On a Darkling Plain: Victorian Poetry and Thought

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This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

© 2009 James Haydock. All rights reserved.

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First published by AuthorHouse 4/28/2009

ISBN: 978-1-4343-4369-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4678-6160-1 (e)

And we are here as on a darkling plain,

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

— Matthew Arnold

Contents

1 Viewing the Victorians

2 Aspects of Victorian Poetry

3 Alfred Tennyson

4 Robert Browning

5 Elizabeth Browning and Others

6 Christina Rossetti and Others

7 Matthew Arnold

8 Dante Gabriel Rossetti

9 Coventry Patmore and Others

10 Rudyard Kipling and Others

11 George Meredith

12 William Morris

13 Algernon Swinburne

14 Thomas Hardy

15 Gerard Manley Hopkins

16 William Butler Yeats

17 Victorian Poetry in Review

18 Prose, Fiction, Drama

19 Index of Titles

20 Index of Authors

1 Viewing the Victorians

The historical period we refer to as The Age of Victoria has many other names. It has been called by writers and thinkers – viewing it from different angles –

The Age of Reform

The Age of Compromise

The Age of Industry and Science

The Age of Change and Adjustment

The Age of Paradox

The Age of Progress

The Age of Transition

All these are applicable to the era, but a more accurate and inclusive term, the Victorian Period, is perhaps the best label. The period began in 1832 and ended with the death of the queen in 1901. Another beginning date is 1837, the year Victoria came to the throne, but 1832 is better for several reasons. In that year two major Romantic masters died, Scott and Goethe. In that year the first important volume by Tennyson appeared. In that year the first Reform Bill was passed, marking the end of speculation in politics and the beginning of action to achieve results. The passing of three reform bills before the end of the century spared Great Britain the revolutionary turmoil suffered by so many European countries in 1848 and later.

The reform bills (1832, 1867, 1884) had a far-reaching effect upon the temper of the times and the vitality of the nation. They brought democracy to a nation ruled for hundreds of years by a long-established and powerful aristocracy. By degrees they extended the franchise to all three classes, giving the right to vote to more and more citizens. In time, as the bills did their work, England came to be ruled mainly by the middle class. The first of the three bills gave voting privileges to the wealthier middle class. The second included all members of the middle class, except women, and some males of the working class. The third bill gave the vote to all adult males who could read, including industrial and agricultural workers. The chief effect of the three reform bills was to transfer the power of rule from the aristocracy to the upper middle class.

The Middle Class

By mid-century most of the statesmen who were shaping domestic and foreign policy belonged to the middle class. Even though Queen Victoria gave her name to the period and sat on the throne longer than any previous English sovereign, her contribution to the times was comparatively small. It was too late for a monarch to wield direct influence and too late for the aristocracy to regain lost ground, for the new ruling class had become entrenched. This middle class, from which the poets of the period sprang and for whom they wrote their verse, was firmly grounded in a mercantile way of life. They were merchants who had worked very hard to gain the position in life they presently enjoyed. They owned mills and factories, mines and warehouses, ships and railroads. In time they amassed great wealth which brought them power. The mentality of these Captains of Industry (as Carlyle called them) was neither patrician nor proletarian. Belonging to the class between the two, they shared characteristics with both. Vigorous and hard-working, they created and perpetuated in their life and work a style or state of mind that has come to be called Victorianism.

The class viewed itself as religious and was faithful to the Church of England even though by the end of the century many of its members had lost their faith. Democratic in politics and highly individualistic in business, it continued to show respect to the church but gave its energy to commerce. It was dedicated to making money and valued what money could buy. It played by the rules of laissez-faire and balked at attempts on the part of government to legislate business. It was materialistic, acquisitive, and hypocritical. In abhorrence of the atheism of Godwin and Paine, it decided to maintain the appearance of religious belief even when faith was gone. Displaying disgust at the licentiousness of the aristocracy during the Restoration and later, it decided as a group to maintain at least the appearance of respectability. The decision led to keeping up appearances as a way of life, and it nurtured a prevailing prudery and hypocrisy often attacked by reformers. The class was stubbornly resolute in its aims and prided itself on its practicality. Distrusting the Romantic visionaries that preceded them, the Victorian middle class adopted a pragmatic approach to life. Though some of its moral values have disappeared in our time, its chief characteristics are with us today.

