THE VICTORIAN PERIOD: 1830-1890

The Victorian Age:

The critic Maria Frawley writes about Victorian history and culture:
Progress, expansion, mobility these keynotes of Victorian history and culture
evoke in their different ways a society keenly attuned to and preoccupied with
transformations in nearly every arena of daily life. Your railroad starts the new era,
Thackeray wrote in The Roundabout Papers (1863), and, indeed, the opening of railway
lines from 1830 onwards and their rapid spread throughout Britain captures the periods
ethos of energetic pursuit, advancement, growth and diffusion. The evolution of
industrial society, the rise of great towns and cities, and dramatic increases in population
enabled, maybe even forced, government activities to expand exponentially; literacy
rates increased, print culture proliferated, information abounded, the circulating library
took hold, and a mass reading public was born; the franchise was extended through a
series of key parliamentary reform measures; technological developments broadened
and quickened opportunities for travel and communication; uncharted lands were
explored and mapped, and, for much of the century, Britain enjoyed an expansion of
commerce with the wider world all this outreach making for what Robin Gilmour has
described as a dynamo hum in the background of Victorian literature (The Victorian
Period)
These transformations and the optimistic embrace of progress upon which they
depended inevitably wrought their fair share of anxious response. The central metaphors
of Dickens fiction fog, contagion, the prison evoke the capacity of disease, both
literal and figurative, to spread throughout modern society, eventually to immobilise it.
Moreover, if fundamentally outward-looking, the trademark Victorian emphases on
progress, expansion and mobility (and the celebratory display of their fruits) also helped
to produce a corollary preoccupation with interiority, what the poet Matthew Arnold
called the dialogue of the mind with itself. Victorians were nothing if not inquisitive
one can find everything from The Irish Question to The Oyster Question discussed
in the press and curiosity itself is arguably the premise of major works as different as
Jane Eyre, Little Dorrit and Alice in Wonderland. Preoccupation with the idea and ideal
of transformation is no less central to the Victorian study of self than of society.
Although Scrooge redeems himself with an eleventh-hour promise to change, figures
such as Dr Jekyll and, still later in the century, Dracula, embody a deep-seated
uncertainty about the stability of identity itself in a changing a modern world. The
contradictions and complexities of Victorian England account in no small measure for
its enduring appeal.

Characteristics of Victorian literature:

Although Victorian literature is not homogeneous, Victorian writers had much in
common:
1. A set of ideas and feelings characteristic of their age.
2. A special relationship to the reading public. Many Victorian writers were
conditioned by their readers, by what their readers thought and wanted. They
tended to identify with their age and its people. They saw themselves as the
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spokesmen and spokeswomen of the main problems, ideas and feelings of

their contemporaries.
3. They believed that an important function of literature was social criticism:
their writings had a social message. Most Victorian writers criticize the
society they lived in as many of their readers didl. For example, they wrote
about the negative changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution, such
as the creation of mass poverty and unemployment in both town and country:
they wrote about social injustice, about childrens exploitation in factories,
about overcrowding in industrial towns, about Industrial Action (strikes by
factory workers), and about the Woman Question (the changes needed for
women to improve their lives). But they thought that the evils of their time
were temporary: they believed in progress.
4. Literature, particularly the novel, should be realistic when representing
society. The expression Victorian realism is still used to characterize the
Victorian novel.
5. They believed that literature should have a moral function. Victorian writers
had a strong ethical sense and believed that, like priests, they should
encourage virtue and condemn vice. The Victorian reading public saw itself
as highly respectable, honest, decent, self-controlled and chaste, and, since
the novelists identified with their readers, they created highly respectable
novels, where modesty in women and honesty in men were rewarded, and
vice punished.
6. They saw themselves as public entertainers, not as isolated artists. In literary
terms, the result was that they didnt create great works of Art but highly
entertaining popular novels with an enormous social influence. This would
disappear at the end of the century, when Art was thought more important
than entertainment. Yet it did not disappear completely, for there would still
be a tradition of writers who saw themselves as entertainers with a social and
moral message and who were more popular than the creative artists who
have become the heroes and heroines of literary history. This division
between the novel as a popular form and the novel as high art still exists
today, although the borders are now a lot more blurred than at the beginning
of the XX century.
Victorian magazines
The literary periodical or magazine was a very important element in the literary
scene of the Victorian period. It was developed through the XVIII century, but
did not play an important part in literature until the beginning of the XIX
century, with the foundation of the Edinburgh Review in 1802. This magazine
had an immediate and unprecedented success, due, more than to the talent of its
founders, to the need for serious critical opinion independent of the publishers.
This magazine, like all others founded in the XIX century, had a clear political
perspective. When Walter Scott, who contributed to the early numbers,
complained of the magazines left-wing politics, the editor told him that the
right leg of literature is politics. The following literary magazine, set up seven
years after the Edinburgh Review, the Quaterly, was founded by Tories, that is,

by editors with right-wing politics. After the enormous success of these two
magazines, many others were founded throughout the Victorian period.
These magazines published short stories, poetry and serialized novels: each
week or month a chapter of a novel would be published. Many Victorian novels
were published in this way, and only later as books.
The reviews of fiction in Victorian magazines show what the Victorian critics
expected from the novel. They helped to create and maintain literary standards.
The criticism of the Victorian reviews influenced the taste and demands of the
Victorian reading public. Every upper middle-class family was subscribed to at
least one magazine, and those who were not, borrowed them from private
libraries. Victorian reviewers required that the novel should be:
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moral in its tendency, which really meant a demand for explicit

moral teaching.
amusing or entertaining therefore easy to read.
exhibit a true and faithful delineation of the class of society which it
professes to depict, that is, it should be realistic when representing
society. Yet realism in the novel should not be carried out to the point
of showing the most sordid aspects of life. For literature, according to
the Victorian magazines, should not shock the readers. Social
criticism in the novel was well accepted, even welcome, but it should
not be too precise or realistic. For example, poverty could be
represented, to show the bad living conditions of working-class
people at the time, but the writer had to leave out the worst, ugliest
and most disturbing aspects of poverty, of life in the slums.
Most reviewers rejected crude sensationalism and extreme
sentimentality (although some degree of both was accepted),
demanding common-sense standards of literary taste.

