HISTORY OF ENGLISH NOVEL
(series 04)

NINETEENTH CENTURY NOVEL

There was tremendous growth in English novel during the 19^th century and the century was to produce works of fiction of far greater significance than the tales of terror. Seldom has the English novel been conceived with such deliberate and successful art as in the novels of the 19^th century.

JANE AUSTEN

Jane Austen (1775-1817), the daughter of the Rector of Stevenson, lived quietly at different homes in Hampshire and in Bath and was taught by her father. She did not travel, went to London only once, saw nothing of “high life”, and after a long period of bad health, died at Winchester at the age of forty two. She read the ordinary classics of her times and enjoyed Fanny Burney. She read the Gothic romances with amused contempt. Her inborn sense of comedy was aroused very early by the absurdities of sentimental novel and she made some juvenile literary efforts not printed till 1922.

LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP (1790) was evidently written for domestic entertainment but it contained nearly every quality which Jane Austen was to show in her later works. The transition from these juvenilia to her first published books can be seen in the fragment of her epistolary novel LADY SUSAN first printed in 1871 though written about 1794. A little later she wrote Elinor and Marianne, a first draft of SENSE AND SENSIBILITY, in the epistolary form. Jane Austen did not offer it for publication and never attempted the epistolary form any more. The first of her published novels to be written was PRIDE AND PREJUDICE which was composed first under the title First Impressions in 1796-97. Her father offered First Impressions to a publisher Cadell who refused it. The novel had been completed some three months when Jane Austen began to re write Elinor and Marianne as SENSE AND SENSIBILITY which was not published till 1811. Thus PRIDE AND PREJUDICE became her first published novel and received immediate success. In 1798 she began to write Susan, the first draft of NORTHANGER ABBEY which was sold to a publisher who failed to publish it and Jane Austen did not recover the manuscript till 1816. The novel was later published in 1818 after her death. In 1803 & 1804 she began a story which was never finished and it was first published as THE WATSONS in 1871 with some other fragments. After 1803 there was a gap of several years in her literary career.

In 1812 she began writing MANSFIELD PARK which was published in 1814. EMMA was begun in 1814 and published in 1816. PERSUASION, last of her regularly published novels, was begun in 1815 and was finished in 1816. The manuscript was in her hands at her death bed and was published posthumously with NORTHANGER ABBEY in 1818. It is pertinent to note here that the novels published during her life time appeared anonymously and her name was attached in the short biographical note prefixed in the volumes of 1818.

It has to be noted that the tangled tale of Jane Austen’s literary activities shows that she was a careful craftsman who was prepared to give long considerations to her work. Her clear sighted eyes read through the inner minds of those who lived around her or of the beings that she invented and animated. Right from the beginning she seems to have realized the scene which she could portray and nothing could tempt her outside. She seemed to have no curiosity for the past and events that stirred Europe left no impression on her pages. She was completely detached and impersonal. With complete verisimilitude she created commonplace persons, not types, and they revealed themselves completely and consistently in narrative and conversation of almost extraordinary ordinariness.

She detached herself from the weaknesses of her predecessors. She assaulted the tale of terror directly in NORTHANGER ABBEY. The moral outlook of Richardson left her unimpressed. Sentimentalism also found her equally unmoved. More than anyone since Fielding she considered novel to be a form of art which required a close and exacting discipline.

SIR WALTER SCOTT

It is quite pertinent to note that seldom has a single age been presented with two artists of such different range and outlook as Jane Austen and Walter Scott during the nineteenth century. Never was a writer more generous than Scott nor a critic more catholic in taste. He praised Jane Austen and distinguished her art from his “bow wow” manner. Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) was born in Edinburgh which was almost a foreign city for Englishmen at that time. A mischance of early childhood left Scott lame but did not abate his extraordinary vigour. Though debarred from youthful sports he grew up with books and with the store of Border ballads and tales. Educated at Edinburgh High School and University, Scott joined his lawyer father’s office as advocate in 1792.

But the romantic ardour kindled in him by the traditional songs and stories moved him to make his first venture into print. He had developed an enthusiasm for the antiquities of Scotland and a series of visits into the Highlands stored his mind with legends which proved valuable to him later as a novelist. His researches led him to publish The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802-03). From a collector of poetry he himself became a poet with The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805).His another poetical story Marmion (1808) was full of heroic matter and in The Lady of the Lake (1810) the force is laid on incident. In Rokeby (1813) the force is laid on character and The Lord of the Isles presents the historical interest. His other less important romances are The Vision of Don Roderick (1811), The Bridal of Triermain (1813) and Harold the Dauntless (1817).Scott also attempted dramatic works like Halidon Hill (1822), Macduff’s Cross (1822), The Doom of Devorgoil (1830) and The Tragedy of Auchindrane (1830).