Calvinism was central to the Victorian frame of mind, and most of the Calvinistic virtues were those of the middle class. It tended to think of God as sometimes loving and kind, but often demanding and derisive. It viewed all persons as inheritors of the sin of Adam, as steeped in original sin and therefore damned. Yet it also believed that mankind could achieve salvation through work. Hard, honest, unremitting labor became in time a religious act. This in turn validated the acquisition of wealth and its rewards. The class was inclined to regard human destiny as preordained and discoverable through action. It saw history and the whole panorama of nature as the working out of a divine plan, and was stunned by certain implications of the new science. It was inclined to respect the great leader and to view all leaders as among the elect. Yet it believed, in line with Calvin’s thought, that the people could rebel against an incompetent ruler. Also the middle class placed high premium upon Calvinistic sobriety, honesty, frugality, chastity, practicality, and inner strength. These virtues in combination promoted an attitude of mind, largely that of the middle class, characterized by individualism, earnestness, productive work, diligence, and perseverance.

This middle class as the ruling class influenced the thinking of artists of all kinds. Reformers such as Carlyle and Dickens inevitably addressed their remarks to this class, for they were the ones who could get things done. Yet we should not allow this to obscure the fact that the working class exerted a very real influence as the century progressed. And while the upper classes had resigned their right to rule, they managed to hold on to wealth and privilege and a portion of their power. The reality, therefore, is that three distinct classes existed in England throughout the nineteenth century, and all three at one time or another made their presence felt and their voices heard. But when we speak of the Victorians in hindsight we are generally thinking of the powerful middle class. Victorian morality, for example, is the morality of the middle class. Other codes of conduct, as social scientists were quick to assert, applied to the upper and lower classes. The woman question as discussed by poets and writers of the time was also a movement of the middle class. The social, political, economic, religious, philosophical, scientific, and domestic issues of a dynamic century were firmly grounded in the middle class.

Political Reforms

Spurred on by Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and his followers, the Whigs in 1832 enacted the First Reform Bill to begin significant reform. Bentham’s group, the Utilitarians, was in back of most reforms throughout the century. Utilitarianism had arisen in the eighteenth century as an ethical doctrine which held that any human conduct is good if its end is the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. Bentham went on to develop the political implications that centered on reform. In 1824 he founded the Westminster Review as a means of propagating his views. The journal soon became widely read and broadly influential. An ardent though reasonable reformer, Bentham ferreted out and attacked abuses in law, government, language, business, prisons, and education. His associate, James Mill (1773-1836), eventually passed the leadership of the group to his son. John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) afterwards distinguished himself as one of the great philosophers of the day. He authored the classic book on human freedom, On Liberty (1859), with its famous pronouncement: The only purpose for which power can be exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. Mill’s statement epitomized the laissez-faire doctrine, called infamous by some, which guided industrialists and politicians.

With the passing of the First Reform Bill, the privilege to vote was permitted all men who could prove well-defined property qualifications. This middle-class suffrage became the basis of parliamentary representation and placed political power in the hands of merchants and industrialists. The old names Whig and Tory gave way to Liberal and Conservative, and both parties managed to pass notable political reforms. For example, the Catholic Emancipation Act was passed in 1829; slavery was abolished in 1833; and the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 made free trade a national policy. Jews were allowed to hold political office by 1845 and granted parliamentary membership in 1858. The Catholic hierarchy, suppressed for centuries, was restored in 1850. The franchise was extended to urban workers in 1867 and to their agricultural counterparts in 1884. State-supported elementary education was provided in 1870, and voting by ballot came in 1872. The one important political failure of the entire century was the Irish Question. Religious quarrels between the Protestant north and the Catholic south only made matters worse. To this day the problems of the Irish Question have not been entirely solved.