Although the criticism in magazines was often biased by evangelical

morality and political ideas, it contained a high degree of seriousness and
professional responsibility. Most reviewers were aware of performing an
important cultural function.

The Condition of England Question

The concern by many writers about social matters was called the
condition of England question, a phrase invented by Carlyle. The
Victorian age was a time of moderate political and social reforms, partly
the result of the States efforts to avoid the wave of social revolutions that
were taking place in other European countries in mid-century; and partly
the result of the pressure from middle-class social reformers, many of
them writers, worried about the worst effects of a very unequal social and
political system. Many of these reformers were not at all radical in their
ideas, but they had a strong Christian sense of morals, which led them to
become the advocates for moderate social change.

Dickens is the best example of the writer concerned with the

Condition of England Question who is also a social reformer.
The movements for social reforms and for social analysis were part of
that same early Victorian ardour which Dickenss novels exemplify.
Dickens writings and the social movements of the period were
complementary, animated by the same energy and faith in progress.
The Woman Question: criticism of gender roles and relations by
women novelists Charlotte Bront, George Eliot.
Victorian ideology regarding gender roles and relations is mirrored in the
following excerpt from Arden Holts Etiquette for Ladies and Girls
(1880):
A true lady should, more than all other things, take the greatest
care not to wound the feelings of anybody. We meet in society for mutual
pleasure, but want of thought and good feeling often cause mortification
and pain to others. Men are even more sensitive about trifles than women
imagine, though a certain free-and-easy-ness of manner has crept in of
late between the sexes, which occasionally leads to a lack of deference
that it would perhaps be stilted to call a want of respect. A woman has in
her own hands the power of making men treat her with friendly kindness
and simple courtesy, which honours them in giving and she in receiving.
If a young lady walking with her father or brother meet a gentleman
known to them whom they recognize, in returning their salutation he
would raise his hat to her without knowing her, which she would
acknowledge by the slightest possible motion of the head, but this would
not constitute an acquaintance. Supposing she bowed to a gentleman of
her acquaintance who was accompanied by a friend, he would raise his
hat as well as her acquaintance.
Victorian women were saturated with prescriptive literature filled
with social instruction on the duties of womanhood and proper feminine
behaviour. Sermons, educational tracts and advice books sanctified a
belief in the separate spheres the masculine/public vs. the
feminine/private which industrialization had helped to solidify and the
resulting duties of women in the maintenance of a tranquil home and a
selfless devotion to husband and children (the Angel in the House: selfdenying instruments of domestic happiness). At the same time, there were
more and more literary works that move away from this impossible
domestic ideal and represent with far more complexity real women: their
duties, desires, opportunities or lack of them, their opinions, their
frustrations and their influence.
Florence Nightingales long autobiographical essay Cassandra
counsels mothers to awake and recognize that if this domestic life were
so very good, would your young men wander away from it, your maidens
think of something else?.

In Charlotte Bronts Jane Eyre there are many forceful moments

when Jane expresses dissatisfaction with the gender roles and relations
that were too rigid for women. For example, she rebukes Rochester the
man she loves for his idealization of her: I am not an angel and I
will not be one till I die: I will be myself.
In a review essay titled Silly novels by Lady Novelists (1856),
George Eliot [Mary Ann Evans] condemned novels in which the type of
gender ideology represented was not progressive.
In her essay she wrote:
when a womans talent is at zero, journalistic approbation is at
the boiling pitch; when she attains mediocrity, it is already at no more
than summer heat; and if she ever reaches excellence, critical enthusiasm
drops to the freezing point.
Eliots essay reveals much about gender roles and relations in the
period. The Woman Question is present in her condemnation of a
domestic ideology that links the feminine to the fatuous, of the
educational and professional barriers to women, and of the rigid
requirements of gender. She singles out three female writers for their
excellence: Harriet Martineau, Currer Bell, the pen name of Charlotte
Bront and Mrs. Gaskell.
George Eliot and Charlotte Bront wrote under male pseudonyms
to avoid gendered bias of their work. Mrs. Gaskell was an authorial
identity to give the legitimacy of marriage to the female writer: she wrote
about the social, political and economic issues of the day in a forthrightly
masculine way. En fact, George Eliot [Mary Ann Evans] adopted her
own pen name not just so that her work would be reviewed as rigorously
as she were a man, but also to share a name with George Henry Lewes,
the married man and prominent literary and social critic with whom she
lived.

Charlotte Bront, Jane Eyre (1847)

