Cultural Aspects of the Victorian Age Reflected in Literature

Lect. univ. dr. Anca Mihaela DOBRINESCU Universitatea Petrol-Gaze Ploiesti No matter how controversial the issues relating to the Victorian age may have been when the term Victorianism imposed itself as indispensable to the history of culture and civilisation in the nineteenth century, consensus has been reached that this period was one of unprecedented development in all the fields of Englands economic, social and political life. Referred to from the standpoint of the twentieth century, Queen Victorias age is undoubtedly perceived as a period of stability and equilibrium underlain by a solid and reliable value system, with the idea of God looming large at its centre. Far from being a period of perfect harmony, free of any conflicting states, Victorianism still enjoys the benefits of some strongholds on whose unquestionable stability one is invited to rely. The most important one is the figure of Queen Victoria herself and the institution the queen represented - the monarchy. Queen Victoria was the longest reigning monarch in English history and she is primarily remembered for her having established the monarchy as a respected and popular institution. The monarchy the apex of the court and of polite society generally 1 flourished under Queen Victoria. The monarchy represented the timeless quality of what was taken to be a pre-industrial order. In an increasingly urbanised society, it balanced the Industrial revolution: the more urban Britain became, the more stylised, ritualised, and popular became its monarchy, for the values which it claimed to personify stood outside the competitive egalitarianism of capitalist society.2 Victoria gained enormous popular esteem for supporting the imperialistic policies and, in 1876, she also became Empress of India. Great Britain turned into one of the worlds most extended empires. It occupied a position in the world that engendered a feeling of self-confidence, of trust in the individuals power and in an unlimited possibility of progress, all the more so for Britain also being the cradle of the Industrial Revolution. Dictated by a tough competition with other European nations, the British Empire expanded with a view to establishing new spheres of influence and gaining control over previously unexplored areas that represented fresh opportunities for trade and new sources of wealth. A feeling of national pride was also associated with Britains expansionistic tendencies in the nineteenth century, which undoubtedly accounts for part of the apparent stability of the Victorian society. The Empire was, thus, another stronghold of the Victorian age, on whose strength much of the spirit of the period depended. On the occasion of the Great Exhibition of 1851, proudly opened by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in London, E. P. Hood, the inventor of the term Victorian stated with immeasurable pride. The Englishman lives to move and to struggle, to conquer and to build; to visit all seas, to diffuse the genius of his character over all nations. Industry, Protestantism, Liberty seem born of the Teutonic race that race to whom God has committed the conservation as well as the spread of Truth and on whom mainly depend the civilisation and progress of the world.3 The boom in wealth generated a boom in birth rate. In the public opinion, the traditional picture of the family reigned supreme. The large family was the rule in the Victorian society. Many children,
1 2

Morgan , Kenneth O. (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain, Oxford University Press, 2000, p.493 ibid., p.496 3 Hood, E.P., The Age and Its Architects quoted in Bedarida, F., A Social History of England 1851-1990, Routledge, 1994

gathered under the protective wing of a caring mother, materially depended on the effort, and consequent success, of the father, who could be seen as a dignified epitome of God on earth. Much of the stability and solidity of the Victorian age were given by peoples perceiving the family, the monarchy and the empire as solid, incontestable and wealth providing institutions. Although the Victorian prosperity was only one side of the coin, the other being the victims, the multitude of the crushed and the oppressed, few Victorian people ever seriously thought of contesting the beneficial role of these institutions in the Victorian society. Dissatisfaction may have been formulated with any other social, economic or political aspects. The monarch and the institution she led, the imperialist expansionism and the family as the basic social unit of the society were never questioned. Literature, and especially fiction, reflects the reality in a certain period of time. The Victorian novel, constructed according to the conventions of realism is, thus, expected to be in various ways a reflection, or better said, a representation of the Victorian society, with all its underlying values. Yet, one and the same cultural, ideological and axiological background will generate different distinct individual works. The main condition of existence of fiction is that it establishes a necessary relationship with the external referent. When a mimetic attitude to literature is adopted, the fictional work will create an illusion of reality, which can go from an apparent total overlap between fiction and reality, to subtly or maybe strikingly divergent paths of the two. No matter which type of illusion it creates, the work always is an original processing of the same material. It is the form and the choice of method and technique that gives the work uniqueness and differentiates it from any other individual work, even if the latter is inspired from the same referent. Starting from the historical delimitation of the Victorian period, it is interesting to see how different Victorian writers, or writers creating in the Victorian age, formulated their own standpoint and related themselves to the Victorian values and conventions. The paper will try to demonstrate that there is a clear relationship between the particular standpoint that a writer chooses to express and the technique that he opts for in order to carry into effect the intended representation. To this end, I have chosen for exemplification three novels by three novelists whose work displays a fairly wide range of references to the Victorian period, but which, by a different option in point of technique, produced a different representation of reality. The specific moment of time when the three novels I selected were published is also relevant. Charles Dickens Bleak House came out in 1852-1853, i.e. about the same time the Great Exhibition took place in London. The Great Exhibition marked a turning point in the history of the nineteenth century, delimiting the Hungry Forties from the Fabulous Fifties. Lewis Carrolls Alices Adventures in Wonderland appeared in 1865, i.e. a moment when the Victorian values indicative of wealth and prosperity, success and self-confidence became the standard of the Victorian organisation. Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness was written in 1899 and published only three years later in 1902, i.e. in a period when the Victorian system, the Empire included, underwent a process of decline, when mans value system got relative under the influence of the turn-of-thecentury scientific and technological discoveries. I will approach the three novels, starting from some textual instances that I consider relevant to the purpose of this paper. The three writers work will be dealt with in succession, given the fact that the view of the world and the modifications of technique can be also interpreted as time-dependent. Dickens confronts his reader with an image of the Victorian society rendered in the conventions of the realist novel. Without claiming that he would reform manners and morals, or that he would repair social injustice, Dickens constitutes himself, however, into a spokesperson of the realities of his time. He has a view of both sides of the Victorian coin, but he chooses to emphasise more the bad side of it, focusing on the deficiencies of the legal, social and political system. Dickens is a keen observer of reality and he decides to present it as truthfully and as accurately as possible. He chooses thus the narrative technique that could provide the proper birds-eye view of the Victorian panorama. The point of view that Dickens uses is the omniscient, which means that, no matter how sceptical about the values underlying the Victorian system he may be, he is not ready to essentially question