However Scott’s poetic romances represent merely a fraction of his endowments. It was for his novels to allow fuller scope for his natural gifts and acquirements and for his wholesome humour as well as his comprehensive sympathies. Scott may be said to have invented the historical novel though he seemed to have some antecedents including Maria Edgeworth’s CASTLE RACKRENT (1800).Instead of flashing the contemporary scene and the detailed study of middle class life Scot steps back into the past frequently using well known characters and constructing a narrative which is at once an adventure and a pageant of an earlier world. Where Fielding and Jane Austen had been satisfied with characters and their immediate surrounding, Scott invented a background for his scene with landscape and nature descriptions and all the details of the past ages.

Although Scott’s central theme often introduces the leading personalities his most secure element lies in his pictures of ordinary life and people particularly the Scottish peasants whom he knew well and in whose portrayal he freely exercised his gift of comedy. He seems to equal Shakespeare in the variety of scenes and characters but he did not penetrate into the hidden places of his character’s mind.

Scott’s earliest novel WAVERLEY (1814) dealt with the Jacobite rising of 1745. Though historical, Scott formulated in this novel a background from the memories of living people whom he had met in the Highlands. This Scottish element with Jacobitism, the last medieval movement in Europe, is the most secure element in Scott’s works and he recurs to it frequently. A bare list of his novels follows like this: WAVERLEY (1814), GUY MANNERING (1815), THE ANTIQUARY (1816), OLD MORTALITY (1816), THE HEART OF MIDLOTHIAN (1818), ROB ROY (1818), THE BRIDE OF LAMMERMOOR (1819), IVANHOE (1821), THE PIRATE (1822), THE FORTUNES OF NIGEL (1822), QUENTIN DURWARD (1823), RED GAUNTLET (1824), THE BETROTHED (1825), WOODSTOCK (1826), THE HIGHLAND WIDOW (1827), THE FAIR MAID OF PERTH (1828), THE MAIDEN OF THE MIST (1829), CASTLE DANGEROUS (1832).

The success of these novels was indeed sensational. WAVERLY was an entirely new phenomenon--- new in setting, in incident, in character and in historical interest. GUY MANNERING and THE ANTIQUARY were tales of contemporary life, among the very best in sheer interest of the story and in richness of characterization. With OLD MORTALITY Scott seems to have plunged back into the past. While THE HEART OF MIDLOTHIAN succeeds as a tragedy of the domestic kind, THE BRIDE OF LAMMERMOOR succeeds as a tragedy of the loftier kind. If IVANHOE, KENILWORTH and QUENTIN DURWARD are triumphant historical romances, ROB ROY carries us into wild Highland adventure. The Legend of Montrose and Wandering Willie’s Tale in RED GAUNTLET can rightly be described as masterpieces in lesser dimensions.

Indeed Scott had Homeric qualities. Like Shakespeare he did not judge he recorded. He was superb when he brought nature into his stories. His special quality was the peculiar combination of the humorist with a romance writer, of the man of the world with the devoted lover of nature and an ardent worshipper of the past. For him romance was not the romance of love but the general romance of human life, of the world and its activities, and of the warring adventurous past. Unlike Jane Austen, Scott was unnatural with the conventional and at ease with the eccentric. His almost mechanical rapidity forbade any kind of revision. His tremendous efforts to meet the financial liabilities cost him his life. There are perhaps few more affecting stories than his long odyssey in search of health and his return home to die.

CHARLES DICKENS

In the nineteenth century English novel the name of Charles Dickens (1812-70) is pre eminent. With the exception of Shakespeare there is no greater example of creative force in English literature. Every figure which he created came alive. Vitality, exuberance, and idiosyncrasy –these are the notes of Dickens’ characters. The great humorist of the world can be counted on fingers of the single hand and Dickens is of that choicest company. In Dickens we have an astonishing combination of creative vigour, unstaled humour and abundant variety.

Dickens had an unpromising birth and upbringing. Born at Portsmouth, his father was a dockyard clerk in Navy Pay Office and a transfer to Chatham in 1817 made him familiar with the neighbouring Rochester and its ancient appeal. A further transfer to Somerset House brought the family to London where he lived in a sordid suburb and where he became painfully familiar with the debtor’s prison, the Marshalsea to which his father was sentenced. Just two days after his twelfth birthday he was sent to work at Warren’s Blacking warehouse to paste labels at blacking pots. It is pertinent to note that when Dickens’ father was sent to the debtor’s prison the entire family except him moved inside the prison shortly afterwards while he lived in a succession of lodging houses. After his release Dickens’ father proposed to send him to school but his mother was in favour of sending him back to the work place. This was the deepest wound made in his young soul, the only cruelty he never forgot though the father prevailed and Dickens resumed his education as a day scholar in a nearby school where he remained till 1827 when he joined a legal office as a clerk. Later on he began his journalistic career as a parliamentary reporter. While still a reporter he began writing short stories and achieved a modest success.