The novel charts the heroines development from a troubled childhood
and adolescence through her experiences as a governess to marriage. It
appropriates many traits of the genre of the Bildungsroman, in the same
literary trajectory of many other major Victorian novels such as David
Copperfield (Dickens) and The Mill on the Floss (George Eliot). It also
contains gothic and romantic aspects: it can be considered as a gothic
romance as well as a novel of development.
This novel shows a heroine that, for the first time in English literature,
rebels against her circumstances as a woman, against the limitations
imposed on her development, and this rebellious voice is full of passion
in her expression of painful frustration and lack of freedom. This
passionate voice caused a social scandal, but the novel became a bestseller. After this novel, feminine passion (a mind full of hunger, rage,
and rebellion denounced Matthew Arnold) would be possible in
literature.
On the other hand, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have influentially
posited Jane Eyre as the foundational text for understanding the influence
of patriarchal literary standards on the nineteenth-century woman writer,
arguing that the madwoman in the attic the phrase refers specifically
to mad Bertha and Janes alter ego can be seen to symbolize the woman
writer whose creative impulses cannot be only expressed. But many
critics believe that Bront draws on the rhetoric of the colonial subject
(Bertha is from the West Indies) as primitive and savage to convey
Janes conflict towards her own passions and desire either to control or to
be dominated. At the core of Janes developmental journey there is a
conflict about her own desires for passion and liberty with an equally
strong desire for service and for fitting in, for social belonging. At the
end of the novel she marries a blind man with whom she can enjoy,
besides romantic love, the feeling of being useful and needed, without
needing, as a newly wealthy woman (she gets an unexpected inheritance
from an uncle), to depend on her husband.
As in any bildungsroman (novel of development or formation), the
childs circumstances are essential in the development of his or her character. She is an
unloved orphan. From the beginning the novel shows the childs development of a
double or split self: the adaptive false self, which is submissive, meek, a self that is
necessary for the female orphans social survival in an in a social and familial
environment where she is rejected and despised, and the true self, which is angry and
rebellious: a non-adaptive hidden self.
From her earliest memories, her existence was threatened with social
banishment: the non-existence exclusion- of a dependant person: a slave, unequal,
inferior. In order to exist, to survive she has to show a self that is humble, obedient,
agreeable to them, that pleases her masters. Hence the development of a self that is
adaptive, that is, false. The development of this self causes self-alienation since

eventually the person has to deny, split off or repress a good part of her true self, of
those feelings and behaviours that are not acceptable to the childs caretakers.

John Reed, her fourteen-year-old cousin she is ten when the story starts is cruel,
abusive to her. Jane uses the word abuse several times. He is a bully: he bullied and
punished me sadistically. In her reaction to him (end of chapter one), we see for the
first time the mechanism of split.
Chapter 1 (last two pages)
John had not much affection for his mother and sisters, and an antipathy to me.
He bullied and punished me; not two or three times in the week, not once or twice in a
day, but continually: every nerve I had feared him, and every morsel of flesh on my
bones shrank when he came near. There were moments when I was bewildered by the
terror he inspired, because I had no appeal whatever against either his menaces or his
inflictions; the servants did not like to offend their young master by taking my part
against him, and Mrs Reed was blind and deaf on the subject: she never saw him strike
or heard him abuse me, though he did both now and then in her very presence; more
frequently, however, behind her back.
Habitually obedient to him, I came up to his chair : he spent some three minutes
in thrusting out his tongue at me as far as he could without damaging the roots: I knew
he would soon strike, and while dreading the blow, I mused on the disgusting and ugly
appearance of him who would presently deal it. ()
Accustomed to John Reeds abuse, I never had an idea of replying to it: my care
was how to endure the blow which would certainly follow the insult.
What were you doing behind the curtain? he asked.
I was reading.
Show the book.
I returned to the window and fetched it thence.
You have no business to take our books; you are a dependant, mamma says;
you have no money; your father left you none; you ought to beg, and not to live here
with gentlemens children like us, and eat the same meals we do, and wear clothes at our
mammas expense. Now, Ill teach you to rummage my book-shelves: for they are mine;
all the house belongs to me, or will do in a few years. Go and stand by the door, out of
the way of the mirror and the windows.
I did so, not at first aware of his intention; but when I saw him lift and poise the
book and stand in act to hurl it, I instinctively started aside with a cry of alarm: not soon
enough, however; the volume was flung, it hit me, and I fell, striking my head against
the door and cutting it. The cut bled, the pain was sharp: my terror had passed its
climax; other feelings succeeded.
Wicked and cruel boy! I said. You are like a murderer you are like a slavedriver you are like the Roman emperors!
I had read Godsmiths History of Rome, and had formed my opinion of Nero,
Caligula, &c. Also I had drawn parallels in silence, which I never thought thus to have
declared aloud.
()

I heard the words

Dear! Dear! What a fury to fly at Master John!
Did ever anybody see such a picture of passion!
Then Mrs Reed subjoined: Take her away to the red-room1 and lock her in
there. Four hands were immediately laid upon me, and I was borne upstairs.
Chapter 2 (first two pages)
I resisted all the way: a new thing for me, and a circumstance which greatly
strengthened the bad opinion Bessie and Miss Abbot were disposed to entertain of me.
The fact is, I was a trifle beside myself; or rather out of myself, as the French would say.
I was conscious that a moments mutiny had already rendered me liable to strange
penalties, and, like any other rebel slave, I felt resolved, in my desperation, to go all
lengths.
Hold her arms, Miss Abbot: shes like a mad cat.
() she and Miss Abbot stood with folded arms, looking darkly and doubtfully on my
face, as incredulous of my sanity.
She never did so before, at last said Bessie, turning o the Abigail.
But it was always in her, was the reply. Ive told missis often my opinion
about the child, and missis agreed with me. Shes an underhand little thing: I never saw
a girl her age with so much cover.
Bessie answered not; but ere long, addressing me, she said:
You ought to be aware, miss, that you are under obligations to Mrs Reed: she
keeps you: if she were to turn you off you would have to go to the poorhouse2
I had nothing to say to these words: they were not new to me: my very first
recollections of existence included hints of the same kind. This reproach of my
dependence had become a vague sing-song in my ear; very painful and crushing, by
only half intelligible. Miss Abbot joined in:
And you ought not to think yourself on an equality with the Misses Reed and
Master Reed, because missis kindly allows you to be brought up with them. They will
have a great deal of money and you will have none: it is your place to be humble, and to
try to make yourself agreeable to them.
What we tell you is for your good, added Bessie, in no harsh voice: you should
try to be useful and pleasant, then, perhaps, you would have a home here; but if you
become passionate and rude, missis will send you away, I am sure.

