Assignment

Paper no 6 (Victorian age)

Topic: write note on major Victorian novelist.

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•                          Introduction:

In Victorian era we have many Novelists. They all are very famous for their creation. Here i’m select some of them for my topic like..

• ·        Charles Dickens
• ·        Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell
• ·        Bronte sisters (Charlotte, Emily, and Anne)
• ·        George Eliot

Now i would like to give some detail about them.

v Charles dickens:

Charles dickens (1812-70) is an central to the Victorian novel as Tennyson is to Victorian poetry. Dickens's struggling, unhappy childhood, as the son of poor, debt-ridden dock clerk , brought him into contact with debtors prisons and forced him into work in a blacking factory at the age of twelve. By perseverance he became office boy, journalist and finally original contributor to periodicals. His satirical “sketches by Boz” proved popular and the Pickwick Papers, following hard offer, made his name. In the journey of a novelist it is said that he had to undergo two most traumatic events. The humiliation of the blacking factory and the disgrace of the marshalsea debtor’s prison. The sickening shame of both seeped to depths of his writing and haunting him for the rest of his days.

The Pickwick paper was a great success. Dickens fame was secure. He lived to enjoy a reputation that was unexampled, surpassing even that of scott. His popularity was exploited in journalism, for he edited ‘the daily news’ and founded ‘household words’ and ‘all the year round’. He also commenced his famous series of public readings that brought him much money. He died in his favourite house, god’s hill place.

After earning a lot name and fame dickens had been offered an opportunity to stand for parliament but although he cared desperately about social reform, he had no political axes to grind. His constituency was the whole world, his policy the dignity of human beings. He abhorred the impersonal machinery of a state fuelled by the evil power of wealth, and in his writing he championed the cause of its victims who were defenseless, dehumanized, degraded, demoralized and deflated-victims powerless to help themselves.

Dickens’s exceptional sensitivity expressed itself through his characters who were based on real people and much of his own vitality and experience flowed through their veins. In many powerful passages he exposed the exploiters and dyrants for the impostors they were ridiculing the pompous, deride the insensitive and creating caricatures of all those who had ceased to be human. He promoted the underprivileged whom society had cast aside, eliciting a sympathetic response from his readers and communicating warmth and kindness to those he supported.

Dickens has written wonderful novels and he has enriched the Victorian novel. Apart from his Pickwick papers, he has to his credit few works, they are:

• ·        Oliver twist,
• ·        Nicholas
• ·        master Humphrey’s clock
• ·        the old curiosity shop
• ·        A Christmas carol
• ·        David Copperfield
• ·        black house
• ·        hard times
• ·        a tale of two cities
• ·        Great expectations etc....

His style is neither polished nor scholarly, but it is clear, rapid and workman like the style of the working journalist. As W. J. Long states,,

“dickens is excellent reading, and his novels will continue to be popular just so long as men enjoy a wholesome and absorbing story”.

    George Eliot:

                              Introduction:

      

      George Eliot was one of the greatest novelists of the Victorian age. She stood at the gateway between the old novel the new, no unworthy heir of Thackeray and dickens and no unworthy forerunner of hardy and Henry James. She was essentially a novelist of intellectual life and her psychological insight into the motives of her characters was deep and profound. Like Meredith she intellectualised the novel and gave in a moral fore our and ethical bias, which it had not yet possessed in the hands of dickens and ohackeray. She made notable contribution to the English novel by giving it an air of sobriety, sternness and which it had not attained in the hands of the early Victorian novelists.

George Eliot as a modern novelist:

George Eliot is known as a modern novelist in spite of living in Victorian Age. She wrote in the fashion contrary to that of her contemporaries, Dickens, Thackeray, etc. She is not completely divorced from the traditions. She draws her picture in the Victorian style, but she develops it in a new direction.
 

    The Victorians, on the whole, were instructive and they wrote what they wanted to write. Eliot, on the other hand, was an intellectual and she wrote what she should have written. She is known as the first intellectual novelist. Her novels are the embodiment of her ideas. The main charm of the Victorians lies in the individual expression, whereas, in Eliot, our interest is kept up in the way she analyses and diagnoses problems. Eliot rejects dogma and wants to analyze the causes of every problem she comes across.
    

