Culture Under Pressure

THIS VOLUME in the Introductions to British Literature and Culture series surveys the historical, cultural, political, economic, philosophical, religious, and literary background to Victoria's reign. Key terms are explained, further readings provided, critical approaches outlined. Victorian Literature and Culture is indispensable not only "to orientate students as they begin a new module or area of study" (as stated on the back cover), but to guide teachers in preparing a Victorian Studies course.

Maureen Moran has condensed the mindset, upheavals, and accomplishments of Victorian England into a readable and insightful handbook, beginning with the intellectual context of an era rife with contradictions. This was a society given to self-righteousness and doubt, to high seriousness and maudlin sentimentality. There was the "mixed experience of imperialism—optimism and opportunity on the one hand, brutality and conflict on the other." There was Ruskin's view of artworks as purveyors of cultural and moral values, as well as Pater's assertion of the primacy of form (art for art's sake) over matter. Influences on the era were equally diverse: from the emotive language of Romanticism to French Naturalism and Symbolism; Auguste Comte's Positivism and Jeremy Bentham's Utilitarianism; and of course Christianity, "the most powerful cultural presence in the Victorian milieu," in particular an Anglicanism (the established state church) that allowed the middle class to legitimize its moral influence. "Emphasis on the fallen nature of humanity etched introspection and guilt on the Victorian personality," writes Moran, one of many terse comments that effectively encapsulate the era's intellectual climate. On the other hand—another contradiction—Charles Lyell (Principles of Geology, 1830–1831) and Darwin (The Origin of Species, 1859) eroded faith in God and set science against religion (which Matthew Arnold replaced with high culture, a bulwark against middle-class philistinism).

The result of these doubts is that from the 1860s onwards, novel plots began to reflect a new determinism. Earlier, they had also begun to reflect the Woman Question, which became a pervasive social and literary phenomenon. Although Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies (1865) lectures and Coventry Patmore's poetic sequence The Angel in the House (1854–1861) helped fix social expectations of women as destined for domesticity, J. S. Mill's On Liberty (1859) and The Subjection of Women (1869) helped women question imposed gender ideologies. The ensuing New Woman fiction signaled women's aspirations toward economic, sexual, and educational empowerment.

Industrialization created its share of contradictions. An affluent minority coexisted with a populace living in squalid conditions and toiling in sweatshops and factories, one writer in 1849 calling the poor "a pestiferous moral exhalation dangerous to all other classes of society." The dichotomy was famously summed up in Disraeli's phrase "the two nations" (in Sybil, 1845). Yet there was enormous progress: the impact of railways was pervasive; one invention followed another: telegraph, telephone, street lighting, photography; new disciplines emerged and existing ones refined: philology, sociology, archeology, and comparative mythology. And yet Victorian England was a market-driven urban society where "the financial clout of the middle class meant that the bourgeois outlook increasingly determined social and moral policies."

The multifarious nature of Victorian society is mirrored in its literature (the book's second section). Poetry was "consistently viewed as an art form with profound significance," with lyric poetry "expressing nostalgia for lost happiness and meditating on flux as the essential quality of the modern human condition." Styles and moods ranged from Alfred Tennyson's melancholia and the emotionalism of Swinburne, who "positively cultivated a reputation for offensiveness, with blasphemous attacks on Christianity and Victorian sexual orthodoxy," to the technical virtuosity of G. M. Hopkins, Browning's ambiguous dramatic monologues, the narrative poetry of Christina Rossetti, and the long poems of William Morris.

Fiction, readily available through cheap books and lending libraries such as Mudie's, had an even greater appeal because it often dealt with "the social milieu and the reality of the individual consciousness." Serial publication was very influential, as it "shaped how writers wrote, as much as what they wrote" (Dickens...