Chapter 12 [a governess in Thornfield Hall]

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The red-room: The terror the red-room holds is not that Uncle Reed died there, but that to the child it is
the permanent home of death obviously, since it is blood-coloured and ghastly white, striking horror
into the childs soul. The ominous (gothic) atmosphere of the red-room mirrors her self-hatred: nothing
worse than myself, all I said was wicked and perhaps I might be so, she thinks as she feels fear of
being punished by supernatural hands: her self experienced as a ghost, a phantom, haunted. In the redroom, her own ghost self as she looks at herself in the mirror leads her to be afraid of the ghost of her
uncle. As in other gothic stories by women writers, the haunted room is a metaphor for the haunted self.
The self can be experienced as a place to be occupied. And it is typical of the female gothic that the self
is felt to be occupied by a horrible ghostly presence: the monster, the freak, the deadly ghost is ones own
self - Emily Dickinsons the enemy inside.
2

A kind of prison for poor people unable to keep themselves.

The promise of a smooth career, which my first calm introduction to Thornfield Hall
seemed to pledge, was not belied on a longer acquaintance with the place and its
inmates. Mrs Fairfax turned out to be what she appeared, a placid-tempered, kindnatured woman, of competent education and average intelligence. My pupil was a lively
child, who had been spoilt and indulged, and therefore was sometimes wayward; but as
she was committed entirely to my care, and no injudicious interference from any quarter
ever thwarted my plans for her improvement, she soon forgot her little freaks, and
became obedient and teachable. ()
Anybody may blame me who likes, when I add further, that, now and then, when
I took a walk my myself in the grounds; when I went down to the gates and I looked
through them along the road; or when, while Adle played with her nurse, and Mrs
Fairfax made jellies in the storeroom, I climbed the three staircases, raised the trapdoor
of the attic, and having reached the leads, looked out afar, over sequestered field and
hill, and along dim skyline that then I longed for a power of vision which might
overpass that limit; which might reach the busy world, towns, regions full of life I had
heard of but never seen; that then I desired more of practical experience than I
possessed; more of intercourse with my kind, of acquaintance with variety of character,
than was here within my reach. I valued what was good in Mrs Fairfax, and what was
good in Adle; but I believed in the existence of other and more vivid kinds of
goodness, and what I believed in I wished to behold.
Who blames me? Many, no doubt; and I shall be called discontented. I could not
help it; the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes. Then my
sole relief was to walk along the corridor of the third story, backwards and forwards,
safe in the silence and solitude of the spot, and allow my minds eye to dwell on
whatever bright visions rose before it and, certainly, they were many and glowing; to
let my heart be heaved by the exultant movement, which, while it swelled it in trouble,
expanded it with life; and, best of all, to open my inward ear to a tale that was never
ended a tale my imagination created, and narrated continuously; quickened with all of
incident, life, fire, feeling, that I desired and had not in my actual existence.
It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must
have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a
stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows
how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which
people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as
men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as
their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation,
precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellowcreatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting
stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn
them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has
pronounced necessary for their sex.
When thus alone, I not unfrequently heard Grace Poole3s laugh4: the same peal,
the same low, slow ha! Ha! Which, when first heard, had thrilled me: I heard, too, her
eccentric murmurs; stranger than her laugh.
Chapter 15 [Jane is hopelessly in love with her master, Mr Rochester]
3
4

Bertha Mason is her real identity.

the laugh was as tragic, as preternatural a laugh as any I ever heard (chapter 11)

I, indeed, talked comparatively little, but I heard him talk with relish. It was his nature
to be communicative; he liked to open to a mind unacquainted with the world, glimpses
of its scenes and ways () and I had a keen delight in receiving the new ideas he
offered, in imagining the new pictures he portrayed, and following him in thought
through the new regions he disclosed, never startled or troubled by one noxious
allusion.
The ease of his manner freed me from painful restraint; the friendly frankness, as
correct as cordial, with which he treated me, drew me to him. I felt at times as if he were
my relation rather than my master: yet he was imperious sometimes still; but I did not
mind that; I saw it was his way. So happy, so gratified did I become with this new
interest added to life, that I ceased to pine after kindred: my thin-crescent-destiny
seemed to enlarge; the blanks of existence were filled up; my bodily health improved; I
gathered flesh and strength.
() Though I had now extinguished my candle and was laid down in bed, I could not
sleep for thinking of his look when he paused in the avenue, and told how his destiny
had risen up before him, and dared him to be happy at thornfield.
Why not? I asked myself. What alienates him from the house? Will he leave
it again soon? Mrs Fairfax said he seldom stayed here longer than a fortnight at a time;
and he has now been resident eight weeks. If he does go, the change will be doleful.
Suppose he should be absent spring, summer, and autumn: how joyless sunshine and
fine days will seem!
I hardly know whether I had slept or not after this musing; at any rate, I started
wide awake on hearing a vague murmur, peculiar and lugubrious, which sounded, I
thought, just above me. I wished I had kept my candle burning: the night was drearily
dark; my spirits were depressed. I rose and sat up in bed, listening. The sound was
hushed.
I tried again to sleep; but my heart beat anxiously: my inward tranquillity was
broken. () I was chilled with fear.
() This was a demonic laugh low, suppressed, and deep uttered, as it seemed, at
the very keyhole of my chamber door. The head of my bed was near the door, and I
thought at first the goblin-laughter stood at my bedside or rather crouched by my
pillow.
Chapter 23 [Jane decides to leave Thornfield Hall after Rochester
tells her he is getting married]
I tell you I must go! I retorted, roused to something like passion. Do you
think I can stay to become nothing to you? Do you think I am an automaton? a
machine without feelings? And can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my
lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am
poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! I have as
much soul as you and full as much heart! () I am not talking to you now through the
medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh: it is my spirit that
addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at
Gods feet, equal as we are!
() Jane, be still; dont struggle so, like a wild frantic bird that is rending its own
plumage in its desperation. () I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free
human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you.