These political reforms benefited the middle class by increasing its wealth and power and extending its imperialistic aims. England had controlled the seas since the defeat of the French navy at Trafalgar, and this sea power helped the nation acquire new territories around the globe. Naval mastery of the Mediterranean was insured by the Treaty of Paris (1856), which barred Russian warships from the Black Sea, and in 1875 Disraeli purchased full control of the Suez Canal. The next year British administrative power in a faraway nation allowed Queen Victoria to be declared Empress of India. At the same time the continent of Africa was being parceled out to European countries. England dominated Egypt, the Sudan, and parts of South Africa. In 1867 Canada became a dominion. Australia had been claimed for England by Captain James Cook in 1770, and was now being explored and exploited. The transporting of convicts to penal colonies had almost ceased by 1839, but the gold rush of 1851 brought thousands of Europeans to the region. By 1861 a hundred thousand Caucasians, many of them English, had settled in New Zealand. While some reformers (e.g., John Bright) looked upon these events with alarm and disfavor, most Victorians viewed imperialism as their destiny. It convinced them of their superiority in the world, as we shall see when we come to Tennyson.

Another important trend of the times was the pervasive influence of the historical spirit. The new outlook stressed continuity, growth, process, and slow change. It gave credence to Carlyle’s doctrine of society as an organism, to Newman’s thoughts on the development of dogma, to the writings of geologists who stressed transformation over long periods of time, and even to Darwin’s evolutionary hypothesis. This concept of growth and development, of becoming rather than being, was one of the master ideas of the time. You will find it particularly in the poems of Browning, but you will see it also in the work of the other poets. In the mind of the average citizen it was equated with the idea of progress as a natural phenomenon, a process that could not be ignored or denied. Together with the growing prosperity and political reform that notably improved the quality of Victorian life, the historical spirit contributed in a noticeable way to mid-century optimism. The leaders of the nation were convinced that comfort and happiness lay within the grasp of all persons, regardless of class, who had the strength and determination to struggle for a goal to be reached. This state of mind, the optimistic mentality of the middle class, was dominant as the nation planned to show the entire world what the English people could accomplish with industry and machinery and mind.

Great Expectations and Real Achievement

In 1851 Victorian prosperity found expression in the Great Exhibition, sponsored by Prince Albert. The fair was intended to be a forecast of even more wonderful accomplishments in the future, and the whole world was invited to attend. Queen Victoria arrived at the Crystal Palace precisely at noon on the opening day, May 1. She stood grandly on a tall platform above the dignitaries of other countries and formally opened the fair. Typically she called the occasion the happiest, proudest day in my life. In the packed galleries women in silks and satins and men in tuxedos peered at the scene through opera glasses. Alarmists had warned that the fair would surely attract a band of anarchists-today we call them terrorists-who would try to assassinate Victoria and Albert. Yet for twenty-three weeks there was no report of violence, not even a fist fight. Police arrested only twelve pickpockets and some persons caught stealing minor exhibits. The crowds were full of pride and good humor and on their best behavior. Awestruck by the progress mankind was making in the most exciting of centuries, it did not occur to them to be disorderly. The middle class was proud to host the world’s first international exhibition and to display the grand show in a splendid building. Its theme was peace, prosperity, industry, and progress.

The wonderful fair brought together under one fantastic roof eye-catching displays from all over the world. One could feel the vibration of huge machines in motion, examine manufactured goods made in faraway countries, gawk at daring sculpture from Italy and America, or an Indian howdah made of gold and silver and mounted on a stuffed elephant. The Chinese put on display some carved jade and lacquered cabinets borrowed from English importers because China, chafing under the opium wars, had refused to send an official exhibit. The Tunisian bazaar, filled with outlandish merchandise that was sold illegally on the spot, was set up around a nomad’s tent artistically draped with lion skins. From Britain’s far-flung colonies came products that fired the imagination. Canada sent exotic furs, a new fire engine, a huge birch-bark canoe, and Indian artifacts. Australia sent hats made by convicts from the leaves of cabbage trees. Fabulous exhibits, such as the Kohinoor diamond (an item more priceless than anything else in the exhibition), came from India. A lucrative British factory, operating in India, had the gall to display its processed opium. No visitor seemed to know that the drug had turned millions of Chinese into addicts, and not one took it upon himself to protest.

