Victorian literature

VICTORIAN LITERATURE


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Annotation: The article is devoted to the problem of the Gothic style in Western European prose. The origins of the Gothic tradition, the history of the term in literary criticism, the main stages in the development of the classic Gothic novel are considered.
Keywords : aesthetics, genre, style, gothic, educational, mysticism.

While poetry was the main genre during the Romantic period, the book was the most important throughout the Victorian age. The first half of Victoria's reign was dominated by Charles Dickens (1812-1870). ‘Pickwick Papers’, his first work, was published in 1836, and his Between 1864-5, William Thackeray published ‘Our Mutual Friend’. ‘Vanity Fair’, (1811-1863) most famous book, was published in 1848, and Charlotte (1816–55), Emily (1818–48), and Anne Bronte, three sisters In the 1840s, he also published notable works. A significant later ‘Middlemarch’ (1872) by George Eliot (1819–80), although the Thomas Hardy was a notable novelist during Queen Victoria's reign. Hardy's debut work, ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’, was published in 1840. ‘Jude the Obscure’, his last novel, was published in 1895. Victorian England's most famous poets were Robert Browning (1812–89) and Alfred Tennyson (1809–92), though more recent tastes have favored the poetry of Thomas Hardy (1844–89), who wrote poetry throughout his life but did not publish a collection until 1898, and Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89), whose poetry was published posthumously in 1918. W. B. Yeats' early poems was also published during Victoria's reign.

In terms of the theatre, no notable works were produced until the later decades of the 19th century. This began in the 1870s with Gilbert and Sullivan's humorous operas, followed by George Bernard Shaw's (1856-1950) plays inside the 1890s, and Oscar Wilde's (1854-1900) ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ in 1895.
The most famous Victorian novelist is Charles Dickens. Dickens was a hugely popular author in his day, and his characters took on a life over their own outside the pages. He is still one of the most popular and widely read authors of his time.
His first novel, ‘The Pickwick Papers’ (1836), was an instant hit when he was twenty-five years old, and all of his subsequent writings sold well. His debut novel's humour has a satirical tinge to it, and this penetrates his writing. Dickens worked tirelessly and prolifically to not only provide amusing writing for the public, but also to remark on social issues and the suffering of the impoverished and oppressed. ‘Oliver Twist’ (1837-1838), ‘Dombey and Son’ (1846-1848), and Bleak House are among his most famous works (1852-1853), ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’ is the setting for three novels: ‘Great Expectations’ (1860–1861), ‘Little Dorrit’ (1855–1857), and ‘Our Mutual Friend’ (1864–1865). In his fiction, there is a progressive shift toward darker topics, which matches a trend in most of nineteenth-century writing. In the first half of Queen Victoria's reign, Dickens' main adversary was William Thackeray. He inclined to represent a more middle-class culture than Dickens, with a comparable style but a slightly more distant, sardonic, and stinging sarcastic view of his characters. His novel ‘Vanity Fair’ (1848), entitled ‘A Novel Without a Hero’, is an example of a famous Victorian literary form: a historical novel depicting recent history.
Anne, Charlotte, and Emily Bronte wrote important works of the time, however Victorian reviewers did not immediately embrace them. Emily's only work, ‘Wuthering Heights’ (1847), is an example of Gothic Romanticism from a female perspective, examining class, myth, and gender. ‘Jane Eyre’ (1847), written by her sister Charlotte, is another important nineteenth-century Gothic book. Anne's second work, ‘The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’ (1848), is often regarded as the first sustained feminist narrative, written in a realistic rather than romantic form. George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) published ‘The Mill on the Floss’ in 1860 and ‘Middlemarch’ in 1872, both within this time period. She, like the Bront sisters, used a masculine pen name.
Thomas Hardy was the most prominent novelist of the Victorian era's closing decades. ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’ (1872), ‘Far from the Madding Crowd’ (1874), ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’ (1886), ‘Tess of the d'Urbervilles’ (1891), and Jude the Obscure are only a few of his masterpieces (1895).
Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–1865), Anthony Trollope (1815–1882), George Meredith (1828–1909), and George Gissing were other notable novelists of the time (1857-1903).
Victorian novels are romanticized depictions of challenging lives in which hard effort, determination, love, and luck ultimately triumph; goodness is rewarded, and wrongdoers are appropriately punished. They tended to be upbeat, with a central moral lesson at their core. While much of early Victorian fiction was based on this model, the issue became increasingly complicated as the century advanced.