10

George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), Middlemarch (1872)

Her work was in some ways a bridge, a transitional path between nineteenthcentury and twentieth-century literature. Her best novel, Middlemarch meant the
beginning of the modern psychological novel that Henry James would develop at the
turn of the century.
In this novel he synthesised a) the most characteristic features of Jane Austens
novels and b) some of Charlotte Bronts.
a) She used the narrative genre of the comedy of manners to criticise ironically
nineteenth-century society. Like Jane Austen, Eliot is ruthless in her portrayal of a social
class that is hypocritical and sees marriage as a question of money old money
preferably and social status. Unlike Jane Austen, Eliot adds a feminist social critique
of provincial gentlemens tastes regarding their ideal type of woman.
b) She followed Charlotte Bronts lead in the creation of heroines that are
passionate in all areas of human experience and desire, and because of that, express like
Jane Eyre their frustration and discontent, their feelings of being sequestered,
imprisoned in the very limited life and gender roles allowed to Victorian women.
c) She revised Jane Austens opposition between sense (reason) and sensibility
(passion) by creating a complex synthesis between the opposite female characters in
Jane Austens novels and between female versions of Don Quijote and Sancho Panza.
With the new female characters of Dorothea and Celia, her sister, George Eliot
questions the opposition of sisters in Jane Austens work, where she gives priority to
sense and self-control over feelings. Dorothea and Celia are both a mixture of sense and
sensibility, as most women really are. To this complex mixture of reason and passion
Eliot adds another layer of psychological complexity by adding the characteristics of
another pair of complementary opposites, the one formed by Quijote and Sancho.
Dorothea is a kind of female Quijote and her sister her Sancho Panza. Dorothea is
quixotic from the beginning to the end of her tragic story, which makes of her a tragic
heroine, more heroic than her down-to-earth realistic sister who makes no errors of
perception sees no chimeras but does not have great ideals either. The influence of
Cervantess novel regarding the construction of the pair of sisters is explicit in Eliots
novel. To represent that Dorotheas idealistic vision and Celias realistic vision
represent two female versions of Quijote and Sancho she quotes from Cervantess novel
a very significant paragraph in both Spanish and an English translation:
Dime; no ves aquel caballero que hacia nosotros viene sobre un caballo rucio
rodado que trae puesto en la cabeza un yelmo de oro? Lo que veo y columbro,
respondi Sancho, no es sino un hombre sobre un asno pardo como el mo, que trae
sobre la cabeza una cosa que relumbra. Pues ese es el yelmo de Mambrino, dijo Don
Quijote. CERVANTES
Dorotheas tragic error of perception is to mistake old Causabon, the man shell
marry, for a wise man.
In the prelude, Eliot explains Dorotheas type of quixotic tragedy as that of the
Spanish Santa Teresa had she been born at a time when cultural conditions would allow
women no Mission or epic life.

11

d) Eliot constructs a female character, Rosy, that represents the Victorian ideal of
femininity The Angel in the House only to deconstruct it or demystify it as only a
false myth. The concept of femininity as masquerade, first defined in the late 1920s
by the British psychoanalyst Joan Rivire - concept which became central in the gender
theory developed in the 1970s and 1980s - is present in the construction of Rosy,
whose femininity is characterized as an act of pretence, as theatrical self-presentation
not as the eternal (essential) feminine. As in the story The Lifted Veil, Eliot shows
that behind the myth of an enigmatic and seductive femininity there is no mysterious
essence, only a masculine dream.
Eliot, like many other great literary writers Shakespeare, Blake, Virginia Woolf
among others was a visionary. In this novel she warns the reader that historical
change would unmask the type of femininity represented by Rosy, and that her
opposite in many ways, Dorothea, would become the New Woman.
Therefore Dorothea represents the tragic destiny of ambitious women in the
nineteenth-century, but also she embodies the beginning of another type of feminine
ideal relatively free and independent, educated, participating in the public realm of
action that would start just after George Eliots death (1880).

12

PRELUDE
WHO that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture
behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the
life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl
walking forth one morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek
martyrdom in the country of the Moors? () That child-pilgrimage was a fit beginning.
Theresas passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life: what were many-volumed
romances of chivalry and the social conquests of a brilliant girl to her? Her flame
quickly burned up that light fuel; and, fed from within, soared after some illimitable
satisfaction, some object which would never justify weariness, which would reconcile
self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self. She found her epos in
the reform of a religious order.
That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago was certainly not the
last of her kind. Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life
wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of
mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of
opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into
oblivion. With dim lights and tangled circumstance they tried to shape their thought and
deed in noble agreement; but after all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere
inconsistency and formlessness; for these later-born Theresas ere helped by no coherent
social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently
willing soul. Their ardour alternated between a vague ideal and the common yearning of
womanhood; so that the one was disapproved as extravagant, and the other condemned
as a lapse.
() Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving
heart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among
hindrances, instead of centering in some long-recognizable deed.
Chapter III
For a long while she had been oppressed by the indefiniteness which hung in her mind,
like a thick summer haze, over all her desire to make her life greatly effective. What
could she do, what ought she to do? she, hardly more than a budding woman, but yet
with an active conscience and a great mental need, not to be satisfied by a girlish
instruction comparable to the nibblings and judgments of a discursive mouse. With
some endowment of stupidity and conceit, she might have thought that a Christian
young lady of fortune should find her ideal of life in village charities, patronage of the
humbler clergy, the perusal of Female Scripture Characters, and the care of her
soul over her embroidery in her own boudoir with a background of prospective
marriage to a man who, if less strict than herself, as being involved in affairs religiously
inexplicable, might be prayed for and seasonably exhorted. From such contentment poor
Dorothea was shut out. The intensity of her religious disposition, the coercion it
exercised over her life, was but one aspect of a nature altogether ardent, theoretic, and
intellectually consequent: and with such a nature, struggling in the bands of a narrow
teaching, hemmed in by a social life which seemed nothing but a labyrinth of petty
courses, a walled-in maze of small paths that led no whither, the outcome was sure to
strike others as at once exaggeration and inconsistency.