The British exhibits filled half the Crystal Palace and reflected the old and the new. They suggested that the nation’s leaders were looking back to the elegance and grace and simplicity of the past, particularly the middle ages, but also eagerly ahead to the new era of the machine. In the machinery sections could be found the largest crowds. Factory workers jostled one another to admire the machines and products they themselves had made. The machine age was well represented with everything from steel knives to express locomotives, hydraulic presses, and power looms. In the gleaming beauty of brightly painted machines the Victorians saw their destiny. They were fascinated by it all and equally delighted with the building itself. The Crystal Palace with nearly a million square feet of glass was a radical departure from the heavy stone architecture of mid-century. It astonished John Ruskin, who promoted the Gothic style. He pronounced it neither a palace nor made of crystal, and therefore quite phony. Yet most of the visitors regarded the huge building that covered nineteen acres of Hyde Park with reverence. Gleaming in the light of progress, the structure dazzled six million Victorians with grand visions of the past and present and a future that promised to be glorious.

But this euphoria, this collective feeling of unrivaled happiness that Matthew Arnold had cautioned against, tended to ignore the darker side of industrialism. That laissez-faire individualism prized by industrialists had a dark dimension which many preferred to overlook. Their policy of hands off and don’t interfere produced a callous indifference for the distress of workers and their families. The law of supply and demand in a market inflated by a high birth rate made for cheap labor and starvation wages. In the dark Satanic mills and in the narrow mine shafts children worked many hours a day, often to the point of exhaustion. Because the pay scale for them was even lower than that for adults, children were expected at times to support entire families with unemployed adults. They slept on a bare floor at their place of work in a room crowded with other children and adults. They ate skimpy meals lacking in nutrition and were always hungry. Adequate health care, sanitation, and personal hygiene were non-existent. In the early decades Parliament passed rigid laws that favored owners and managers, making the condition of the poor even worse. Without the right to vote they could do little to improve their lot. In the cities of the richest nation on earth one of every nine persons was a pauper. Chartism, one of the first movements aimed at helping the poor, was seen as a threat to the middle class and its power. The movement ultimately failed.

Chartism failed but it left an imprint on the conscience of men and women who sought to penetrate the indifference of middle-class rulers. A series of bitter reports on the condition of the poor could not be ignored. They brought to public attention wretched children on all fours pulling heavy carts of coal through the mines. They provided sketches of sweating women, stripped to the waist, performing the same labor. They spoke of the squalid misery and long hours of handloom weavers, of dangerous machinery in many factories, of dead bodies lying unnoticed in crowded hovels until they decayed and stank. At length a horrified public persuaded a stubborn Parliament to enact legislative reform. Important in the cycle of reform were the Factory Acts (1833-1878), the Mines Act of 1842 which prohibited employing women and children underground, Ashley’s Act of 1847 establishing a ten-hour day, and the Acts of 1867 and 1873 which rescued women and children from back-breaking agricultural labor. By 1875 several Public Health Acts had also become law. Yet statesmen trained on Malthus’ Essay on Population (1798) continued to believe that any attempt to help the poor would upset natural laws and bring calamity.

Under that assumption Parliament in 1834 amended the old Poor Law to end private relief so as to encourage work of any kind. The new law resulted in the poor being herded into workhouses, blasted by Carlyle and Dickens, where they surrendered freedom for the privilege of working. But wages were deliberately set lower than in the private sector, and as the people worked they slowly starved to death. Many of the poor preferred to perish in the streets rather than go to the workhouse. Thomas Malthus had argued that no remedy except war, starvation, disease, or abstinence could be found to curb the increase of population among the poor. His doctrine proved defective in a number of ways. Census figures showed the population did not rise geometrically as he had postulated. From fifteen million at the beginning of the century it went to forty million at the end. Moreover, the growth was attributed to a decrease in the death rate rather than an increase in the birth rate. Even so, the population of London went from one million in 1801 to nearly five million in 1881. But that rapid increase had little to do with the general birth rate. It was mainly the result of an agricultural depression, hard conditions in the countryside. People by the thousands migrated to the city which had become for them their last hope. The city of London took them in only to ignore them. Until after the Second World War the slums of London, in the midst of great wealth, were among the worst in the world.

