Cultural Aspects of the Victorian Age Reflected in Literature
Lect. univ. dr. Anca Mihaela DOBRINESCU
Universitatea “Petrol-Gaze” Ploiesti
No matter how controversial the issues relating to the Victorian age may have been when the term ‘Victorianism’ imposed itself as indispensable to the history of culture and civilisation in the nineteenth century, consensus has been reached that this period was one of unprecedented development in all the fields of England’s economic, social and political life. Referred to from the standpoint of the twentieth century, Queen Victoria’s age is undoubtedly perceived as a period of stability and equilibrium underlain by a solid and reliable value system, with the idea of God looming large at its centre. Far from being a period of perfect harmony, free of any conflicting states, Victorianism still enjoys the benefits of some strongholds on whose unquestionable stability one is invited to rely. The most important one is the figure of Queen Victoria herself and the institution the queen represented - the monarchy.
Queen Victoria was the longest reigning monarch in English history and she is primarily remembered for her having established the monarchy as a respected and popular institution. The monarchy – “the apex of the court and of polite society generally”[1] – flourished under Queen Victoria. “The monarchy represented the timeless quality of what was taken to be a pre-industrial order. In an increasingly urbanised society, it balanced the Industrial revolution: the more urban Britain became, the more stylised, ritualised, and popular became its monarchy, for the values which it claimed to personify stood outside the competitive egalitarianism of capitalist society.”[2]
Victoria gained enormous popular esteem for supporting the imperialistic policies and, in 1876, she also became Empress of India. Great Britain turned into one of the world’s most extended empires. It occupied a position in the world that engendered a feeling of self-confidence, of trust in the individual’s power and in an unlimited possibility of progress, all the more so for Britain also being the cradle of the Industrial Revolution. Dictated by a tough competition with other European nations, the British Empire expanded with a view to establishing new spheres of influence and gaining control over previously unexplored areas that represented fresh opportunities for trade and new sources of wealth. A feeling of national pride was also associated with Britain’s expansionistic tendencies in the nineteenth century, which undoubtedly accounts for part of the apparent stability of the Victorian society. The Empire was, thus, another stronghold of the Victorian age, on whose strength much of the spirit of the period depended.
On the occasion of the Great Exhibition of 1851, proudly opened by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in London, E. P. Hood, the inventor of the term ‘Victorian’ stated with immeasurable pride. “The Englishman lives to move and to struggle, to conquer and to build; to visit all seas, to diffuse the genius of his character over all nations. Industry, Protestantism, Liberty seem born of the Teutonic race – that race to whom God has committed the conservation as well as the spread of Truth and on whom mainly depend the civilisation and progress of the world.”[3]
The boom in wealth generated a boom in birth rate. In the public opinion, the traditional picture of the family reigned supreme. The large family was the rule in the Victorian society. Many children, gathered under the protective wing of a caring mother, materially depended on the effort, and consequent success, of the father, who could be seen as a dignified epitome of God on earth.
Much of the stability and solidity of the Victorian age were given by people’s perceiving the family, the monarchy and the empire as solid, incontestable and wealth providing institutions. Although the Victorian prosperity was only one side of the coin, the other being the victims, the multitude of the crushed and the oppressed, few Victorian people ever seriously thought of contesting the beneficial role of these institutions in the Victorian society. Dissatisfaction may have been formulated with any other social, economic or political aspects. The monarch and the institution she led, the imperialist expansionism and the family as the basic social unit of the society were never questioned.
Literature, and especially fiction, reflects the reality in a certain period of time. The Victorian novel, constructed according to the conventions of realism is, thus, expected to be in various ways a reflection, or better said, a representation of the Victorian society, with all its underlying values. Yet, one and the same cultural, ideological and axiological background will generate different distinct individual works. The main condition of existence of fiction is that it establishes a necessary relationship with the external referent. When a mimetic attitude to literature is adopted, the fictional work will create an illusion of reality, which can go from an apparent total overlap between fiction and reality, to subtly or maybe strikingly divergent paths of the two. No matter which type of illusion it creates, the work always is an original processing of the same material. It is the form and the choice of method and technique that gives the work uniqueness and differentiates it from any other individual work, even if the latter is inspired from the same referent.