13

Chapter X
A fine woman, Miss Brooke! An uncommonly fine woman, by God! said Mr.
Standish, the old lawyer, who had been so long concerned with the landed gentry that he
had become landed himself, and used that oath in a deep-mouthed manner as a sort of
armorial bearings, stamping the speech of a man who held a good position.
Mr. Bulstrode, the banker, seemed to be addressed, but that gentleman disliked
coarseness and profanity, and merely bowed. The remark was taken up by Mr. Chichely,
a middle-aged bachelor and coursing celebrity, who had a complexion something like an
Easter egg, a few hairs carefully arranged, and a carriage implying the consciousness of
a distinguished appearance.
Yes, but not my style of woman: I like a woman who lays herself out a little
more to please us. There should be a little filigree about a woman something of the
coquette. A man likes a sort of challenge. The more of a dead set she makes at you the
better.
Theres some truth in that, said Mr. Standish, disposed to be genial. And, by
God, its usually the way with them. I suppose it answers some wise ends: Providence
made them so, eh, Bulstrode?
I should be disposed to refer coquetry to another source, said Mr. Bulstrode. I
should refer it to the devil.
Ay, to be sure, there should be a little devil in a woman, said Mr. Chichely,
whose study of the fair sex seemed to have been detrimental to his theology. And I like
blond, with a certain gait, and a swan neck. Between ourselves, the mayors daughter is
more to my taste than Miss Brooke or Miss Celia either. If I were a marrying man I
should choose Miss Vincy before either of them.
Well, make up, make up, said Mr. Standish, jocosely; you see the middleaged fellows carry the day.
Mr. Chichely shook his head with much meaning: he was not going to incur the
certainty of being accepted by the woman he would choose.
The Miss Vincy who had the honour of being Mr. Chichelys ideal was of course
not present; for Mr. Brooke, always objecting to go too far, would not have chosen that
his nieces should meet the daughter of a Middlemarch manufacturer, unless it were on a
public occasion.
Chapter XI
Lydgate, in fact, was conscious of being fascinated by a woman [Rosy]
strikingly different from Miss Brooke [Dorothea]: he did not in the least suppose that he
had lost his balance and fallen in love, but he had said of that particular woman, She is
grace itself; she is perfectly lovely and accomplished. That is what a woman ought to
be: she ought to produce the effect of exquisite music. () To his taste, guided by a
single conversation, here was the point on which Miss Brooke would be found wanting,
notwithstanding her undeniable beauty. She did not look at things from the proper
feminine angle. The society of such women was about as relaxing as going from your
work to teach the second form, instead of reclining in a paradise with sweet laughs for
bird-notes, and blue eyes for a heaven.
Certainly nothing at present could seem much less important to Lydgate than the
turn of Miss Brookes mind, or to Miss Brooke than the qualities of the woman who had
attracted this young surgeon. But any one watching keenly the stealthy convergence of

14

human lots, sees a slow preparation of effects from one life to another () Destiny
stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personae folded in her hand.
Old provincial society had its share of this subtle movement: had not only its
striking downfalls, its brilliant young professional dandies who ended by living up an
entry with a drab and six children for their establishment, but also those less marked
vicissitudes which are constantly shifting the boundaries of social intercourse, and
begetting new consciousness of interdependence. () In fact, much the same sort of
movement and mixture went on in old England as we find in older Herodotus, who also,
in telling what had been, thought it well to take a womans lot for his starting-point;
THE END (a conclusion)
Sir James never ceased to regard Dorotheas second marriage as a mistake; and
indeed this remained the tradition concerning it in Middlemarch, where she was spoken
of to a younger generation as a fine girl who married a sickly clergyman, old enough to
be her father, and in little more than a year after his death gave up her estate o marry his
cousin young enough to have been his son, with no property, and not well-born. Those
who had not seen anything of Dorothea usually observed that she could not have been
a nice woman, else she would not have married either the one or the other.
Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were
the mixed result of young and noble impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an
imperfect social sate, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and
great faith the aspect of illusion. For there is no creature whose inward being is so
strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it5. A new Theresa will
hardly have the opportunity of reforming a conventual life, any more than a new
Antigone will spend her heroic piety in daring all for the sake of a brothers burial: the
medium in which their ardent deeds took shape is for ever gone. But we insignificant
people with our daily words and acts are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas, some
of which may present a far sadder sacrifice than that of the Dorothea whose story we
know.
Her finely-touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely
visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in
channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those
around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly
dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they
might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and
rest in unvisited tombs.

The personal is political

15

CHARLES DICKENS: 1812-1870

Critical distance and simplicity.
When he died, the Daily News wrote,
He was emphatically the novelist of his age. In his pictures of
contemporary life posterity will read, more clearly than in contemporary
records, the character of nineteenth century life.
Dickens was the best observer and chronicler of his age and also its most
ferocious and influential critic. Peter Ackroyd, his best biographer, notes,
And yet, if he was the chronicler of his age, he also stood apart
from it; he was always in some sense the solitary observer, one who
looked upon the customs of his time as an anthropologist might look
upon the habits of a particularly savage tribe. And there is no more direct
evidence for this than in his own will, read now as he lay in his coffin.
I emphatically direct that I be buried in an inexpensive,
unostentatious and strictly private manner that those who attend my
funeral wear no scarf, cloak, black bow, long hat-band, or other such
revolting absurdity I conjure my friends on no account to make me
the subject of any monument, memorial or testimonial whatever. I rest
my claims to the remembrance of my country upon my published works