Science and Tradition

The clash between the new science and the old traditional doctrines was inevitable. Rapidly advancing liberalism and material prosperity on the one hand and the plight of the poor on the other was a contradiction that perplexed thinking people. A dilemma, it made the formation of a workable social philosophy a Herculean task. The emergence of a rapidly developing science complicated the process and made it even more difficult. The scientific outlook had begun in the seventeenth century and had gained momentum in the eighteenth with John Locke’s empiricism (the revelation of truth by experiment and observation). That trend continued in the nineteenth century but with an important shift of emphasis. The miraculous universe was no longer a clock made by an expert watchmaker and set running; it was now a mysterious organism changing and evolving on its own and stubbornly yielding its secrets. This scientific fact rested upon an accumulation of verified data put to use by earnest Victorian scientists. One could say, as Bacon had said in the seventeenth century, that the new scientists stood on the shoulders of the ancients and were thus able to see farther and accomplish more.

Certainly dedicated scientists with each passing year were creating new fields. The older geology and biology soon found themselves in the company of bacteriology, psychology, anthropology, sociology, and genetics. Michael Faraday, working long hours, advanced the study of electricity and magnetism. Clerk Maxwell founded a new school of mathematicians that experimented with atomic physics. John Dalton introduced mind-boggling concepts in the field of chemistry with his theory of atomic weights. Also on the scene was paradoxical Charles Darwin who was recognized by his peers, and by middle-class readers, as the greatest scientist of the day. When he and other scientists turned to the question of organic life and its development, they collided head on with the traditional beliefs of religious groups. The account of creation as related in the Book of Genesis was clearly in conflict with the theories of Charles Lyell. For him the physical world had come to its present state not through catastrophic and swift change, but slowly over eons of time. He theorized that the same laws changing the universe had been working in the same slow way for millions of years. His Principles of Geology (1830) went through twelve editions in his lifetime.

Evolution was not a new idea. It had been kicking around since the days of the Greeks. In the eighteenth century the French botanist Buffon was the first to treat the concept scientifically. His contemporaries viewed the world as fixed and stable since the time of creation, but he saw a fluid variation in animals and also in man. His countryman, Lamarck, postulated that species had evolved by transmission of acquired characteristics to their offspring, and the process was not the work of merely a few days. Contradicting the biblical account, he stated that God’s creation was a process thousands or even millions of years old. His theory, similar to Darwin’s but also different in many respects, came to be called purposive evolution and has not been discredited.

It was left to Charles Darwin (1809-l882) to give documentation to the theory of evolution in the most important book of the century, Origin of Species (1859). Its full title was On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Based on years of observation and thought, the work argued that life forms undergo changes by means of a process known as mutation. Afterwards nature selects the variants best fitted to survive. The phrase we remember today, the survival of the fittest, was coined not by Darwin, however, but by Spencer in 1852. To religious people Darwin’s theory honored only the strong and reduced the universe to mechanical process without soul. Nature was no longer seen as benevolent and uplifting, the Wordsworthian view. It was now red in tooth and claw, the view offered by Tennyson in his elegy In Memoriam.

That concept haunted Tennyson as he was writing his masterpiece, and it spread as Darwinism to other fields. It was used to justify colonial expansion abroad and ruthless industrialism at home. It became the basic philosophy of the naturalistic novelists near the end of the century, and it inspired the many books of Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), who applied the theory to just about anything that would support it. He formed the belief that human progress based on the evolutionary process was inevitable. It soon became a master idea of the time, even though more advanced thinkers doubted its validity. Darwin in the meantime withdrew entirely from the controversy caused by his book. Thereafter Thomas Huxley, his brilliant disciple, gained fame as Darwin’s bulldog. When religious conservatives attacked, he defended the master’s theories with thrust and parry logic. In 1871 Charles Darwin published The Descent of Man which stated openly what the Origin of Species had only hinted at, namely that men and women, Homo sapiens, are descended from a lower form of life.