The Victorians are credited with "creating childhood," thanks in part to their attempts to end child labor and institute compulsory education. As children gained the ability to read, children's literature grew in popularity, with both established writers (such as Charles Dickens' A Child's History of England) and a new generation of dedicated children's authors. Authors such as Lewis Carroll, R. M. Ballantyne, and Anna Sewell mostly wrote for children, though they did have an adult audience. Other authors, like Anthony Hope and Robert Louis Stevenson, wrote primarily for adults, but their adventure novels are now regarded as children's books. Other types of poetry include nonsense verse and poetry for children (e.g. Lewis Carroll). School stories took off: Thomas Hughes' Tom Brown's ‘Schooldays’ and Kipling's ‘Stalky & Co.’ are classics. Much of the art of the time is considered as a bridge between the romantic age and the modernist poetry of the next century. For nearly forty years, Alfred Lord Tennyson served as poet laureate. Some of the popular Victorian poetry of the time, such as William Ernest Henley's ‘Invictus’, is now regarded as jingoistic and bombastic, but Tennyson's ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ was a scathing critique of a notorious military blunder; a pillar of the establishment not afraid to criticize the establishment. In Victorian times, there was a lot of comic poems. ‘Punch and Fun’ magazines, for example, were aimed at a well-educated audience and were full of amusing innovation. The Bab Ballads are the most well-known collection of Victorian comedic verse. Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning were a husband and wife combination who wrote many emotional and passionate poetry about their love connection. Both Matthew Arnold and Gerard Manley Hopkins created poems that fall somewhere between romantic poetry's exultation of nature and early twentieth-century Georgian poetry. Hopkins' poetry, however, was not published until 1918. Hopkins drew inspiration from poetic patterns of Old English poetry such as ‘Beowulf’, whereas Arnold's writings anticipate some of the subjects of these later authors. The reclamation of the past was a key theme in Victorian literature, with an emphasis on both classical and medieval English literature. The Victorians admired the epic, chivalrous stories of past knights, and they aspired to reclaim some of that noble, courtly behavior and instill it in the people of the empire. Alfred Tennyson's ‘Idylls of the King’ is the best example of this, as it combines ‘King Arthur stories’, particularly those by Thomas Malory, with modern problems and ideals. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood drew inspiration from myth and folklore in their work, with Dante Gabriel Rossetti considered as the group's principal poet at the time, despite the fact that his sister Christina is today held by scholars o be a stronger poet. Farces, musical burlesques, extravaganzas, and comic operas competed alongside Shakespeare plays and serious drama by James Planché and Thomas William Robertson at the drama department. The German Reed Entertainments began a process of upgrading the standard of (previously risqué) musical theatre in Britain in 1855, which ended in Gilbert and Sullivan's famed series of comedic operas and was followed by the first Edwardian musical comedies in the 1890s. The London comedy ‘Our Boys’ by H. J. Byron, which premiered in 1875, was the very first play to receive 500 straight performances. Brandon Thomas beat it to a new record of 1,362 performances in 1892 with ‘Charley's Aunt’. Oscar Wilde succeeded W. S. Gilbert as the leading poet and dramatist of the late Victorian era. Wilde's plays, in particular, stand out among the many now-forgotten Victorian dramas, and are more closely related to those of Edwardian dramatists like George Bernard Shaw, whose career began in the 1890s. ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’, Wilde's 1895 comedy masterwork, was the best of the plays in which he cast a sarcastic mirror on the aristocracy while exhibiting virtuosic mastery of wit and paradoxical wisdom. It continues to be incredibly popular. The Victorian era was a pivotal period in science progress, with Victorians on a quest to characterize and classify the entire natural world. Much of this material does not qualify as literature, but one book in particular, Charles Darwin's ‘On the Origin of Species’, is still remembered. Many of the Victorians' notions about themselves and their place in the universe were shattered by the work's evolution theory. Although it took a long time to gain widespread acceptance, it had a significant impact on future philosophy and writing. The philosophical texts of John Stuart Mill on logic, economics, liberty, and utilitarianism, as well as the politically influential histories of Thomas Carlyle: ‘The French Revolution’, ‘A History, and On Heroes and Hero Worship’, and Thomas Babington Macaulay: ‘The History of England from the Accession of James II’, are other crucial non-fiction projects of the time. The increasing quantity of novels that carried overt religious critique did not impede a robust list of religious works. John Henry Newman and Henry Edward Manning, two of the most influential of these, both wanted to revitalize Anglicanism by returning to the Roman Catholic Church. With Friedrich Engels' ‘Condition of the Working Classes’ in England and William Morris' early communist utopian novel ‘News from Nowhere’, socialism was pervading political thought at the time in a somewhat reverse manner. The Oxford English Dictionary, which would eventually become the most important historical dictionary of the English language, was also started during this time period.
