The Influence of Romanticism

By the 1830s, romanticism was certainly past its height. Shelley, Keats, and Byron were dead, and Wordsworth was no longer a youthful revolutionary but a stuffy, elderly member of the establishment. Still, young up-and-coming poets such as Robert Browningand Alfred, Lord Tennysonhad been raised on the romantics. Of course, they had their likes and dislikes: Tennyson said that Wordsworth at his best was “on the whole the greatest English poet since Milton,” while Browning, who idolized Byron and Shelley, told fellow poet and future wife Elizabeth Barrettthat he would travel to a distant city just to see a lock of Byron’s hair but “could not get up enthusiasm enough to cross the room if at the other end of it all Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey were condensed into the little china bottle yonder.”

Overall, though, the Romantic movement had an enormous influence on early Victorian poets—not so much on their style of writing, which was often brilliantly original, but on their ideas of what poetry should be. On the streets, they saw factories belching smoke and ragged, hungry children begging pennies. In their writing, though, they ignored this grim reality, focusing instead on more “poetic” subjects: ancient legends, exotic foreign lands, Romantic love, and the awe-inspiring beauty of nature. Matthew Arnoldargued that the poet could have no higher goal than “to delight himself with the contemplation of some noble action of a heroic time, and to enable others, through his representation of it, to delight in it also.” Perhaps this approach was pure escapism, perhaps optimism; or perhaps—just as attitudes inherited from an earlier generation hindered social reform—literary ideals inherited from the Romantics kept the first Victorian poets from redefining poetry for their own time.

Readers seemed to share this sense of dislocation. On the one hand, the Victorians revered their poets, seeing them as a higher order of human being—sensitive, intuitive, inspired—an image first popularized by the Romantics, particularly Byron. On the other hand, many readers, especially among the middle class, increasingly viewed poetry as irrelevant to their own lives. While poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossettipassionately insisted on “art for art’s sake,” the growing reading public turned to other forms of literature, particularly the novel.

Realism in Fiction

Looking at the range and quality of Victorian novelists—the humor, pathos, and unforgettable characters of Charles Dickens,the psychological depth of George Eliot,the dark passion of Emily Bronteand her sister Charlotte Bronte—it’s hard to believe that at the time they wrote, fiction was widely considered to be simply light entertainment, not serious literature. To be fair, the vast majority of novels published weren’t great books like David Copperfield and Middlemarch. The same mass production that filled Victorian homes with inexpensive bric-a-brac of doubtful taste also poured out cheap thrillers and maudlin, weepy tales known as “penny dreadfuls” and “shilling shockers,” which the working classes in particular devoured.

Romanticism didn’t disappear entirely as soon as realism appeared; many of the best novelists combined elements of both and even borrowed reader-pleasing techniques from popular fiction. For instance, in Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte blended the spooky suspensefulness of the gothic novel with a realistic portrayal of the moral, social, and economic pressures faced by a Victorian woman. Charles Dickens filled his many novels with harshly realistic details drawn from his own experiences and observations, but he sweetened his social criticism with amusingly eccentric characters, engaging storytelling, and, often, sentimental endings. Other writers, such as Anthony Trollopeand William Makepeace Thackeray,were known for a more straightforward realistic approach, faithfully depicting the manners and morals of the upper middle class to which they both belonged. George Meredithand George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans) pioneered psychological realism,which focused less on external realities than on the inner realities of the mind, though still within the context of contemporary social changes.

Victorian novels were weighty affairs, quite literally—so weighty that they typically had to be divided into three volumes, collectively known as a three-decker novel. Fortunately, readers had the time and the attention spans to appreciate these elaborately constructed fictional worlds, with their complex storylines and leisurely narrative pace. Families often spent the evening reading aloud to each other, laughing at the adventures of Dickens’s Mr. Pickwick and his oddball friends or sighing over Heathcliff and Catherine’s doomed romance in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights.

Many novels were first published in serial form in magazines and newspapers, that is, in monthly installments of several chapters each, meaning that readers might have to wait as long as two years to find out how a novel ended. Dickens was a master of this form. Hordes of fans—not just in England but around the world—rushed to snatch up each new installment of his 1841 novel The Old Curiosity Shop, especially as the beloved character Little Nell approached her tragic end. In fact, the suspense was so great that passengers aboard a British ship arriving in New York that year were met by crowds of anxious American readers who had not yet received the latest installment. They were shouting from the dock, “Is Little Nell dead?”

Date: 2016-03-03; view: 925