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Victorian literature
The first decades (1830s to 1860s) of Queen Victoria's reign produced a vigorous and
varied body of literature that attempted to come to terms with the current
transformations of English society, but writers in the latter decades (1870s to 1900)
withdrew into AESTHETICISM, a preoccupation with sensation as an end in itself.
Confronted by the shift from an agricultural to an industrial urban society and troubled
by the erosion of traditional religious beliefs, the early Victorian writers held to a
moral aesthetic, a belief that literature should provide both an understanding of and
fresh values for a new society. Novelists of the period explored the difficulty of
forming a personal identity in a world in which traditional social structures appeared to
be dissolving. With compassionate realism, George ELIOT, in such works as ADAM BEDE,
described the slow dissolution of a rural community. The many powerful novels of Charles
DICKENS, William Makepeace THACKERAY, and Anthony TROLLOPE focused on the isolation of
the individual within the city. Charlotte BRONTE in JANE EYRE dramatized the particular
problems of creating a female identity. Among the writers of early Victorian nonfiction,
Thomas CARLYLE in Past and Present (1843) argued for the re-creation in industrial
England of the lost sense of community between social classes. In contrast, John Stuart
MILL in ON LIBERTY spoke for the fullest development of the individual through freedom
from social restraint. The foremost art critic of the time, John RUSKIN, articulated the
assumptions of many contemporary critics by showing in The Stones of Venice (1851-53) the
interdependence of great art and a society's moral health.
The major early Victorian poets, too, took the role of secular prophets, often expressing
a longing for the free play of imaginative life. For Alfred, Lord TENNYSON, the longing
found ambivalent expression in his early lyrics; his major work, In Memoriam (1850),
translated personal grief into an affirmation of religious faith. Matthew ARNOLD,
particularly in his poem Empedocles on Etna (1852), revealed how the spirit of his own
age weakened emotional vitality. Although concerned with presenting his personal form of
religious faith, Robert BROWNING used his dramatic monologues primarily to show the
uniqueness of the individual personality.
By the 1870s, opposing what they now perceived as a repressive public morality, writers
increasingly rejected any obligation to produce didactic art. In the influential
Conclusion to Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), Walter PATER argued that
moments of intense sensation are the highest good and that the function of art must be to
create such moments. In poetry, Dante Gabriel ROSSETTI and Algernon Charles SWINBURNE
expressed their private erotic concerns in terms shocking to the general public. Such
preoccupation with sensation led to the literary decadence of the 1890s, epitomized by
Oscar WILDE's play Salome (1893), with illustrations by Aubrey BEARDSLEY. Along with a
revitalization of prose fantasy (see William MORRIS, Robert Louis STEVENSON), the later
Victorian period also saw a more searching realism, notably in such novels of Thomas
HARDY's as JUDE THE OBSCURE and TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES.
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