His early writings deserve consideration. The Sketches of Young Gentlemen, Sketches of Young Couples and the Mud fog papers are good samples of journalism. What came immediately were not the novels but the Sketches by Boz. Dickens’ first sketch was A Dinner at Poplar Walk (1833). After that he wrote numerous tales and sketches. Thus in his twenty third year Dickens was moderately well known as the author of journalistic and magazine contributions. What happened next is like a fairy tale. Dickens was asked to add the written matter to the pictures in a humorous monthly periodical chronicling the adventures of a cockney sporting club. Chapman and Hall were publishing the periodical and Robert Seymour was to draw the plates. The work was to become one of the world’s comic master pieces.

Dickens began his career as a novelist with PICKWICK PAPERS (1836-37) which has to become the supreme comic novel in the English language. The comedy did not seem to be superimposed for it is an effortless expansion of a comic view of life. The novel is a Rabelaisian fairy tale and has been regarded as a triumph of the curious and difficult process that may be called ‘realism disrealised’. This must be worth remembering that this vast world of three hundred characters and twenty two inns was created by a young man of twenty four years.

Dickens enjoyed life but hated the social system into which he had been born. The immense success of PICKWICK PAPERS enabled Dickens to write what he liked. In his next novels OLIVER TWIST (1837-38) and NICHOLAS NICKLEBY (1838-39) we see the crusader with wrongs to set right, the journalist with evils to expose, the philanthropist with causes to proclaim and the melodramatist with villains to denounce. THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP (1841) shows pathos transcendent over humour. BARNABY RUDGE (1841) is Dickens’ first attempt in the historical novel. In 1842 Dickens paid a long visit to America—the first of his tours abroad, which became frequent and exercised a great influence on his work. This particular voyage produced American Notes (1842) and MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT (1843-44). In 1843 he published A Christmas Carol, the first of his endearing Christmas books which continued annually with The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life and The Haunted Man. Between the first and the last Christmas book Dickens published DOMBEY AND SON (1847-48). It was Dickens’ first attempt at painting actual modern society. DAVID COPPERFIELD (1849-50) was written with a curious tenderness for there is in it something of what the young Dickens was, and something of what the young Dickens wanted to be. The abundance of life and vitality, the range of characters, the close knit texture of the story and the high quality of the writing can hardly be paralleled. There is no crusading although one can note melodramatic elements. Yet this novel can be aptly described as Dickens’ most varied, most serious and most firmly sustained effort.

BLEAK HOUSE (1852-53) has law delays as its chief crusading motif. HARD TIMES (1854), though not very popular, gives special emphasis to Dickens’ attack on social conditions of his times. Through Coketown and Mr. Gradrind the whole laissez faire system of the Manchester School has been satirised and Dickens suggests that its enlightened self interest is unenlightened cruelty. There was an unusual pause in the astonishing stream of production and it was only in 1857-58 that Dickens wrote LITTLE DORRIT. Here Dickens attacked the Circumlocution office and the methods of bureaucracy. The picture of prison life which was a comic motif in PICKWICK PAPERS is now a serious theme. There is some crusading and some melodrama but the tale is so ordered and so enriched that it becomes memorable.

With A TALE OF TWO CITIES (1859) Dickens returned to historical novel and laid his theme in the French Revolution. GREAT EXPECTATIONS (1860-61) is undoubtedly Dickens’ new and the best work and OUR MUTUAL FRIEND (1864-65) was the last novel completed by Dickens.

Dickens’ sense of words was exquisite. His genius in coining names was unsurpassed. He had an extraordinary range of language. He invented characters and situations with a range that had been unequalled since Shakespeare. When Dickens died in 1870 something seemed to have gone out of English life that was irreplaceable, a bright light that had shone upon the drab commercialism of the 19^th century.

THACKERAY

Born near Calcutta William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-63) was another English writer with a homeless childhood for his father died in 1815 and the mother remarried soon. As a boy of six he was sent to England where he attended many schools, the last being Charterhouse (‘Grey Friars’) London. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge which he soon left without getting any degree but the friendship of Tennyson, Fitzgerald and others. From Cambridge he moved to Weimar and began to study law in Middle Temple. Then he made a home in Paris where he gained acquaintance (and lost money) with a shady shabby genteel set of wasters who furnished him material for later sketches. Thereafter he began to inhabit the Bohemian world of letters, writing and drawing in various papers and magazines and using many pseudonyms.

As a novelist, he began late in his thirty sixth year, with VANITY FAIR (1847-48). Ten years later he was working on his last considerable novel THE VIRGINIANS (1857-59). For one decade his novels became a feature of English life. During these years he wrote PENDENNIS (1848-50), HENRY ESMOND (1852) and NEWCOMES (1853-55).