But a compromise was reached between Dickenss family and what

might be called the interests of the nation; he was to be buried in
Westminster Abbey, after all, but with a completely private service. He
had once said, the more truly great the man, the more truly little the
ceremony , thus emphasizing that simplicity which was an essential
part of the man.
His grave at Westminster Abbey was left open for two days. At the end of
the first day, there were still one thousand people outside waiting to pay
their respects. So for those two days the crowds of people passed by in
procession, many of them dropping flowers onto his coffin among
which, his son said, were afterwards found several small rough
bouquets of flowers tied up with pieces of rag.
There, in the ragged bundles of flowers, no doubt picked from the
hedgerows and fields, we see the source and emblem of Charles
Dickenss authority. Even to the labouring men and women there was in
his death a grievous sense of loss; they felt he had in large measure
understood them and that, in his death, they had also lost something of
themselves. It is often said that the great Russian novelists of the
nineteenth century capture the soul of the Russian people with their
fervour, their piety, and their wonderful tenderness; but can we not say
that Dickens captured the soul of the English people, as much in its
brooding melancholy as in its broad humour, in its poetry as well as its
fearlessness, in its capacity for outrage and pity as much as in its
tendency towards irony and diffidence? And can we not see something
of the national outline [of identity] in Charles Dickenss brisk, anxious
stride across the face of the world a man of so much assurance and of

16

so much doubt, of so much energy and so much turmoil? It might be said,

in fact, that it was his peculiar genius to represent, to bring together, more
aspects of the national character than any other writer of his century. As a
man he was sharp, exuberant, prone to melancholy and a prey to anxiety;
as a writer he was filled with the same contrasts, so concerned with the
material world and yet at the same time haunted by visions of
transcendence. The evidence for that divide is to be gathered throughout
his work. In the nineteenth-century Russian novelists, the material and
the spiritual are in a certain sense interfused; and in the French novelists
of the nineteenth century it is the very genius of the material world to
have no transcendental echoes: it remains splendidly itself. But, in the
work of Charles Dickens, the real and the unreal, the material and the
spiritual, the specific and the imagined, the mundane and the
transcendental, exist in uneasy relation and are to be contained only
within the power of the created word. The power of Charles Dickens.
To all Victorians, then, the death of Dickens came as the evidence
of a giant transition; in these last decades of the nineteenth century, the
English people were witnesses to the fatal disruptions of an old order and
the unsteady beginnings of a new. When they buried him, and
surrounded his grave with roses and other flowers, they were registering
in symbolic sense the end of an age of which he was the single most
visible representative; more so than Palmerston, now dead, more so than
Gladstone, and more so than the Queen herself who had not, like
Dickens, seen all the transitions of the century. He had more than seen
them; he had felt them, had experienced them, had declared them in his
fictions. From a distance, then, he embodied the period from which he
sprang; it was his particular genius to turn his life itself into an
emblem of that period instinctively, almost blindly, to dramatise it.

Childhood: adultist child

His childhood was very hard; in fact, there was hardly any childhood for
him: he had to grow up in a hurry so as to look after his family as an
adult would.
His father was not at all responsible. Ackroyd writes about him:
He was always short of money, always spending money, always
borrowing money. This improvidence and recklessness there is a sort
of emptiness, an infantilism, a refusal to confront himself. This is no
more than in a million other men: it comes to our notice only because it
was noticed and recorded by his son. How long he is, Dickens once
complained, growing up to be a man. And we recall in Dickens fiction
how universal it is that the child looks after the adult, and how the
adult remains so dependent upon the child that he becomes something
worse than merely child-like.
This type of childhood trauma/loss/deprivation - the child deprived of
the spirit of childhood because he fulfils grown-up functions
appears well represented in his work, particularly in his most

17

autobiographical work, David Copperfield. In Hard Times children

arent allowed to have a childhood either the spirit of childhood is
absent. Louisa complains about the fact that she had no childhood, she
was never treated as a child with a childs needs.
When Dickens was ten years old, his family settled in London. Then he
was not allowed to go to school and was forced to work in a factory.
From his many childhood woes, Dickens emphasizes this deprivation:
loss of education. The theme of education is central in Hard Times . The
reform of the Victorian educational system, based on cramming, was in
fact his most important concern as a social reformer. He also tried to
make Victorian parents aware of those aspects of the bringing-up of their
children that were negative regarding the healthy development of
children. Great Expectations, from the same period as Hard Times, is a
novel of development or formation a bildungsroman and one of the
two main plots in Hard Times is also a plot of development, or rather, of
unhealthy development, through which he criticizes the Victorian system
of education and bringing up children.
The good uses of memory: the childs look.
As Ackroyd points out, his childhood came suddenly to an end, but it
was not really gone; it had ended so of such considerations [his childhood
hells or traumas] that even now, famous and caressed and happy, I
often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children; even that I
am a man; and wander desolately back to that time of my life.
But, the good side of trauma is that, by freezing the look of the child who
never was a proper child, it allows the development of the childs look
in the world of fantasy, of creativity. Dickens used his frozen childs look
to create a fictional world full of characters seen through a childs
imaginative and full-of-wonder eyes.
Besides, he preserved in his traumatic memory all the concrete details
of the children without childhood, the exploited and fully deprived
(materially, emotionally, educationally) children in Victorian England.
All the splendid children protagonists of his best fiction from the first,
Oliver Twist, to the last, Pip are adultist children. Orphans, who
represent his neglected childhood. Although Dickens had biological
parents, he lacked proper parenting (neglect), and he always felt an
orphan.
Traumatic memories cannot disappear from the mind, for they are
recorded in the brain in a way that differs from ordinary memory. They
may be repressed in the unconscious but they are still there, doing
their work. Dickens did not want or could not repress his traumatic
memories. He put them to very good use instead to represent the drama
of most children at the time, their tragic deprivation and also their
extraordinary capacity for resilience. If Hamlet shows the thousand
natural shocks, Pip shows a thousand natural and healing influences.
Ackroyd notes that The Haunted Man and the Ghosts Bargain is
concerned with the power of memory The theme itself revolves
around Dickenss belief that memory is a softening and chastening

