Studies in Early Victorian Literature

Studies in Early Victorian
Literature, by

Frederic Harrison
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Title: Studies in Early Victorian Literature
Author: Frederic Harrison

Release Date: May 12, 2006 [eBook #18384]
Language: English
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***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STUDIES IN
EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE***
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STUDIES IN EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE

by
FREDERIC HARRISON

Edward Arnold London ------ New York 37 Bedford Street ------ 70
Fifth 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 re-written, 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. The work of
living authors has not been touched upon, nor any book of poetry,
philosophy, or science.

CONTENTS
I. CHARACTERISTICS OF VICTORIAN LITERATURE II.
THOMAS CARLYLE III. LORD MACAULAY IV. BENJAMIN
DISRAELI V. WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY VI.
CHARLES DICKENS VII. CHARLOTTE BRONTË VIII. CHARLES
KINGSLEY IX. ANTHONY TROLLOPE X. 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 civilisation. 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 epochs 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 names second only to the
greatest; its researches into nature and history are at least equal to those
of any previous epoch; 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 colours 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 labelled, 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 colour 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 dead or silent. Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge,
Lamb, Sheridan, Hazlitt, Mackintosh, Crabbe, and Cobbett, were gone.
There were still living in 1837, Wordsworth, Southey, Campbell,
Moore, Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, De Quincey, Miss Edgeworth, Miss
Mitford, Leigh Hunt, Brougham, Samuel Rogers:--living, it is true, but
they had all produced their important work at some earlier date. Carlyle,

Dickens, Thackeray, Macaulay, Tennyson, Browning, had begun to
write, but were not generally known. The principal English authors
who belong equally to the Georgian and to the Victorian Age are
Landor, Bulwer, Disraeli, Hallam, and Milman, and they are not quite
in the very first rank in either age. It is a significant fact that the reign
of the Queen has produced, with trifling exceptions, the whole work of
Tennyson, the Brownings, Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontës, George
Eliot, Kingsley, Trollope, Spencer, Mill, Darwin, Ruskin, Grote,
Macaulay, Freeman,