Transcript of Studies in Early Victorian Literature
70 5th Avenue 1895 All Rights Reserved Note The following essays appeared in the Forum of New York and simultaneously in London during the years 1894-95. They have been carefully revised and partly rewritten after due consideration of various suggestions and criticisms both in England and in America. The aim of the writer was to attempt a mature estimate of the permanent influence and artistic achievement of some of the principal prose writers in the earlier half of the reign of our Queen. 8 Charles Kingsley 9 Anthony Trollopex George Eliot Characteristics of Victorian Literature That which in England is conveniently described as the Victorian age of literature has a character of its own at once brilliant, diverse, and complex. It is an age peculiarly difficult to label in a phrase, but its copious and versatile gifts will make it memorable in the history of modern civilization. The Victorian age, it is true, has no Shakespeare or Milton, no Bacon or Hume, no Fielding or Scott, no Supreme Master in poetry, philosophy, or romance, whose work is incorporated with the thought of the world, who is destined to form epic and to endure for centuries. Its genius is more scientific than literary, more historical than dramatic, greater in discovery than in abstract thought. In lyric poetry and in romance our age has named second only to the greatest. Its researches into nature and history are at least equal to those of any previous epic, and if it has not many great philosophers, it has developed the latest, most arduous, most important of all the sciences. This is the age of sociology. Its central achievement has been the revelation of social laws. This social aspect of thought colors the poetry, the romance, the literature, the art, and the philosophy of the Victorian age. Literature has been the gainer thereby in originality and in force. It has been the loser in symmetry, in dignity, in grace. The Victorian age is a convenient term in English literature to describe the period from 1837 to 1895, not that we assign any sacramental efficacy to a reign, or assume that the queen has given any special impulse to the writers of her time. Neither reigns, nor years, nor centuries, nor any arbitrary measure of time in the gradual evolution of thought can be exactly applied or have any formative influence. A period of so many years, having some well-known name by which it can be labeled, is a mere artifice of classification. And of course an Englishman will not venture to include in his survey the American writers, or to bring them within his national era. The date, 1837, is an arbitrary point and a purely English point. Yet it is curious how different a color may be seen in the main current of the English literature produced before and after that year. In the year of the queen's accession to the throne, the great writers of the early part of this century were either