these values. The omniscient narrator is a God-like presence in the narrative that parallels Gods central position to the Victorian mans system of values. Consequently, critical as Dickens is of Englands situation, the values underlying his thinking coincide to a certain extent with those underlying the thinking of any Victorian individual. Dickens may criticise the organisation of his contemporary England, but he will seldom, if ever, question the validity of this organisation, in a subversive way. Dickens criticism can be effected in tones ranging from mild irony, through satire to bitter sarcasm, but ultimately he will acknowledge the system as system, and thus his novel will be an artistic representation of a society which is, after all, stable and solid. Although England and the English political system are not too often the subject matter of Dickens novels in explicit terms, the chapter National and Domestic in Bleak House offers the reader an almost straightforward representation of the countrys political deficiencies. There is one ingredient that is purposefully avoided in the constitution of England the Queen. One may easily refer the two fictional characters in the fragment to the historical personages Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone, both Prime Ministers having played a significant part during Queen Victorias reign. Yet the monarch does not appear, although Dickens openly satirises the performance of the two politicians, the former a Conservative, the latter a Liberal. Dickens message is that all political alternatives are reduced to mere irrelevance when the judicial system is so ineffective and so negatively reflected in the peoples life. Yet, the taboo subject of the queen, and implicitly of the monarchy, is not tackled, which is clearly indicative of Dickens essential standpoint.
England had been in a dreadful state for some weeks. Lord Coodle would go out, Sir Thomas Doodle wouldnt come in, and there being nobody in Great Britain (to speak of) except Coodle and Doodle, there has been no Government. It is a mercy that the hostile meeting between the two great men, which at one time seemed inevitable, did not come off; because if both pistols had taken effect, and Coodle and Doodle had killed each other, it is to be presumed that England must have waited to be governed until young Coodle and young Doodle, now in frocks and long stockings, were grown up. This stupendous national calamity, however, was averted by Lord Coodles making the timely discovery that, if in the heat of debate he had said that he scorned and despised the whole ignoble career of Sir Thomas Doodle, he had merely meant to say that party difference should never induce him to withhold from it the tribute of his warmest admiration; while it as opportunely turned out, on the other hand, that Sir Thomas Doodle had in his own bosom expressly booked Lord Coodle to go down to posterity as the mirror of virtue and honour. Still England has been some weeks in the dismal strait of having no pilot (as was well observed by Sir Leicester Dedlock) to weather the storm; and the marvellous part of the matter is, that England has not appeared to care very much about it, but has gone on eating and drinking and marrying and giving in marriage, as the old world did in the days before the flood.4