Henry David Thoreau and Susan Fenimore Cooper's ‘Rural Hours’ (1850) were classic influences on Victorian nature literature in the United States. In the early Victorian era, Philip Gosse and Sarah Bowdich Lee were two of the most prominent nature writers in the United Kingdom. ‘The Illustrated London News’ was established in 1842. The world's first illustrated weekly newspaper, which frequently featured stories and images on wildlife; Nature books, essays, and images became widely available and popular throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. Reading audiences are becoming more urbanized.
The first instances of the genre of strange fiction are old Gothic stories from the late nineteenth century.
These stories frequently included larger-than-life characters such as Sherlock Holmes, a famed detective of the period, Sexton Blake, Phileas Fogg, and other fictional figures of the day, such as ‘Dracula’, ‘Edward Hyde’, ‘The Invisible Man’, and a slew of other characters who faced exotic foes. There was a style of writing known as gothic that flourished in the 18th and 19th centuries. In order to delight and terrorize the reader, Gothic literature combines romance and horror. Foreign monsters, ghosts, curses, hidden rooms, and wizardry are all possible elements in a gothic story. Gothic stories are typically set in castles, monasteries, and cemeteries, yet gothic beasts have been known to appear in cities like London and Paris.
Although artists from the United States and the British colonies of Australia, New Zealand, and Canada were affected by British literature, they gradually developed their own individual styles and are sometimes classified as part of Victorian literature. [needs citation]
Grant Allen, Susanna Moodie, and Catherine Parr Traill are examples of Victorian Canadian writers. New Zealand literature includes Thomas Bracken and Frederick Edward Maning, as well as Australian poets Adam Lindsay Gordon and Banjo Paterson, who penned Waltzing Matilda. Some of the country's greats from the realm of literature at this time include: Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Henry James, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, and Walt Whitman are among the authors. The challenge with classifying "Victorian literature" is that there is a significant gap amongst previous works from the period and later works from the Edwardian period, with far too many writers straddling this line. Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, Bram Stoker, H. Rider Haggard, Jerome K. Jerome, and Joseph Conrad all created notable works during Victoria's reign, although their aesthetic is often seen as Edwardian.
Following the romantic resurgence, the literature that flourished during Queen Victoria's reign became known as Victorian Age literature.
Because Victorian literature was preceded by romanticism and later by modernism or realism, it is a blend of romantic and realist literary styles. Victorian Age novels are realistic depictions of challenging lives experienced in a time when success was determined by hard effort, determination, love, and luck. They were practical, and most of them aimed to better the world through a primary moral lesson involving the mind or conscience. Dramas, farces, musically burlesques, extravaganzas, and comic operas from the Victorian era were comparable to Shakespearean dramas. Dramatists like James Planche and Thomas William Robertson wrote serious tragedies. Science's discoveries and inventions had a significant impact on the literature of the day. The Victorians went to considerable lengths to describe and classify all species and landforms. One scientific work in particular, Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, has become a literary classic. Though it also took years for this work to gain widespread acceptance, the book's premise of evolution challenged many Victorian attitudes toward themselves. The book completely altered people's future thinking and beliefs, as well as literature itself. During this period, a new genre known as weird fiction emerged in the shape of classic Gothic tales. Famed and larger-than-life fictional figures such as Sherlock Holmes , Barry Lee (big time gang boss), Sexton Blake, and Phileas Fogg were frequently featured in these stories. Edward Hyde and Dracula, for example, were both well-known malevolent villains.
All of the great Victorian writers and works of literature shared three common themes of human growth. The works were realistic, focusing on real-world issues and answers. Victorian literature shifted away from the rigorous notion of "art for the sake of art" to "art for the sake of ethical or life." Despite significant economic, technological, and social revolutions, this was a period of pessimism and perplexity. In general, Victorian Age literature depicts a perfectly idealized world that is practical or materialistic. Justice, truth, love, and brotherhood were all highlighted by the poets, essayists, and novelists of the time. Thomas Hardy was a Victorian novelist who specialized in realistic fiction with strong emotions. His new pessimistic literary style was widely panned. His writings, including as ‘The Return of the Native’, ‘Far from the Madding Crowd’, ‘Tess of the d'Urbervilles’, and others, featured satirical or tragic characters who had strong and profound emotions. He is a social critic who depicts the low conditions of living experienced by the impoverished throughout the industrial revolution. Thomas Hardy was one of the most influential Victorian novelists because of his blend of realism and social criticism. George Elliot was a writer who utilized literature to delight and depict societal conditions. Mary Ann Evans, who wrote under the pen name George Elliot, used her works to demonstrate how the characters' social milieu influenced them. Elliot thought that any work should be based on real life experiences, such as her practical life of being shunned by her friends and family for her marriage in ‘The Mill on the Floss’.