VANITY FAIR, despite its occasional failings, has a strength and sureness of creative touch. The novel showed Thackeray at his best, in a clear sighted realism, a deep detestation of insincerity, and a broad and powerful development of narrative. As a novelist Thackeray was never a crusader and propounded no problems. His range of characters appears to be limited when compared to Dickens. He kept close to the world he knew and did not, like Dickens, create a vast world of fantasy. Like Fielding he saw that in life it is hard to draw a clear line between vice and virtue.

CHARLES READE

The novel of social attack which was perfected by Dickens was carried on with documentary exactness by Charles Reade (1814-84), as in his exposure of the prison system in IT IS NEVER TOO LATE TO MEND (1856). Reade was always a fighter who took up causes and attacked abuses. He used to turn novels into plays and plays into novels. His first novel PEG WOFFINGTON (1853) was made from his play Masks and Faces (1852). CHRISTIE JOHNSTON (1853) presents life of a Scottish fishing village and appears to have no stage counterpart. He was greatly influenced by realism which was at work in fiction during the middle of the 19^th century. Reade’s documentary novels are not of one kind. Some of them make use of knowledge of trade and occupation such are THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A THIEF (1858), JACK OF ALL TRADES (1858) and A HERO AND A MARTYR (1874). There are stories of philanthropic purposes like IT IS NEVER TOO LATE TO MEND (1856), HARD CASH (1863), FOUL PLAY (1869), PUT YOURSELF IN HIS PLACE (1870), A WOMAN HATER (1877). Reade’s habit of challenging attention by capitals, dashes, short emphatic paragraphs, accentuates the general impression of urgency and even anticipates the devices of modern journalism. The greatest achievement of his documentary method is the historical novel THE CLOISTER AND THE HEARTH (1861) where he portrays illusory but lively and detailed picture of the middle ages.

BENJAMIN DISRAELI

A very powerful quality is attached to the novels of Benjamin Disraeli (1804-81) whose reputation as the most vital figure in the politics of the 19^th century has marred him as a writer of fiction. The most vital attack on new industrialism with its accompanying pauperisation was made by Disraeli. In the whole history of English literature he was the author who rose to become the prime minister of England and went to the House of Lords. Somewhat like Dickens he began with many disadvantages. He never went to a school or university and the earliest education he received was in his father’s personal library.

Disraeli’s earliest novel VIVIAN GREY (1826) is wild and melodramatic but it contains some good sketches of character and some brilliant satire. THE YOUNG DUKE (1830) has some pungent political criticism but deals exclusively with the world of fashion. CONTARINI FLEMING (1832) is a psychological romance and ALROY (1833), THE RISE OF ISKANDER (1835) are historical or quasi historical romances. Disraeli becomes a new person with his ‘young England’ trilogy: CONINGSBY (1844), SYBIL (1845), TANCRED (1847). The message given was—the Crown must govern, the Church must inspire, the Aristocracy must lead, the Commons must construct. Disraeli’s last two novels LOTHAIR (1870) and ENDYMION (1880) are full of politics.

MRS GASKELL/ WILLIAM WILKIE COLLINS

Mrs. Gaskell (1810-65) exposed the cruelty of the industrial system in MARY BURTON (1848) and NORTH AND SOUTH (1855). Her picture of the social horrors that made the 1830s & 1840s in England a perpetual shame endures because her first aim was to tell a story and not to exploit grievances. MARY BURTON has been regarded as the first ‘Labour’ novel which proved to be so powerful and disturbing that the political economists fell upon it and proved by science how wrong it was. The success of this novel brought Mrs. Gaskell into association with the great writers of her day including Dickens who showed her the highest consideration and regard. In CRANFORD (1853) she showed gentleness and humour in a picture of provincial life. RUTH (1853) suddenly returns to problems, this time moral not social. In LIFE OF CHARLOTTE BRONTE (1857) she came out with natural honesty and included domestic details which were resented. With SYLVIA’S LOVER (1863) she discovered for herself a new setting for her genius in the wild Yorkshire coast which serves as a background to a domestic drama of extraordinary power. In striking contrast is COUSIN PHILLIS (1865) which tells the story of a broken heart. Mrs. Gaskell’s last story was WIVES AND DAUGHTERS ((1866) which she left near completion when she died. Thus we see that in her hands the social novel developed into a full grown form of fiction.

When the Victorian readers wanted to turn from politics or social evils they had a writer who could arouse mystery and terror in a far more subtle way than Horace Walpole or Mrs. Radcliffe. Wilkie Collins (1824-89) seems to have never been excelled as a contriver of complicated plots. His first outstanding success THE DEAD SECRET (1857) was followed by the unsurpassed thriller THE WOMAN IN WHITE (1860). Other novels were NO NAME (1862), ARMADALE (1866), THE MOONSTONE (1868) and THE LAW AND THE LADY (1875).