Her scenes are more real than those of the Victorians because her realism is not only documentary but also psychological. To other novelists, realism is an intellectual necessity but in her case, it is a creed and emotion rather ambition which follows avidly. Her picture is more realistic owing to her clear perception of realities. She draws her characters inside out.
    

The Victorians were satisfied with the apparent realities whereas Eliot penetrated deep into the phenomenon and brought to light the hidden causes. 
     The Victorians, too, were satirist but they satirize just to create humor so they were ordinary humorist, whereas, Eliot satirized as a serious thinker. Her humor was of a distinct type i.e. intellectual and psychological humor soaked into deep pathos. She fused together comic irony and mild satire to create humor and her end was to moralize. Her humour had a serious message underlying it. This kind of humor is employed by the modern novelists. 
    

Other Victorians did have a moral touch but, in Eliot, we find moral earnestness. Like Fielding, she wrote to inculcate moral in the people. But her concept of morality was quite different from that of Fielding’s. She reshapes the consciousness of the individuals in order to remold the whole structure of the society. She believes in the presence of the moral code at the heart of the universe. She made novels the embodiment of her moral ideas. In “The Mil on the Floss”, she denounces the dominance of the self recklessness, loose-living etc and emphasizes on the absoluteness of duty, endurance, renunciation etc. her concept of morality is based on human values and the laws of human heart.
    

Her psychological approach also makes her modern. The clear sighted vision of the essential of character gives her a definite edge over the Victorians like Bronte, Dickens, Austen, etc. The grasp on the psychological essentials makes her draw complex characters better than the Victorians, because she draws them inside out.
   

  The insight into human nature makes Eliot’s picture of human nature more homogeneous than that of Dickens, etc. She shows that saints and sinners are made of the same clay; however, the latter lack the necessary strength of mind. She has ardent sincerity which compensates for many of the feelings of her aesthetic judgment.
    

 Eliot is reveler of the self. Characters like Maggie are the self-portraiture's of Eliot. She unveils herself through her female characters. Eliot broke away from the fundamental conventions of form and matter. She rejected the standardized formula. She conceived one idea and its logical development.

     She is modern in inspiration, too. Earlier, novel was meant only for the entertainment of the middle class reading public. Eliot’s intellectual approach made novel a ‘meeting place of problems’. She studied Man in relation to higher aspects of life. Eliot was the first novelist to discover this particular track on which the modern novelists are treading today. Though Eliot lived in the Victorian era yet she is modern novelist since she wrote in the modern fashion. But she cannot be called ‘Victo-modern’. Eliot, in contrast, is exclusively orthodox and Victorian in her ideas and modern in her approach. She can also be differentiated from Hardy in the sense that he is peculiarly Victoria in his style and approach and modern in his ideas. To be curt, Eliot is a modern novelist living among st the Victorians

v Three Bronte sisters:

• ·        Charlotte Bronte
• ·        Emily Bronte
• ·        Anne Bronte

§                Charlotte Bronte:

she broke a new ground in the history of the English novel. The novelist following the example of Jane Austen had chosen to portray the manners and ways of social life. Hitherto the novelists had undergone no revolution of mind or soul. They were still faithful to the 18^th century, still engrossed by the outward spectacle, fascinated by life’s multitudinous variety, exhilarated by its humors if not unendurable touched by its pathos, but as yet unaware to the call of the deeper imagination.

She replaced the literature and the novel of manners by the novel of spirit and the inner life of the soul.

“ A literature of manners was to give place to a literature of the spirit”, says baker, in the novels of Charlotte Bronte.

In her novels the soul was at last awake to its own existence and its relations to a complex and perhaps inscrutable universe. She looked into her heart and wrote of thing she had intimately known. “At any rate, her significance in the course of action is that she delineated the intense moods of her own heart and imagination, which have their rapport in the moods of the race.

v List of novels by Charlotte Bronte:

• §  Jane Eyre
• §  Shirley
• §  Vilette
• §  The professor

v List of novels by Emily Bronte:

• §  Wuthering Heights(1847)

v List of novels by Anne Bronte:

• §  Agnes Grey (1847)
• §  The tenant of wild fell hall (1848)

     this is something about theme i hope it will be helpful to batter understanding.

                                       

                                                                   Thank You....