The irony underlying the text is evident. The names of the two great men come into derisive discrepancy with their indispensability to the fate of Britannia, as England is referred to some lines downwards by Dickens, in remembrance of the heroic days of the Roman province. The common noun doodle5 turned into a proper one and, more importantly, assigned to a person on whose shoulders the responsibility of a country lies suggests Dickens clear intention of mocking at the whole political system that both Conservatives and Liberals represented. The name Coodle is only an invention to make political irresponsibility rhyme. Dickens has the same critical attitude when he considers the political discourse in the Victorian period. He points to the ambiguity and lack of coherence of this discourse, which may be mildly termed diplomatic, but which shows nothing but the indifference, lack of consistency, even rude manners of the politicians at that, and other coming, time. Similarly, he questions, by attacking it, the hereditary right of the aristocratic class to the government of the country. Yet what the reader discovers, in surprise is that, in the Victorian writers opinion, the country could manage without the two, which indicates, in an implicit way that the structure was seen as stable and strong enough to resist in absence of government. This is the reason why the Queen is not held responsible. She was a guarantee to the countrys stability and prosperity. Her privileged
4 5

Dickens, Ch., Bleak House, Penguin Books, 1994, pp.516 doodle: meaningless scrawls and scribbles, while one is or ought to be paying attention to something else

place in the Victorian mentality prevented Dickens from having her artistically involved. The Queen, just like the other institutions mentioned in the beginning of this paper, was a taboo subject. Adopting an omniscient narrators perspective, it would have been unlikely that Dickens should diverge from the main line of thought and mentality of the Victorian age. He formulated an individual viewpoint, without taking the risk of offending the public one. Just a few years later, Lewis Carroll represented the same Victorian period, but in a moment when Victorian issues had, in a way, ceased to be seen as points of controversy. Things had started to change for the better, and the Reform Bills relieved Great Britains political system. Under the form of a nonsensical story, anticipating the twentieth-century literature of the absurd, Lewis Carroll enlarges upon various Victorian topics, in a joking and apparently superficial way. The form he adopts and the technique that he decides on selective omniscience- indicate more than a change in the tenets of literature. It was certainly difficult for Carroll to give an unbiased view of his times society unless he decided to free his reader from a too strict control on the part of the omniscient narrator. To be able to express a personal standpoint, he had to sacrifice the privilege of omniscience to the freer perspective of a character who should not necessarily hold the systems values in reverence. Alice is indeed a dignified representative of the Victorian society, but she is a child, so she has an incomplete and imperfect view of the society she was born in and educated to. For this reason, the action being filtered through her eyes, she has the capacity of coping with the topical issues of the Victorian age in a freer manner and thus formulating a viewpoint different from that of Dickens. Alices eye functions as a mirror, but due to the incompleteness of her knowledge, as an imperfect, sometimes distorted mirror. The impression of distortion is accentuated further more by the story being transferred to a realm of dream. Beside the narrative precautions that Carroll took to enable him to move more freely within the established value system, cherished by the Victorian public opinion, he also resorted to a method of demonstration borrowed from mathematics, the reductio ad absurdum one6. Thus all Carrolls story acquires an in-the-mirror quality. The imperfect and distorted mirror reflects the image of the Victorian society, without the writer committing himself to the sense and value of the mirror reflections. Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that Alice admits the court and the queen in her representations of the Victorian society. She had had access to the incontestable meaning of this institution only through books, that is her discourse becomes a second degree one, and for this much less implicating. What Alice does in the encounter with the underground dream world is nothing but to assign appropriate roles, whose knowledge and linguistic labels she had acquired from books, to beings she meets. It is only through language that Alices whole world is constructed, which is not different from how fiction linguistically constructs itself starting from facts of the real. Due to this strategy, Carrolls criticism, if there is any at all, and his representation of the Victorian society are liberated from the constraints of the Victorian mentality.
The King and Queen of Hearts were seated on their throne when they arrived, with a great crowd assembled about them []. Alice had never been in a court of justice before, but she had read about them in books, and she was quite pleased to find that she knew the name of nearly everything there. Thats the judge, she said to herself, because of his great wig. The judge, by the way, was the King; and as he wore his crown over the wig, (look at the frontispiece if you want to see how he did it,) he did not look at all comfortable, and it was certainly not becoming. And thats the jury-box, thought Alice, and those twelve creatures, (she was obliged to say creatures, you see, because some of them were animals, and some were birds.) I suppose they are the jurors. She said this last word two or three times over to herself, being rather proud of it: for she thought, and rightly too, that very few little girls of her age knew the meaning of it all. However, jury-men would have done just as well.7

6 7

reductio ad absurdum: the disproof of a proposition by showing that its conclusion can be only absurd Carroll, L., Alices Adventures in Wonderland, Penguin Books, 1994, pp. 128-129