THE BRONTE SISTERS

In 1846 Charlotte Bronte (1816-55), Emily Bronte (1818-48) and Anne Bronte (1820-49) together produced Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. The volume did not prove successful. Charlotte Bronte embodied some of her experiences in a novel THE PROFESSOR which failed to impress. In JANE EYRE (1847) she chose a story of unhappy experiences and troubled love and came out with a romanticism of individual passion. The novel became a unique Victorian book because in it purity became passionate and out spoken. Gone was the concept of the ‘man’s woman’; here was woman herself, confronting man on equal terms. One can find here the voice of free insurgent woman, free to feel and speak.

In WUTHERING HEIGHTS (1847), her only novel, Emily Bronte created a stark passionate world reminiscent of the storm scene of King Lear. The figures which she fabricated out of her dreams are worked out in wonderful relief as if they had been borrowed from the most intimately known substance of reality. Her psychology, which appears to be naive as it is profound, is at the same time wholly imaginary and astonishingly convincing.

The qualities of Anne Bronte have been, however, underrated. But AGNES GREY can be regarded as a moving personal record and THE TENANT OF WILDFELL HALL showed clear signs of undeveloped strength and fine observation. But time and experience were denied to her and she died in 1849. Emily Bronte died in 1848. Charlotte Bronte’s SHIRLEY was begun in excitement of success but was completed in utter bereavement. Unlike JANE EYRE, SHIRLEY is not easy to read and its beauty is of the rarer and more difficult kind. She once again took up the theme which she had tried in THE PROFESSOR. To compare VILETTE (1853) with THE PROFESSOR is to see the difference between material transformed and material merely used.

GEORGE ELIOT

As Mrs. Gaskell gave the first of the operatives George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans, 1819-80) gave the last of the yeoman. Of all the women novelist of the 19^th century, George Eliot was the most learned. Before writing fiction she had translated Strauss’s Leben Jesu and acted as assistant editor of the Westminster Review. She spent her early years in a rural home of a great estate of which her father was an agent. When quite young she was forced by circumstances to assume the charge of her father’s house and acquired singular self reliance and self control. Her sincerity of mind led her through many absorbing spiritual experiences including a period of devotion to ascetic ideals. Gradually she became a figure in ‘advanced’ circles. She lodged with the Chapmans and met many figures in advanced thought including Herbert Spencer who introduced her to George Henry Lewes. Attracted by the extraordinary intellectual vivacity of Lewes she made an “unofficial” marriage with him. Lewes’ own home had been broken up and on his three sons she bestowed full maternal affection. Lewes showed to her unsurpassable devotion and watched over her literary labours with great care.

Her early novel SCENES OF CLERICAL LIFE (1858) was an immediate success. The novel won the admiration of Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope, Mrs.Gaskell and others. In her long novel ADAM BEDE (1859) the keynote is the belief that the divine spirit which works in man works through man’s own response to its call. On the background of the English rural life she created a far stronger theme than the Victorian novel previously permitted. In the character of Henry Sorrel she showed a young girl seduced and led to child murder. In Hetty she allowed a free play to her intuitions; her intellect controlled the ‘good’ characters in the novel, Dinah and Adam Bede. The Shakespearean humour accompanying the presentation of the tragedy made the novel unique. Her next work THE MILL ON THE FLOSS (1860) may not be the greatest of her novels but it was one into which she poured the experiences of her own early life. It is a Wordsworthian story told in prose. It is the story of the life of a brother and sister presented with great sensitiveness. The girl is passionate, dimly mystical, introspective, reacting against the blunter and more boisterous values of the brother. The novel is rich in character and description but it is more ample in scope and scale. SILAS MARNER (1861), where all is admirably ordered to one design, is smaller in scale. But its tenderness of fancy and humour and the strong simplicity of invention make it a perfect story.

Her next novel ROMOLA (1863) was an attempt to write a historical novel on the Italian Renaissance. The novel might have been more authentic if George Eliot had laboured less and had written with a larger creative freedom. The historical reconstruction of Medicean Florence is magnificently done; the tragedy of Savonarola is fitly narrated. The minor characters are sketched with divine insight. But the central tragedy fails to touch our deepest conviction.

FELIX HOLT, the RADICAL (1866) is the only political story attempted by George Eliot. With MIDDLEMARCH (1871-72) returned to the relation of domestic tragedy and comedy set in the English scene. DANIEL DERONDA was her last novel and it has never been popular. After that she attempted no more fiction and felt that the labour of long creative work was beyond her. The death of Lewes in 1878 removed her watchful adviser. However her place in English fiction is secure. In command of pathos, humour and tragedy, she is excelled by none. In her work one is aware of her desire to enlarge the possibilities of the novel as a form of expression.

