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10. Fiction
Overview
The super-productive Dickens is the dominant figure of the Victorian novel, combiningelements of the Gothic - a genre made serious by the Brontë sisters - with a remarkablyimagined account of the social institutions of Victorian London. The mode of his novelsowes much to popular stage and melodrama, though language and character-creation arehis own. His rival, Thackeray, is represented here by
Vanity Fair.
A less theatricalrealism comes in with Mrs Gaskell and Trollope, and with the historian of imperfectlives in their fullest social settings, George Eliot.
The triumph of the novel
Modern images of 19th-century English life owe much to novels, and versions of novels.By 1850, fiction had shouldered aside the theatre, its old rival as the main form of literary entertainment. As with the drama at the Renaissance, it took intellectuals sometime to realize that a popular form might be rather significant. Human beings havealways told stories, but not always read the long prose narratives of the kind known asnovels. The reign of the novel has now lasted solong as to appear natural. There had been crazesfor the Gothic novel and for Scott’s fiction, yet itwas only in the 1840s, with Charles Dickens, thatthe novel again reached the popularity it hadenjoyed in the 1740s. Between 1847 and 1850appeared Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, VanityFair and David Copperfield.
In 1860, Dickens wasstill at his peak, Mrs Gaskell and Trollope were going strong, and George Eliot hadbegun to publish. Poetry was popular, but prose more popular. The popularity of broadlyrealistic novels seems to go with the broadening basis of middle-class democracy.For the sake of clarity, this cornucopia of fiction is treated author by author, at theexpense of chronology, interrelation, context. Dickens coincidentally published his first novel in the year of

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