The New Reading Public

Darwin’s books upset the religious community and brought about an erosion of faith. But a year after the Origin of Species was published he wrote to a friend: I cannot be content to view this wonderful universe, and especially the nature of man, and conclude that everything is the result of brute force. So while Darwin and other scientists were confounded by their own discoveries, and while popularizers explored the consequences, an army of inventors (many of them Americans) was hard at work making life easier. Practical application of scientific concepts produced steamships, railroads, the telegraph, telephone, phonograph, light bulb, photography, and other inventions (even the zipper). The new science provided a source of cheap paper, improved the printing press, and encouraged the development of an eager reading public. The Victorians, seeking ever to abolish illiteracy, saw a steady increase in the number of readers and students.

In the realm of education notable reforms were taking place. The University of London opened its doors in 1828 and rapidly began to compete with prestigious Oxford and Cambridge, which in time ceased to be training schools for the clergy. Other cities in quick response to the Elementary Education Act of 1870, built institutes, museums, universities, and public schools. The act touched the lives of persons of all classes as the secondary schools were gradually brought in line with national goals. Matthew Arnold, as a school inspector, was in the thick of this educational reform and wrote influential reports. The press then as now was a strong source of informal education. Newspapers, review organs, magazines, and book publishers proliferated as never before and flourished. Popular and pervasive journalism featured articles to instruct as well as concise reports on local and world events. Daily and weekly journals, some of them intellectually weighty, found enough readers to make a profit. In general the Victorians were eager to receive and test new ideas and theories from any source. That accounts in part for the many books of expository prose that were published each year. The usual procedure of such authors was to deliver a lecture, then publish it as an article in a magazine or journal, and later publish it again as part of a book. Some of these books not only attained influence, but also displayed qualities of originality and force which made them a genuine and lasting literature. Many publications, however, were not lasting (Chit-Chat comes to mind) and soon disappeared. The London Times was well known for its authority and accuracy and was highly respected.

In one of his lighter moments, perhaps in reference to the Times, Matthew Arnold called journalism literature in a hurry. Yet most writers admired the power of the press. Numerous Victorian authors wrote for newspapers or for reviews and magazines. James Stuart Mill published several important articles in the Westminster Review, and so did George Eliot. Thackeray edited with fine efficiency the Cornhill Magazine where Trollope serialized some of his novels. Dickens edited Household Words in which he published serial pieces. Macaulay even submitted verse to the Times and wrote long essays for the Edinburgh Review, a journal that also published some articles by Carlyle. Stevenson published twelve of his best essays in Scribner’s Magazine, an American publication. Grub Street still existed and so did New Grub Street (as in George Gissing’s novel by that title), but on the whole a well-known and productive author such as Stevenson or Dickens could earn a good living with the pen. In his Autobiography of 1878 Trollope confessed that in twenty years he had earned £70,000 (a small fortune), but Gissing (writing powerful novels a decade later) earned in the best of years scarcely more than £200. By the 1890’s editors wanted all manuscripts prepared on a new-fangled machine called the typewriter. If an author could not afford a typewriter or a typist, such as Gissing whose career was fraught with poverty, he found it difficult to get his books published.

This enormous production of a wide variety of publications aimed at middle-class English readers had a curious side effect in America. Literate Americans believed in the manner of Macaulay that they had special ties with England. But without a legal and binding copyright agreement between the two nations it was easy for American publishers to pirate any British book they thought would turn a profit. The most recent novel by Dickens was therefore free for the taking, and he received not a penny. What is more, he could do little about it. At the peak of his career Dickens grew bitter as he saw his books and his labor making great sums of money for other people. He tried hard to do something to prevent the situation, but the legal piracy continued until the International Copyright Agreement of 1891. By then Dickens was dead, but the books of Thackeray, George Eliot, Tennyson, Browning, Hardy, and Gissing suffered the same fate. In an earlier period Byron and Scott were also victims of the same practice. Deliberate abuse of professional authors by greedy American publishers contributed to the low opinion of America that persisted among the English upper classes throughout the century. Yet the influence of the British in this country, particularly in cultural matters, remained consistently strong. Victorianism was alive and well among the movers and shakers in America.