ANTHONY TROLLOPE

Anthony Trollope (1815-82) entered upon a doubly prosperous career as a civil servant in the post office and as a man of letters. His youth and boyhood was equally wretched like Dickens and we may find some glimpses in his Autobiography (1877) and in THE THREE CLERKS (1858). Of his sixty novels the best are to be found among the tales of ‘Barset’. The real Trollope begins with THE WARDEN (1855) and develops in its successors BARCHESTER TOWERS (1857), Dr. THORNE (1858), FRAMLEY PARSONAGE (1861), THE SMALL HOUSE AT ALLINGTON (1864) and THE LAST CHRONICLES OF BARSET (1867). In these novels we get a perfect picture of English provincial life, with the middle or upper middle classes as its main figures. He was a man of strong prejudices. For instance he disliked the crusading spirit of Dickens which he criticised in THE WARDEN. He had a very easy and quite unpretentious narrative, a fertile imagination for creating characters and incidents. He is recognised as a representative English novelist and social historian of the period. He is ranked with the realists and possessed the essence of realism which consists in the inner intention of the artist first and concerns his technique only in the second instances.

George Meredith, Samuel Butler, Thomas Hardy and George Gissing, though Victorian in birth and upbringing represent a complete rejection of the normal Victorian values in faith and life.

GEORGE MEREDITH

George Meredith (1828-1909), partly Welsh by birth and educated at Neuwied, was never quite the Englishman. He started with POEMS (1851), containing poetic pieces of high promise and actual merit but gained very little recognition. His first prose works THE SHAVING OF SHAGPAT (1856) and FARINA (1857) showed his remarkable power of concealing his thought in verbal flourishes. A grouping of his subsequent novels can be given here: THE ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVEREL (1859), EVAN HARRINGTON (1861), EMILIA IN ENGLAND [title changed to SANDRA BELLONI] (1864), and THE ADVENTURES OF HARRY RICHMOND (1871) --- all ideal with the upbringing of well born youth to the state of “capable manhood”. RHODA FLEMING (1865) gives prominence to figures of the yeoman class. In VITTORIA (1867), a sequel to EMILIA BEAUCHAMP’S CAREER (1875), and in THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS (1880) he takes a wider sweep of vision over the world of politics in England and Germany and of high national aspiration in Italy. THE EGOIST (1879) stands apart from Meredith’s own stories in its originality of attitude. The four novels DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS (1885), ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS (1891), LORD ORMONT and his AMINTA (1894) and THE AMAZING MARRIAGE (1895) have a chivalrous advocacy of women compromised in honour and in pride by male despotism.

Though Meredith began to write at a time when Dickens, Thackeray, Browning and Tennyson were at the height of their powers still he cannot be affiliated to any of his contemporaries or predecessors. It must be admitted that his novels are difficult but there was perhaps no more sensitive mind among the novelists of the century. He made the first chapters of his novels intentionally difficult so that they might be signposts to the dim witted to follow him no farther. Through his conception of comedy he wished to show up the dangers that beset the human spirit in its struggle to abandon the brutishness from which it had arisen.

SAMUEL BUTLER

The son of a clergyman Samuel Butler (1835-1902) was intended for the church. At Cambridge, he did well in classics and pursued his interest in music. In 1859 he abandoned his intentions of taking orders, went to New Zealand and successfully managed a sheep run. He returned to England in 1864 and spent the remainder of his life in Clifford’s Inn. Thus his youth coincided with the main body of the Victorian age. He experienced its triumphant self confidence, its imperious order, and he reacted against them. His originality found itself in rebellion. His moral independence was carried to extremes. He seems to have established his life upon one exclusive principle, doubt, and the solitary search for truth. From 1865 to 75 he appears as a social intellectual at war with social surroundings.

He challenged the current values in morals and religion in EREWHON (1872), a satirical ‘Nowhere’ in which disease is a crime, crime a misfortune, religion a banking system and education the suppression of identity. With singular prophetic insight the Erewhonians banish machines from their republic on the ground that they will evolve and then become the masters of their makers. In EREWHON REVISITED (1901) the machinery of satire overwhelms its interest. In a century that was little given to satire he revived in THE WAY OF ALL FLESH (1903) the spirit of Swift.

THOMAS HARDY

With Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), the reaction of a robust nature against a philosophy assumes the character of one of those complete breaks through which men of energetic temperament will stand up against their times. Not only does he deny the hope of a happiness founded upon the progress of critical reason; it is the whole of modern civilisation that he condemns and as a wounded animal his sore heart seeks the shelter of the most primitive and untouched earth. He accepts science and feels its spells but joylessly. His tastes lead him away from the fever and fret of industry. A meditative and solitary man, he keeps in harmony with the austere though verdant countryside of Dorset shire where he spent his boyhood. His novels almost ignore the new facts of the present day world. Their background is the eternal framework of the hills and the moors.