18

power, that the recollection of old sufferings and old wrongs can be used
to touch the heart and elicit sympathy with the sufferings of others. In his
autobiographical fragment he had written of his parents neglect only to
add that I do not write resentfully or angrily: for I know all these things
have worked together to make me what I am Now, in the last words
of this Christmas Book he was writing, he put it another way: Lord,
keep my memory green For it was his sufferings and the memory of
his sufferings which just as his recollection of those harder days inspired
him with that pity for the poor and the dispossessed which was a mark
of his social writings. (although in fact it seems that his forgiveness of
his real parents was only partial at the best of times).
If he could write so movingly, so precisely, about child neglect, it was
because he never forgot his childhood. Those memories were part of his
force as a writer.
The prison and the convict: central imagery in Dickenss work.
His father was incarcerated in Marshalsea Prison as an insolvent debtor.
The insolvent debtor at the time was classed as a quasi-criminal and kept
in prison until he could pay or could claim release under the Insolvent
Debtors Act. It often happened that such a prisoner remained indefinitely
within the prison.
Marshalsea was the place and the area which haunted (as traumas
do) Dickens throughout his life. In his autobiographical fragment he
could recall scenes and details as clearly as if they had happened just the
day before, which is typical of traumatic memory.
When he visited his father, he watched and noted everything, and
in that slow agony of my youth, he made up stories for the wretched
people there.
Ackroyd writes: there are times when within his fiction the
whole world itself is described as a type of prison and all of its
inhabitants prisoners; the houses of his characters are often described as
prisons [also middle-class houses, as in Hard Times], and the shadows
of confinement and punishment and guilt [Pips] stretch over his pages.
Not only guilt, but also shame the humiliation of having a father who is
a convict [Pips] is a central feeling recurrent in Dickenss fiction. Guilt
and shame are the main traumatic feelings of victims. Other
characteristics of the effects of trauma that are also represented in
Dickenss fiction are the extraordinary reserve and secrecy of the boy
[Dickens as a boy], just like the child Pip in Great Expectations who
feels everything and says nothing. So he [the child Dickens] suffered,
but he suffered in secret; never once did he complain to his working
companions, or even to his parents. This repression of his feelings,
his silence, will be seen to be characteristic of the mature Dickens
never wanting to show himself as he truly was, to express how he truly
felt, is a remarkable characteristic of the man who in his fiction seems so
open to all the sentiments of the world.
But then, the repression of feelings was a typical feature of the Victorian
mind, best represented symbolically by the split Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
This reserve, this repression of feelings, characterizes Louisas alienated
self in Hard Times.

19

Portrait of a traumatized child:

Throughout the novels we are left with the image of the child who still
dwells somewhere within. Insecure. Maltreated. Starved. Frail. Sickly.
Oppressed. Guilty and ashamed. Small. Often, orphaned. Of course there
are healthy children to be found in his pages but, like the schoolchildren
in the Old Curiosity Shop, they are merely players. His children are
somehow separated from the world, forced to keep their distance. Has
my dream come true? exclaimed the child again, in a voice so fervent
that it might have thrilled to the heart of any listener. But no, that can
never be. How could it be Oh! How could it!.
The middle-class children in Hard Times are also deprived. Their
trauma is not spectacular; it is insidious: the trauma of emotional
deprivation, linked to the suppression of imaginative play, to the tragic
lack of development of their imagination.
Revolutionary representation of the resilient developmental path of a
deprived and abused child: Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Great
Expectations.
Oliver Twist is the first novel in the English language which takes a
child as its central character or hero; a revolution, perhaps.
As soon as Dickens began writing it he realized that he had hit on a
capital notion. For he had created the figure of Oliver, the child brought
up in a workhouse, but who dared to ask for more than was his lot, and at
once he saw the possibilities that could be extracted from it.
The capital notion is not just that of the deprived and abused child, but of
the resilient child who somehow manages to develop healthily enough,
even if traumatically deviated from the usual paths of normal
development. Louisa in Hard Times can also be viewed as an example of
resilient development despite her insidious trauma of emotional
deprivation.
A COMIC WRITER, The funniest in English ever. Use of humour
particularly the satiric parody as a critical weapon.
Dickens showed the real world to the middle-class raising their
consciousness of themselves and of the working class, of their virtues and
of their problems. He was highly critical sometimes ferociously critical
of many aspects of middle class life style, personality mostly the
famous Victorian hypocrisy and even ways of raising children for as
a social reformer he was mostly concerned about the healthy
development of children, and therefore about education at school and the
ways of bringing up children at home. But he could be successful
despite his, at times, radical criticism of the middle class manners,
ideology, etc., because he was so hilariously funny, so seductively funny.
Ackroyd: he saw comedy everywhere the novelist of a thousand
moods, is also primarily and overwhelmingly the greatest comic writer in

20

the English language. Dickenss high spirits and his theatrical

comedy existed as much in his own life as they did in his fiction, and if
there is one constant memory of him among his friends and
contemporaries it was precisely this quality of humour; he had and
inimitably funny way, one remarked. His own son noted that, of all
the men he knew, Charles Dickens was the quickest to see the ludicrous
aspect of any situation. Misplaced gravity especially amused him.
Funerals often provoked hilarity in Dickens.
His laughter overpowered all the conventions. It was an instinctive
force that drove him to rebel against everything that was not authentic, all
the tragic errors of men and women that stopped the world from being a
better place, particularly for children.
Nothing sacred for his sense of humour:
Ackroyd says that Dickens was a man who could not take anything
absolutely seriously for very long; often in the middle of scenes of
distress and poverty in the worst rookeries of London, for example,
something would strike him as irresistibly comic. Nothing was
excluded from the range of his humour, whether it took a farcical or
satirical turn.
His work as a social reformer and his laughter go hand in hand, for his
anarchic, liberating and sometimes harsh laughter was his best weapon
against injustice and lies. Virginia Woolf observed in Three Guineas
that laughter is actually the best weapon against injustice and the lies that
try to disguise it.

21