a lavish and dissipated lifestyle, which included homosexual encounters. Wilde enjoyed outraging his Victorian contemporaries, but also gained him enemies, such as the Marquess of Queensberry. As a result of a libel suit against Queensberry (see John- Ivan Palmer’s essay “Don’t Do It, Oscar” in this issue), Wilde was sentenced to two years of hard labor, and eventually wound up in Reading Prison. The execution of another inmate inspired his most famous poem, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”. Wilde succeeds in channeling the hard, neutral voice and contrasting picturesque imagery of the ballad, though it is not as compressed as, say, “Edward”. As in his plays and novel, Wilde can’t resist a bon mot, and will repeat a sentiment more than once if it serves his wit.
He walked amongst the Trial Men
In a suit of shabby grey;
A cricket cap was on his head,
And his step seemed light and gay;
But I never saw a man who looked
So wistfully at the day.
I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky,
And at every drifting cloud that went
With sails of silver by.
After being released from prison, Wilde lived more or less seclusion. Attracted to Catholicism, he was baptized in the church shortly before he died in 1900. Like Jack Kerouac in the 20th century, Oscar Wilde is perhaps more famous for his lifestyle than his works. Certainly his trial and imprisonment have made him a sort of martyr for gay rights. However, his many talents, and particularly his sparkling, satirical wit, would probably have stood on its own without Wilde’s notoriety. And he was one of the only writers who has ever produced masterpieces in all three categories—fiction, drama, and poetry.
George Gissing is known for his naturalistic depiction of the poor and working classes in the late 19th century; his characters typically suffer because they follow social conventions at the expense of their own feelings. His most famous novels are The Nether World (1889), New Grub Street (1891), and The Odd Woman (1893). The son of a Yorkshire chemist, his first wife, Marianne Harrison, was a young prostitute he rescued from the streets. His second wife, Edith Underwood, went insane. He had two children, and made a living mostly as a private tutor.
Gissing typifies the “B-list” novelist of the Victorian era. His writing style is stiff, his characters are seldom more than stereotypes, and his plots tend to follow the lines of argument surrounding some moral issue. For example, in one Gissing novella the main character, a middle-aged gentleman, is having a quarrel with his old truelove, a lady of high breeding and morals who refused marriage on learning he had an illegitimate son. A message arrives that said son (who is also the lady’s ward) has died in Greece. Rather than dissolving in a paroxysm of grief—the couple continue their debate!
On the list of the liveliest characters ever created, we must surely give Sherlock Holmes a place. His resourcefulness, scientific methods, bouts of depression and cocaine use embody the spirit of the Victorian era. As with P. G. Wodehouse’s famous valet, Jeeves, Holmes is a genius of action; he needs a lesser (but more eloquent) mortal to narrate his exploits—in this case, Dr. Watson.
Holmes’ creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, has a biography more resembling the good doctor’s. Like Robert Louis Stevenson, he was born in Edinburgh (1857). His father was an alcoholic, and the family lived a hardscrabble life in tenement dwellings. His uncles paid for Doyle’s education by Jesuits, and he studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh. After serving as a doctor on a whaler, he went into private practice, first with a partner in Plymouth, and then in Portsmouth. Lack of patients left him plenty of leisure time to write, and he completed several early novels, including A Study in Scarlet (1886). It was the first tale to feature Holmes and Watson, and was a moderate success. Sherlock Holmes’ inspiration was Joseph Bell, a lecturer Doyle had studied under at Edinburgh who emphasized the importance of close observation in making a diagnosis.
Doyle wrote further stories and novels featuring his famous detective, making a tidy sum from their appearance in The Strand (more than he did in his lackluster medical practice). In 1893, determined to concentrate on more serious historical novels, he killed off Sherlock Holmes in “The Final Problem”. Due to public outcry, however, he resurrected his hero ten years later in “The Adventure of the Empty House”. The detective stories remain by far the most widely read of Doyle’s fiction, supporting a burgeoning industry and numerous Sherlockian societies. Beyond being ingeniously constructed, they exhibit a surprisingly supple and imagistic style. For example, this brief sketch from the beginning of “The Copper Beaches”:
It was a cold morning of the early
spring, and we sat after breakfast on
either side of a cheery fire in the old
room in Baker Street. A thick fog
rolled down between the lines of duncoloured
houses, and the opposing windows loomed like
dark, shapeless blurs, through the heavy yellow wreaths.