Hardy’s first published novel was DESPERATE REMEDIES (1871) and it was followed in a regular succession by UNDER THE GREENWOOD TREE (1872), A PAIR OF BLUE EYES (1873), FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD ((1874), THE HAND OF ETHELBERTA (1876), THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE (1878), THE TRUMPET MAJOR (1880), THE LAODICEAN (1881), TWO ON A TOWER (1882), THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE (1886), THE WOODLANDERS (1887), TESS OF THE D’URBERVIILLES (1891), JUDE THE OBSCURE (1896) and THE WELL BELOVED (1897). Being an architect by profession he gave to his novels a design that was architectural, employing all circumstances in the novel to one accumulated effect. The final effect came as one of a malign Fate functioning in men’s lives, corrupting their possibilities of happiness and taking them towards tragedy. Hardy revolted against the optimism of 19^th century materialism and refused the consolations of Christian faith. Though he saw life as cruel and purposeless he did not remain a detached spectator. He had pity for the puppets of Destiny and it was a compassion that extended from man to earthworms and to the diseased leaves on the trees. Such a conception gave his novels a high seriousness.

Hardy was read and admired by a large following of thoughtful persons. Later in his career he attained notoriety by the publication of Tess with its challenging subtitle A Pure Woman. He infuriated the protectors of proprieties by the crude realism of Jude. Partly in contempt for the assaults of indignant sentimentality in England upon books that would have aroused no protest in any centre of continental culture, and partly because he felt that he had no more to say in prose fiction Hardy returned to his first love poetry.

Hardy’s novels have appealed to successive generations of readers. His gift for anecdote and his power of inventing lively incidents impressed his readers. Nature which to Wordsworth and the Romantics had seemed stimulating and benign appeared to Hardy as cruel and relentless. At the same time his kindliest characters are those who have lived away from the towns in a quiet rural life. It is important to note that in the First World War Hardy was read with pleasure as one who had courage to portray life with the grimness that it possessed and portraying it not to lose pity.

GEORGE GISSING

George Gissing was another Victorian rebel and realist who described the diseases of the society without any hope of curing them. Gissing began, at Owens College, Manchester, a promising academic career that was cut short by several misfortunes. He seemed born to encounter mischances in life and it is only fitting that he became the chronicler in fiction of lives in which success had no part. His first novel WORKERS IN THE DAWN was published in 1880. His more important novels are THE UNCLASSED (1884), ISABEL CLARENDON (1886), DEMOS (1886), THYRZA (1887), THE NETHER WORLD (1889), NEW GRUB STREET (1892), BORN IN EXILE (1891) and THE OLD WOMEN (1893). In form the novels of Gissing are Victorian; in matter they reject the current themes and beliefs. He was influenced by the French realists but he can not be called as the follower of any school. He can be regarded as the first English novelist of importance who considered seriously the psychology of sex.

It is important to note that Gissing has been often compared with Dickens. It is also essential to observe that in spite of striking analogies their works have quite different tones. Dickens, when he was not crusading, could depict the lives of the poor as rich in idiosyncrasy and humorous vitality. Gissing saw nothing in poverty but a squalid, mirthless waste on the outskirts of hideous commercialism and he pictured it without pity and without sympathy. Therefore Gissing emerges as the uncompromising historian of the seamy side of later day Victorian England.

HENRY JAMES

The name of Henry James (1843-1916) stands unique in the realm of fiction not only as first American novelist of repute but also as one who created international situations in English novel for the first time. Born and educated in America, he settled in Europe in 1875 and was naturalised in 1915. His early novels, such as DAISY MILLER (1879), portrayed the contacts of Americans with European life. Then followed a series of studies of English life itself in THE TRAGIC MUSE (1890) and other novels. With the progress in his works the intricacy of his style also increased. He seemed to seek for every fine nuance of feelings and with microscopic clarity he discriminated moods and changes that had not been apparent before. This mature stage can be noticed in THE WINGS OF THE DOVE (1902), THE AMBASSADOR (1903) and THE GOLDEN BOWL (1904). His other novels RODERICK HUDSON (1876), THE AMERICAN (1877), THE EUROPEANS (1878), and THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY (1881) showed that James was supremely well qualified to interpret the international situation so subtly and impersonally that the reader could not tell whether the novel in question was written by an American with knowledge of England and the Continent or by an Englishman with knowledge of both American and European life. `

It must be noted that James put in an unsuccessful attempt of play writing. It should also be noted that this experience of writing for the stage was though unprofitable but it was not without some considerable influence on his style and procedure as a novelist in his later years. He began to write novels from ‘a really detailed scenario, intensely structural, intensely hinged and jointed preliminary frame’. Dialogue now became all important to him. THE AWKWARD AGE (1899) was written almost in dialogue.