Starting from the historical delimitation of the Victorian period, it is interesting to see how different Victorian writers, or writers creating in the Victorian age, formulated their own standpoint and related themselves to the Victorian values and conventions. The paper will try to demonstrate that there is a clear relationship between the particular standpoint that a writer chooses to express and the technique that he opts for in order to carry into effect the intended representation. To this end, I have chosen for exemplification three novels by three novelists whose work displays a fairly wide range of references to the Victorian period, but which, by a different option in point of technique, produced a different representation of reality. The specific moment of time when the three novels I selected were published is also relevant. Charles Dickens’ Bleak House came out in 1852-1853, i.e. about the same time the Great Exhibition took place in London. The Great Exhibition marked a turning point in the history of the nineteenth century, delimiting the “Hungry Forties” from the “Fabulous Fifties”. Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland appeared in 1865, i.e. a moment when the Victorian values indicative of wealth and prosperity, success and self-confidence became the standard of the Victorian organisation. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was written in 1899 and published only three years later in 1902, i.e. in a period when the Victorian system, the Empire included, underwent a process of decline, when man’s value system got relative under the influence of the turn-of-the-century scientific and technological discoveries. I will approach the three novels, starting from some textual instances that I consider relevant to the purpose of this paper. The three writers’ work will be dealt with in succession, given the fact that the view of the world and the modifications of technique can be also interpreted as time-dependent.
Dickens confronts his reader with an image of the Victorian society rendered in the conventions of the realist novel. Without claiming that he would reform manners and morals, or that he would repair social injustice, Dickens constitutes himself, however, into a spokesperson of the realities of his time. He has a view of both sides of the Victorian coin, but he chooses to emphasise more the bad side of it, focusing on the deficiencies of the legal, social and political system. Dickens is a keen observer of reality and he decides to present it as truthfully and as accurately as possible. He chooses thus the narrative technique that could provide the proper bird’s-eye view of the Victorian panorama. The point of view that Dickens uses is the omniscient, which means that, no matter how sceptical about the values underlying the Victorian system he may be, he is not ready to essentially question these values. The omniscient narrator is a God-like presence in the narrative that parallels God’s central position to the Victorian man’s system of values. Consequently, critical as Dickens is of England’s situation, the values underlying his thinking coincide to a certain extent with those underlying the thinking of any Victorian individual. Dickens may criticise the organisation of his contemporary England, but he will seldom, if ever, question the validity of this organisation, in a subversive way. Dickens’ criticism can be effected in tones ranging from mild irony, through satire to bitter sarcasm, but ultimately he will acknowledge the system as system, and thus his novel will be an artistic representation of a society which is, after all, stable and solid.
Although England and the English political system are not too often the subject matter of Dickens’ novels in explicit terms, the chapter ‘National and Domestic’ in Bleak House offers the reader an almost straightforward representation of the country’s political deficiencies. There is one ingredient that is purposefully avoided in the constitution of England – the Queen. One may easily refer the two fictional characters in the fragment to the historical personages Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone, both Prime Ministers having played a significant part during Queen Victoria’s reign. Yet the monarch does not appear, although Dickens openly satirises the performance of the two politicians, the former a Conservative, the latter a Liberal. Dickens’ message is that all political alternatives are reduced to mere irrelevance when the judicial system is so ineffective and so negatively reflected in the people’s life. Yet, the taboo subject of the queen, and implicitly of the monarchy, is not tackled, which is clearly indicative of Dickens’ essential standpoint.
