Descus About Victorian Novel
Answers
Explanation:
The Victorian Age is essentially the age of the novel or fiction. During this period, the novel made rapid progress.
This was partly because this middle-class form of literary art was bound to flourish increasingly as the middle class rose in power and importance, partly because of the steady increase of the reading public with the growth of lending libraries, the development of publishing in the modern sense and other events which accompanied this increase, and partly because the novel was the best means to present a picture of life, lived under the stable background of social moral values by people who were like the people encountered by readers, and this was the kind of picture of life, the middle-class readers wanted to read about.
The early Victorian or first-generation novelists comprised of William Thackrey, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Mrs Gaskell etc.
Although there were several more novelists of the time, only the ones mentioned here have survived the test of time and are considered representative of the early phase of the Victorian fiction in England.
One of the prominent features, that the novel of the early Victorian era, had, was the concern with the “condition of England question”.
They chose for their themes the specific contemporary problems of the Victorian society caused by the predominance of industrialism and utilitarianism and wrote about them sometimes as satirists, sometimes as humanists, sometimes as moralists.
In spite of the fact that they were conscious of the havoc caused by the industrial revolution, the presence of mass poverty and accumulation of riches in a few hands, yet they believed like the common Victorians that these evils would prove to be temporary, that on the whole, England was growing prosperous, which was evident from the enormous increase in material wealth and there was no reason why this progress should not continue indefinitely.
A significant shift in the English Novel in its movement from the 18th to the 19th century was the change of emphasis from action to character. They gave primacy to the character as opposed to Neo-classical novelists who gave more importance to action.