Brtlt20a.wpd
Lesson 20a: The Victorian Novel (Day: 168-170)

The Victorian reading public firmly established the novel as the dominant literary form of the era. Virtually the entire literate population consisted of novel-readers. Herbert Spencer, that rigorous apostle of science, exempted George Eliot's works works from his general condemnation of "mere" novels; Newman and Arnold were avid readers of fiction; and Darwin stated in his Autobiography that to him novels were "a wonderful relief and pleasure." Carlyle, however, dourly excluded the novelist from the category of the hero as writer. Amazingly, Tennyson compared the novel to verse drama and gave it higher rating: "I am of the opinion that if a man were endowed with such faculties as Shakespeare's, they would be more freely and effectively exercised in prose fiction with its wider capabilities than when "cribbed, cabined, and confined" in the trammels of verse." Certainly the novel may well be termed the most distinctive and lasting literary achievement of Victorian literature. At the outset of the Victorian period no one, except possibly Thackeray, considered the novel a significant art form. By 1853, however, Clough, writing in the North American Review, recognized that cultured readers had turned their attention from poetry to the novel. By the century's end the novel had completely triumphed over poetry as aesthetic and spiritual nourishment for English readers. The novel by this time claimed writing talents that in earlier eras would have developed elsewhere--Meredith and Hardy who were essentially poets, Gissing and Wells who were essentially essayists. Sir Walter Scott had created a large novel-reading public and had made novel-reading respectable. He was also responsible for strengthening the tradition of the three-volume novel and for kiting the price up to one-and-a-half