Doyle married Louisa Hawkins in 1885 but, like Dr. Watson, was destined to be a widower. Louisa died in 1906, and the following year Doyle remarried, this time to Jean Leckie, with whom he’d had a close, though platonic, relationship since 1897. After the death of his son Kingsley in World War I, Doyle was drawn to spiritualism, and believed his friend Harry Houdini possessed supernatural powers. He maintained his keenly objective mind to the end, however, sometimes taking part in real-world crime cases on behalf of prisoners convicted on shoddy evidence; two men were exonerated because of his efforts.
Among the last of the Victorians, Kipling is perhaps the most controversial. Though he lived almost to the outbreak of World War II, his most iconic work takes place in 19th century British India, where Kipling was born (1865) and where he cut his teeth writing for a Lahore newspaper after his dismal school days in England. His stories and poems are instilled with the aura of exotic adventure to be found at the fringes of the farflung British Empire; they also depict the darker side of the Victorian era—racism, sexism, and the exploitation of native peoples in the colonial system. Hardly a single line of Barrack- Room Ballads can be read without alarms going off in the mind of the politically correct reader. Yet Kipling was simply writing in the vernacular of his time, expressing (for example) what a British soldier might say about the hanging of Danny Deever or the heroism of Gunga Din. In his more serious pieces, such as “Without Benefit of Clergy” (an Englishman finds domestic happiness and then domestic tragedy with a young Muslim woman whom he has purchased) and “The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows” (addicts of diverse background gather in an opium den) Kipling casts a sympathetic, if somewhat jaded, eye on those of a different race, caste and creed.
Two of Kipling’s most famous poems neatly illustrate the dual nature of his reputation. One is “If ”, a set of life principals that is often read at graduation ceremonies; the other is “The White Man’s Burden”, ostensibly about the US involvement in the Philippines but oft quoted to illustrate the condescending arrogance of Western imperialism. But at the end of the day, Kipling’s legacy may lie in a third direction: his children’s fiction. The Jungle Book is still well known, thanks in part to the Disney film, and Just So Stories and “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” are also literary classics. Kim, an early example of a spy thriller, is probably Kipling’s best novel—though he did not have a novelist’s knack of plot construction, and is generally better in his tales. And no other writer can summon a place so effortlessly in a poem:
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the old Flotilla lay,
With our sick beneath the awnings when we went to Mandalay!
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the flyin’-fishes play,
An’ the dawn comes up like thunder outer China ‘crost the Bay!
Later in life he married an American, lived for a while in Vermont (and didn’t like it) and retired in Sussex. He was at the height of his popularity during Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, to which he contributed his famous “Recessional”, and was the first English writer to receive the Nobel Prize (1907).
George Meredith. As a young man in the 1850s, he was hailed by the critics as a genius and was considered one of the great writers of the day, though never a very popular one. His poetry and fiction were a challenging read in his own time, and are now rather less accessible. Some of Meredith’s better known works are the sonnet sequence Modern Love, the poem “Love in the Valley”, and his novel Diana of the Crossways, based on the life of Caroline Norton.
Walter Pater. An Oxford don like John Ruskin, Pater was an Epicurean, and espoused the love of art for art’s sake. He is known primarily for his essays, and his major collections are Studies in the History of the Renaissance, Marius the Epicurean, and Appreciations. His ideas contributed to the Aesthetic Movement.
Thomas Carlyle. Irritable, sharp, and puritanical, Carlyle seems a strange candidate to be the spiritual leader of the Victorians, but such was the case. He is best known for his histories, in particular The French Revolution, where he uses a dramatic narrative style that incorporates biographical material; the main theme is how the revolution was God’s visitation on the French aristocracy. His ideal hero was (predictably) Oliver Cromwell.
