How to represent Victorian worlds in literature

As regards the narrative masterpieces written in this period one could refer to such works as: Great Expectations, Vanity Fair, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, The Ambassadors, Lord Jim and so on.

We may ask ourselves why this unprecedented flourishing of the novel? Probably, the answer engages two directions. On the one hand, it is the Victorian society itself that confronts us – for the first time in the European history - with an industrialized system.

It is well known that industrialization brought about the development of the novel (a literary genre closely related to the transformations of societies) everywhere in the world. On the other hand, we can see in the flourishing of the epic a cultural reaction to the remarkable development of poetry during the romantic age.

Unconsciously, English writers experimented – avant la lettre, of course – Harold Bloom’s anxiety of influence (a concept that may be translated critically – according to Bloom himself in his famous book The Anxiety of Influence – as the fear of not imitating critically the achievements of the previous generation of writers ), feeling somehow that poetry was worn out by the genius of the Romantics.

Anyway, it is a fact that the Victorian novel develops exceptionally, marking one of the most productive moments in the history of British literature.The Victorian age as such unveils particularities in comparison to other previous moments in the evolution of the English society.

It is now, in the 19th century, that we witness the manifestation of industrialization, England being the first industrialized country in the world. Basically, industrialization refers to the substitution of man by the machine in the economic process and the mass production of consumption goods.

Yet, from a more complex perspective, industrialization represents the engine of the capitalist society and the premise of a long series of social, cultural, economic and psychological transformations of the human community. We shall take these transformations step by step:

I.The historical effect of industrialization. The traditional English society can be imagined in the form of a pyramid which concentrates its absolute power at the top in the symbolic persona of the king or the queen. The dominant class within this pyramid is aristocracy. At this upper level of the system authority is inherited and not conquered by personal merits.

The king represents God on earth (from the teaching of the Old Testament where we learn that God approves at one point on the suggestion that people should be led by kings and no longer by judges and priests) and his unnatural, violent elimination from the top may push the whole pyramid into chaos (examples of such situations appear in different Shakesperean tragedies, where kings are killed and substituted by impostors; this happens in Hamlet and Macbeth, where Claudius and Macbeth replace violently their monarchs and eventually bring disaster into the social and political order of their countries.)