The Last Three Decades

The Victorians, as we ourselves, lived in a time of unprecedented change. Within a single lifetime they saw the simple act of moving from one place to another go from stage coaches to railway trains and automobiles. In the last three decades even dreams of flight came closer and closer to realization. Moreover, as we are doing so every day, they were constantly adjusting to change. These attempts to adjust inevitably led to conflict in virtually all areas of their lives: economic, social, political, religious, and intellectual. From their intense desire to reconcile conflicting forces came that spirit of compromise for which the Victorian era is now so well known. It has in fact been accurately called the Age of Compromise. Substantial citizens of the middle class felt the need for freedom but also a need for control and guidance. Most of them revered tradition but were charmed by innovation. They wanted to believe in the Book of Genesis but were fascinated by the theory of evolution. They looked for a compromise especially between religion and science, and those not able to find it suffered consequences comparable to Tennyson’s spiritual crisis after the death of Hallam. It was an age of serious and earnest hard work which brought great achievement, but disappointment for the visionaries who wanted more.

Despite immense wealth and power England suffered near the end of the century economic and political strife. In 1847 the nation was beginning to experience unprecedented development of trade and prosperity. This condition lasted into the 1870’s, and during that interval of comfortable affluence insular England became the workshop of the world. With amazing rapidity the country reached the pinnacle of her power and prestige, becoming in a few years the greatest empire the world had ever seen and dominating western society. Her extensive foreign trade exceeded that of France, Germany, and Italy combined and was almost four times that of the United States. She owned buildings and factories in China, mines in Mexico, ships in every major port, and the railroad system of Argentina. She had colonies in every corner of the globe and favorable trade agreements with them. India, Australia, and Canada were then under British control and contributed immensely to her wealth. India was thirty-four times the size of England, and Australia forty times her size. Canada’s unbelievable land mass was not even fully measured. In our time the term Great Britain has become just a little pretentious, but during the last fifty years of Victoria’s reign the phrase had meaning and was entirely accurate.

Even so, the last three decades were years of decline. The unquiet autumn of Victorianism began around 1880 when many problems arose to trouble the leadership. During the second ministry of Gladstone, from 1880 to 1885, the third Reform Bill was passed in 1884. At last the coveted franchise was extended to the agricultural laborer. This meant that virtually any man of any class with some degree of substance had the right to vote. As these advances were being made, however, the last decades of the era were marred by a series of small yet bloody wars. They produced a negative impact upon the empire’s image, but were scarcely felt at home. The person in the street was unable to see that the empire building going on mainly in Africa was now tainted. Imperialistic aims were very much alive at the Queen’s Jubilee of 1887 as the nation celebrated Victoria’s fifty years on the throne. She had been named Empress of India in 1876, and in 1897 in the midst of pomp and pageantry celebrating sixty years on the throne she was named the glorious living symbol of the British Empire. From the days of the Great Exhibition to the Queen’s Jubilee the supreme Caucasian mind, as Tennyson said, marched resolutely in the foremost files of time. Some perceptive observers on the sidelines, however, were able to see storm clouds gathering and skies darkening.

As early as the seventies the attentive person could detect a gradual though sweeping decline in agricultural, political, industrial, and even spiritual leadership. Most of the great personalities were rapidly reaching an honorable old age, and many seemed to die all at once. Mill, Lyell, and Bagehot died in the 1870’s. Carlyle, Disraeli, Pusey, Darwin, FitzGerald, Rossetti, Arnold, and Browning died in the eighties. Newman gave up the ghost in l890 and Tennyson in 1892. Huxley, Morris, Pater, and Stevenson were gone by 1896, and Ruskin by 1900. Macaulay had died at the end of 1859, the century’s miracle year in literature. Prince Albert, Arthur Hugh Clough, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning all died in 1861. As these productive persons disappeared, so did the unassailable certainties of the time. During the seventies and eighties faith had surrendered categorically to doubt, and only a few people could muster faith in anything. The new science had made inroads in the traditional faith, particularly as thinking persons found themselves unable to reconcile science and religion. In the early years Carlyle and Newman had tried to revitalize and restore faith. Sometime later others of lesser note tried to replace the old religion with concepts taken mainly from science. All these well-meaning attempts ultimately failed. Skepticism at the turn of the century had become the mood of the day.