John Stuart Mill. The grand philosopher of the Victorian age, Mill wrote on economics, liberty, ethics and the scientific method. His best known writings are On Liberty and Utilitarianism. Though his ideas were for the most diametrically opposed to Carlyle’s, the two were close friends (Mill’s maid accidentally burnt an early manuscript of The French Revolution while he was borrowing it, and Carlyle had to rewrite the first part from scratch). A Liberal, Mill was elected a Member of Parliament from 1865-68, and was the first to call for the right of women to vote.
John Henry Newman. The leader of the Oxford Movement, Newman advocated for reintroducing traditional Catholic rituals and forms of worship to the Church of England. He eventually converted to Catholicism, was made a cardinal by Pope Leo XIII, and helped found University College, Dublin. His religious writings include the poem The Dream of Gerontius, later made into a choral work by Edward Elgar.
Charles Kingsley. A Hampshire rector who was briefly Queen Victoria’s chaplain, Charles Kingsley is best known now as a friend of Charles Darwin’s, and one of the first to espouse his theory of evolution. His books include the swashbuckling Westward Ho! and his children’s novel The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby, a moral fable with evolutionary overtones.
Jerome K. Jerome. One of the great humorists of the Victorian era, Jerome K. Jerome worked as an actor, journalist, and solicitor’s clerk before finding his forte in comedy. He and his wife spent their honeymoon on a boat in the Thames, which inspired his most famous work, Three Men in a Boat. The novel still affords amusement, as camping, fishing, and boating misadventures have not changed much since 1889. During World War I Jerome, then in his 50s, drove an ambulance.
George MacDonald. A friend and mentor to Lewis Carroll, Mac- Donald was a fine children’s author in his own right, and a seminal figure in the fantasy genre. His best-known works, such as The Princess and the Goblin, are extended fairy tales.
Edward FitzGerald. One of the classics of the Victorian age is Edward FitzGerald’s fabled The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Both would probably be unknown in English if Dante Gabriel Rossetti had not discovered FitzGerald’s translation of the Persian poet through mutual friends. Born into one of the wealthiest families in England, FitzGerald led a life of idle leisure, devoted to flowers, music, literature, and (late in life) yachting. He lived many years in a cottage on the grounds of his parents’ Suffolk estate, translating various classic authors, including the Persian poet Jami and the Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca—but it was Omar Khayyam’s star to which he ultimately hitched his wagon.
Arthur Hugh Clough. Although Arthur Hugh Clough’s socialist ideas may have been forward-thinking (he witnessed the 1848 revolution in Paris), his poetry is patently Victorian; the majority of his small output is in iambic tetrameter, employing the didactic devices typical of 19th century poetry. “Say not the Struggle Naught availeth” and “Through a Glass Darkly” are the pieces most often spoken of, when Clough is spoken of at all. A close friend of Matthew Arnold, he served his wife’s cousin, Florence Nightingale, as a secretary for a time.
Francis Thompson. The Victorian most likely to have his life made the subject of a Gus Van Sant film, Francis Thompson’s most anthologized poem is “The Hound of Heaven”, which contains echoes of Coleridge. After studying medicine indifferently at the University of Manchester, Thompson went to London and lived the life of a starving artist, selling matches and newspapers and becoming addicted to opium. He was living on the streets and contemplating suicide when a vision of the 18th century Romantic poet Chatterton stayed his hand. A kind prostitute rescued him and shared her lodging, and later a couple of literary editors (who can also be kind, on occasion) gave him a home and published his first book. He died of tuberculosis at 48.
Henry James. Though technically belonging to America’s Gilded Age, James lived in London much of his life, and some of his best-known novels (Portrait of a Lady, The Turn of the Screw) have an English setting. Though his languid story lines and ponderous clauses take their own sweet time, the complex psychological makeup of his characters makes James worth reading.
The Edwardians. The generation who began publishing around
1900—among them E.M. Forster, Kenneth Grahame, A.E.
Housman, J.M. Barrie, H.G. Wells, John Masefield, John
Galsworthy and G.K. Chesterton— form a neat bookend to
the Victorian era, a brief and fruitful autumn that came before
the desolate winter of World War I. 