In Conrads case, the representation strategies are more complicated. Conrad is a turn-of-thecentury writer. The Victorian value system starts to give way under the pressure of a new, not yet definite, one. Conrads works faces the crisis of the Victorian value system and so it represents a Victorian society that strives to preserve their feeling of self-confidence by giving prominence to the imperialistic values. The British Empire reached its climax in the last years of the nineteenth century and, as a matter of fact, its supremacy had never been contested before in the Victorian literature. It seems that it was only an exile, such as Conrad was, a man of Europe and not a British subject, to come to grips with the obvious controversial aspects of Britains imperialistic experience. The imperial idea, which reached its zenith between 1880 and 1914, was a strange compound of widely different ingredients: the will to power, the profit motive, national pride, Christian zeal, humanitarian feeling an extraordinary mixture of cold calculation and passion, reason and sentiment, all combined in one irresistible thrust.8 For all its civilising dimensions, the springs of the imperialistic experience were mainly material. However, the moral aspect had been always seen as inherent in the mechanisms and ideologies of the empire. Thus many considered it the duty and obligation of the whites to civilise the savages, to impart their knowledge to the uncultured brutes, to pass on the European cultural standards to the native inhabitants. With all this moral camouflage, it is not surprising that the imperialistic ideas were more often than not perceived as positive within the general framework of the Victorian value system. Dealing with such delicate issues in an age which had already announced its relativity, Conrad needed, from a narrative as well as from an ideological point of view, the proper detachment that could permit him to investigate the imperialistic discourse and to subversively assert his own standpoint. Both the narrative and the ideological detachment are ensured in Conrads novels by the adoption of a technique of indirectness, with Marlow as a narrator, observer, interpreter and experiencer of the story. References to the empire, a taboo subject in the Victorian novels, are always veiled and subtle. Meanings of the empire are interwoven with a deeper meaning of mans investigation of the self. There are, however, portions in Heart of Darkness, where ideas relating to the empire are clearly stated, although dealt with quite diplomatically. Conrad does not aim at shocking his audiences. He simply wants to question and subvert the existing value system, which he manages to do by an artful combination of acknowledged truths and ironically questioned ones. This flexibility of approach would have never been possible without his eye witness narrators mediation. As compared to his predecessors direct reference to Victorian aspects, in a more or less ironic tone, Conrad handles topics relating to the empire more subtly and with much more insight. He is more interested in the philosophy and ideology of the empire and their relevance to mans existence than in the institution as such.
We looked at the venerable stream not in the vivid flush of a short day that comes and departs for ever, but in the august light of abiding memories. And indeed nothing is easier for a man who has, as the phrase goes, followed the sea with reverence and affection, than to evoke the great spirit of the past upon the lower reaches of the Thames. The tidal current runs to and fro in its unceasing service, crowded with memories of men and ships it had borne to the rest of home or to the battles of the sea. It had known and served all the men of whom the nation is proud, from Sir Francis Drake to Sir John Franklin, knights all, titled and untitled the great knights-errant of the sea. It had borne all the ships whose names are like jewels flashing in the night of time, from the Golden Hind returning with her round flanks full of treasure, to be visited by the Queens Highness and thus pass out of the gigantic tale, to the Erebus and Terror, bound on other conquests and that never returned. It had known the ships and the men. They had sailed from Deptford, from Greenwich, from Erith the adventurers and the settlers; kings ships and the ships of men on Change; captains, admirals, the dark interlopers of the Eastern Trade, and the commissioned generals of East India fleets. Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. What
8

Bedarida, F., A Social History of England 1851-1990, 1994, p.145

greatness had not floated in the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires.9

The fragment synthesises Great Britains imperialistic experience from the times of the Renaissance, to whose name much lustre was added by historians as regards the exploits of brave lords-pirates such as Drake, to the modern times. Englands imperialistic history does not confine itself to the Victorian times. The expansionist tendencies of Britain are inherent in the medieval crusades, and the conquering of Canada and America. What Conrad suggests, by the way in which he organises the historical information and adds to it his subtle ironic comments, is that mans propensity towards destruction and self-destruction, translated in expansion and conquest, is inherent in human nature. What seems to be nothing but a sequence of events praising Englands uninterrupted presence in the history of the world turns out to be a subversive dismantling of the very building the text apparently puts up. Conrad gallantly refers to the Queen and her reassuring presence, it is true that he means Queen Elizabeth I, but he implies Victoria as well as any other monarch of England, while disclosing the monarchs implication in the imperialistic destructiveness. Conrads strategy is thus characterised by simultaneous assertion and subversion of a value system, which is part of the modernity of his enterprise. Bibliography Bedarida, F., A Social History of England 1851-1990, 1994 Carroll, L., Alices Adventures in Wonderland, Penguin Books, 1994 Conrad, J., Heart of Darkness, Penguin Books, 1994 Dickens, Ch., Bleak House, Penguin Books, 1994 Morgan , Kenneth O. (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain, Oxford University Press, 2000

Conrad, J., Heart of Darkness, Penguin Books, 1994, pp. 6-7