Henry James longed for the imagined elegance of the old world, its tradition, its courtesies and its ritual. When he discovered that in reality they did not exist he invented them, until his world became a Bostonian’s platonic idea of what aristocratic life in Europe should be. James enlarged the very conception of novel by his subtle discriminations in sentiment and by the presentation of human relationship.

At this juncture it is important to note that between 1870 and 1880, there appeared new values both in English fiction and in the readers. There was a remarkable increase in the number of people who could read and majority of them were weary of reading voluminous novels. Although the publishers were unable to realise the change at once they gradually found that shorter and cheaper volumes were more profitable.

R. L. STEVENSON

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94) can be regarded as one of the earliest writers who made publishers aware of these changes in the reading habit of the readers. He had published TREASURE ISLAND without much success in a children’s periodical. When it was reissued in 1883 in a volume form it was immediately popular with the new adult public.

It is also significant to note here that along with short novel came the short story also in England which Edgar Allan Poe had already given a vogue in America. Stevenson was a born writer who gave a high artistic quality to the novel of adventure. TREASURE ISLAND made Stevenson successful and directed the current of his subsequent efforts. It was followed by KIDNAPPED (1886), CATRIONA (1893), THE BLACK ARROW (1888), THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE (1889), DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1886), THE WRONG BOX (1889) etc. Like Scott he was at his best while dealing with his native land. He seems to have retained a belated boyishness and it was not till he wrote WEIR OF HERMISTON (1896) that he showed signs of attaining restraint and self command.

It has to be noted that in all his writings Stevenson remained an artist. He was self conscious in style and exacting in perfection. Nevertheless one has to remember that Stevenson was leading the English novel back towards story telling and to the romance. He devoted attentive care to the art of writing. He knew the quest for exact word and the search for a cadence. His style drew its strength from a very varied and supple vocabulary.

But the new reading public wanted a fiction that was easy and not too long. Hence from this point onwards we can identify two types of fiction writers: those who deliberately or naturally adapted themselves to the public taste and those who followed their art into more difficult places. All the works of writers like Arthur Conan Doyle, Rider Haggard, Mrs Humphrey Ward, Hall Caine, Marie Coreilii, Grant Allen and Edgar Wallace was simple enough though their approach to fiction as an art was varied.

However it must be noted that sometimes popularity disguised an author’s genuine merit. P G Wodehouse’s reception by a vast audience should not obscure the fact that he was not only a writer of most brilliant idiomatic English but that he added profusely to the English vocabulary.

RUDYARD KIPLING

Rudyard Kipling (1856-1936) gained great popularity because his art expressed much that a wide audience in England wished to read. His work appeared at a time when England was becoming increasingly conscious of its imperial position. Kipling, born in India, was able to give the colour and the strangeness of the great country. Like Stevenson, he was a master of both the short story and short novel and this brevity helped him to cater the taste of his day. Nirad C. Choudhury in his Continent of Circe (1965) considers Kipling to be the only English writer who will have a permanent place in English literature with books on Indian themes and who will also be read by everyone who wants to know not only “British” India but also “timeless” India.

He began with PLAIN TALES FROM THE HILLS (1888) and continued with volumes of short stories and novels like THE LIGHT THAT FAILED (1891) and KIM (1901). Though the Indian scene formed the source of his first popularity he also wrote an original story of school life titled STALKY AND CO. (1899); the well known animal stories of THE JUNGLE BOOK (1894 & 1895); and the Sussex fairy world theme of PUCK OF POOK’S HILL (1906). Kipling’s style was simple and he had a lively imagination.

JOHN GALSWORTHY

John Galsworthy (1867-1933) began his literary career as a novelist with THE ISLAND PHARISEES (1904). Later, in a series of volumes beginning with The Man of Property, he portrayed the life of the contemporary upper middle classes. Published as THE FORSYTE SAGA (1906-1921) this series and its sequels became immensely popular in England and on the continent. Like Trollope, Galsworthy made a whole class in society come to life.

ARNOLD BENNETT

While Galsworthy focussed his attention upon the upper middle classes Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) showed the life of the ‘five towns’, the ‘potteries’ of Staffordshire and of the men and women who went out from them to see the world. He has been described as an artist who was tempted towards the commercial world. He did not devote his attention to the industrial working man but to a lower middle class of shopkeepers, clerks and professional people. THE OLD WIVES’ TALE (1908) CLAYHANGER (1910) HILDA LESSWAYS (1911) and THESE TWAIN (1916) made up his central fresco.