Even as faith eroded, however, and even as empire building diminished, new developments were to be seen in every quarter. In the 1890’s in particular people spoke of the new science, the new drama, the new journalism, the new humor, the new art of fiction, the new morality, the new realism, the new hedonism, and the new ideal of womanhood which had produced the new woman. Few of these aspects have been included in this discussion, and yet all of them are bright features of the Victorian scene that deserve careful attention. The period is too protean to cover in a single volume. The Victorian novel alone has generated scores of books. The revival of the drama in the nineties has enough substance for several full-length books. The charm of the informal essay in the hands of Thackeray or Stevenson is fuel for study, and the same could be said of the short story as crafted by several writers. The merrymaking of Gilbert and Sullivan and the imagination of Lewis Carroll have generated books that can fill a dreary day with sunshine. These new developments forcefully suggest that the 1890’s were years of subtle transition between the nineteenth century and the twentieth and on into our own troubled century.

But in spite of progress on some fronts, England’s economy was in steep decline. Between 1850 and 1875 real wages (take-home pay) had risen by almost fifty percent. In the next decade when British industries began to stumble, wages fell ten percent until 1886 when they began to rise again. During that interval thousands of bankruptcies took place, and in a single year (1886) as many as 21,000 people emigrated to greener pastures. During the next two years at least 30,000 more left the country, many of them the brightest persons of the younger generation. The great programs of promise, such as free trade, extension of the franchise, and domestic reform, had run into trouble. For more than fifty years Britain had maintained a sure monopoly of trade in manufactured goods, but now other countries were offering competition. Germany, the United States, and Japan (released from centuries of isolation by Commodore Perry in 1853) were exporting goods to the rest of the globe. The economic depression of the seventies and eighties hit the industrial worker hardest. The situation led many workers to socialism, but the English (to their credit) put their faith in evolution instead of revolution.

The Victorians in Retrospect

In 1901 the people of Great Britain could look back upon a busy century of earnest striving to make the world better, but the results of that gargantuan struggle had not been entirely favorable. Their achievement may be called a splendid paradox. The multitude of panaceas had produced little more than material prosperity. The dreams of many, and their ideals, had ended mainly in the triumph of mediocrity, uniformity, and monotony. As reflected in such writers as Walter Pater, the Victorian era began to experience a fin de siècle weariness. The vigorous giant after a century of laboring was now ready to relax and enjoy some of the pleasures of life. Whereas Carlyle had advocated unrelenting work to bring order into the world, Pater’s new epicureanism preached idle detachment. His followers wanted a life of feeling rather than of thought, leisure rather than work. Yet if these remarks too strongly suggest the ultimate failure of the Victorians, let us remember their literature. In its strength, variety, and underlying concern, Victorian poetry is without a doubt one of the greatest accomplishments of a stupendous age.

As the period came to an end, it could be expected that the next age would attack it. The bustling, high-hatted, bearded Victorians talked too much and wrote too much and were ultimately bores. Their literature seemed to have only one purpose, to teach the triumphant middle class how to hold the reins of rule and how to conduct themselves in a rapidly changing world. By their energy and hard work the middle class had acquired a huge portion of the earth’s real estate, but the empire they were attempting to rule was becoming more troublesome by the day. Ominous forces over which even powerful leaders had little control (e.g., German militarism) were pushing forward to perplex and provoke. There was a feeling near the end that in spite of the advances of the past, England was marching backward and downward into the abyss. In 1900 the American Henry Adams wrote to his brother: It’s a queer sensation, this secret belief that one stands on the very brink of the world’s greatest catastrophe. He was not alone in his premonition, for literature and the literary mind have a way of predicting the future.

2 Aspects of Victorian Poetry

Surely one of the most important aspects of Victorian poetry is the durability of this body of literature. At the close of the century more than a few critics worried that in no time at all most of the literature of the age would pass into nothingness. In 1895 a critic of some renown ruefully observed: A great poetry has accompanied our century of swift development in thought and deed. Only within the past decade has it sunk into silence with the death of Tennyson and Browning. Swinburne and Morris, our only surviving poets, have nothing new to say; no younger men are rising to occupy the vacant places. So far as we can tell, the story of modern English song has ended. Even Mathew Arnold, a leading poet