England had been in a dreadful state for some weeks. Lord Coodle would go out, Sir Thomas Doodle wouldn’t come in, and there being nobody in Great Britain (to speak of) except Coodle and Doodle, there has been no Government. It is a mercy that the hostile meeting between the two great men, which at one time seemed inevitable, did not come off; because if both pistols had taken effect, and Coodle and Doodle had killed each other, it is to be presumed that England must have waited to be governed until young Coodle and young Doodle, now in frocks and long stockings, were grown up. This stupendous national calamity, however, was averted by Lord Coodle’s making the timely discovery that, if in the heat of debate he had said that he scorned and despised the whole ignoble career of Sir Thomas Doodle, he had merely meant to say that party difference should never induce him to withhold from it the tribute of his warmest admiration; while it as opportunely turned out, on the other hand, that Sir Thomas Doodle had in his own bosom expressly booked Lord Coodle to go down to posterity as the mirror of virtue and honour. Still England has been some weeks in the dismal strait of having no pilot (as was well observed by Sir Leicester Dedlock) to weather the storm; and the marvellous part of the matter is, that England has not appeared to care very much about it, but has gone on eating and drinking and marrying and giving in marriage, as the old world did in the days before the flood.[4]
The irony underlying the text is evident. The names of the two ‘great men’ come into derisive discrepancy with their indispensability to the fate of Britannia, as England is referred to some lines downwards by Dickens, in remembrance of the heroic days of the Roman province. The common noun ‘doodle’[5] turned into a proper one and, more importantly, assigned to a person on whose shoulders the responsibility of a country lies suggests Dickens’ clear intention of mocking at the whole political system that both Conservatives and Liberals represented. The name ‘Coodle’ is only an invention to make political irresponsibility rhyme. Dickens has the same critical attitude when he considers the political discourse in the Victorian period. He points to the ambiguity and lack of coherence of this discourse, which may be mildly termed diplomatic, but which shows nothing but the indifference, lack of consistency, even rude manners of the politicians at that, and other coming, time. Similarly, he questions, by attacking it, the hereditary right of the aristocratic class to the government of the country. Yet what the reader discovers, in surprise is that, in the Victorian writer’s opinion, the country could manage without the two, which indicates, in an implicit way that the structure was seen as stable and strong enough to resist in absence of government. This is the reason why the Queen is not held responsible. She was a guarantee to the country’s stability and prosperity. Her privileged place in the Victorian mentality prevented Dickens from having her artistically involved. The Queen, just like the other institutions mentioned in the beginning of this paper, was a taboo subject. Adopting an omniscient narrator’s perspective, it would have been unlikely that Dickens should diverge from the main line of thought and mentality of the Victorian age. He formulated an individual viewpoint, without taking the risk of offending the public one.
Just a few years later, Lewis Carroll represented the same Victorian period, but in a moment when Victorian issues had, in a way, ceased to be seen as points of controversy. Things had started to change for the better, and the Reform Bills relieved Great Britain’s political system. Under the form of a nonsensical story, anticipating the twentieth-century literature of the absurd, Lewis Carroll enlarges upon various Victorian topics, in a joking and apparently superficial way. The form he adopts and the technique that he decides on – selective omniscience- indicate more than a change in the tenets of literature. It was certainly difficult for Carroll to give an unbiased view of his time’s society unless he decided to free his reader from a too strict control on the part of the omniscient narrator. To be able to express a personal standpoint, he had to sacrifice the privilege of omniscience to the freer perspective of a character who should not necessarily hold the system’s values in reverence. Alice is indeed a dignified representative of the Victorian society, but she is a child, so she has an incomplete and imperfect view of the society she was born in and educated to. For this reason, the action being filtered through her eyes, she has the capacity of coping with the topical issues of the Victorian age in a freer manner and thus formulating a viewpoint different from that of Dickens. Alice’s eye functions as a mirror, but due to the incompleteness of her knowledge, as an imperfect, sometimes distorted mirror. The impression of distortion is accentuated further more by the story being transferred to a realm of dream. Beside the narrative precautions that Carroll took to enable him to move more freely within the established value system, cherished by the Victorian public opinion, he also resorted to a method of demonstration borrowed from mathematics, the reductio ad absurdum one[6]. Thus all Carroll’s story acquires an in-the-mirror quality. The imperfect and distorted mirror reflects the image of the Victorian society, without the writer committing himself to the sense and value of the mirror reflections.