0333672267_A_History_of_English_Literature

Fergus and his clansmen face death bravely. Flora becomes a Benedictine nun in Paris. Waverley marries Rose Bradwardine: a happy Union! But the orotund prose is not naively Romantic: the too-picturesque vision by the waterfall is presented with some irony. Like Don Quixote and Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, Waverley falls for images from books. The making of the trews by James of the Needle is a parody of the arming of an epic hero. The tragic Highland romance is set inside a British novel about a young Englishman who wisely marries a Lowland Scot.

Scott’s success was immediate, immense, international. Waverley was followed by twenty-five Scottish historical novels, notably The Antiquary (1816), Old Mortality (1816), The Heart of Midlothian (1818) and Redgauntlet (1824), and English medieval romances, beginning with Ivanhoe (1819); also numbers of plays, biographies, essays, and editions. Thanks to Scott, Edinburgh saw the Prince Regent in a kilt (and pink tights) taking a dram of whisky: a swallow which made the summer of Scottish tourism. Scott, the first Briton to be made a baronet for writing books, may be the most influential of all British novelists. His historical novels use a new social history to recreate the past through characters imaginary and real. He combined wide reading in 18th-century antiquarians with fluent composition and narrative. Leisurely and

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detailed in exposition, he sets up several centres of interest; the action hen develops energy and drama. He made the past imaginable, with a sympathetic grasp of the motives and influences shaping the actions of groups and individuals. His characterization is benign, detached, shrewd, humorous, owing much to 18th-century theatrical traditions of external representation, but very wide in its social scope, with pungent low-life characters. His reconstruction of how things happen in history is broad, penetrating and subtle, and his plots are expertly managed. In his Scottish novels he sought to make the differing versions of Scottish history mutually intelligible to their inheritors, using a new relativistic historical and anthropological approach to reconcile sectarian traditions, so that a Scotland who understood herself could be known to England. Scott was a patriot and a Unionist.

The greatest commercial success of ‘the Wizard of the North’ was Ivanhoe, the first of the English romances which succeeded his Scottish novels. It created the costume-drama industry which turns out ‘good reads’ and bodice-rippers. In Scott’s English medieval pageants, drawn from reading rather than local knowledge, the use of theatrically-posed scenes, as of Flora MacIvor at the waterfall, loses both irony and Scottish iron. His popularity and reputation eventually faded, and his generosity of style means that he seems long-winded compared with his snappier imitators. The success of Ivanhoe and its sequels should not conceal the achievement of the author of Waverley, a historical novelist of range, grasp and balance.

Jane Austen

Jane Austen (1775-1817) grew up in the quiet country parish of her father, the Rev, George Austen, in a family where literature was the chief amusement. One of her

five elder brothers became her father’s curate and successor. She wrote for pleasure in childhood, and as an adult chose to work on ‘3 or 4 families in a country village’: the world she knew. Her wit, workmanship and background are not Romantic but Augustan and 18th-century Anglican, like the ideals of the older country gentry she depicts.

Despite its sudden spring in the mid-18th century, the novel became a major form again only after 1800. Before Austen, there were Gothic tales, novels of sensibility like Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling, the social entertainments of Fanny Burney and Charlotte Smith, and Godwin’s experiments of ideas, but the novel reached perfection with Jane Austen. It went on to popularity, periodical publication, and bigger things.

‘And what are you reading Miss —?’ ‘Oh, it is only a novel’, replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. – ‘It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda’; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusion of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.

Thus Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey. (Cecilia and Camilla are novels by Fanny Burney; Belinda, a novel by Maria Edgeworth.)

In her brilliant fragment, Love and Friendship, the 14-year-old Austen mocks the novel of feminine sensibility, and in Northanger Abbey, begun in 1798, the silliness of Gothic. Catherine Morland reflects: ‘Charming as were all Mrs Radcliffe’s works, and charming even as were the works of all her imitators, it was not in them perhaps that human nature, at least in the Midland counties of England, was to be looked

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[Figure omitted: ‘Tales of Wonder’ (1802), by James Gillray, a print caricaturing the Gothic craze. Tales of Wonder was the title of a collection of verse tales of horror published by M. G. Lewis in 1801. The ladies listen to Lewis’s The Monk.]

for.' She learned from Fanny Burney, but preferred Cowper, Crabbe and the moral essays of Johnson to the fiction of wishfulfilment.

After juvenilia written to entertain her family, she dedicated herself to the novel. Her novels are cast in the form of the comedy of manners: accuracy of social behaviour and dialogue, moral realism, elegance of style, and ingenuity of plot. For all her penetration and intelligence, Austen is distinctly a moral idealist. The mistress of irony unfolds a Cinderella tale ending in an engagement. The heroine, typically of good family but with little money, has no recognized prospect but marriage; no wish to marry without love; and no suitable man in sight. After trials and moral discoveries, virtue wins. Of the few professional

novelists before her, none is so consistent. Formally, Austen’s fiction has the drastic selectivity of drama, and, like Racine, gains thereby. The moral life of her time is clear in her pages, although the history is social not national. Two of her brothers, however, became admirals; and in Persuasion, amid the vanities of Bath, she rejoices in the challenge of naval officers to the old social hierarchy. Her comedy of manners accepts the presence or absence of rank, wealth, brains, beauty and masculinity as facts, and as factors in society, while placing goodness, rationality and love above them. Such comedy is not trivial, unless a woman’s choice of husband is trivial. For all her fun and sharp-edged wit, Austen’s central concern is with the integrity of a woman’s affections. Her novels become increasingly moving.

The bright Northanger Abbey and the dark Sense and Sensibility are preparatory to the well-managed gaiety of Pride and Prejudice, which the author came to find ‘too light, bright and sparkling’. It is certainly simpler than the serious Mansfield Park, the classical Emma and the autumnal Persuasion. It is hard to choose between these. Mansfield Park is not about the education of its heroine: her example educates others. Amidst complex social comedy, the plain and simple Fanny Price, a poor niece brought up at Mansfield in its splendid park but not sophisticated by it, resists the predatory charm of visitors from London. Edmund, her admired cousin, eventually realizes the beauty of her nature.

Moral worth is recommended less directly in Emma, a work of art designed with economical symmetry. ‘Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to dis-

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Jane Austen aged c.35. A pencil and watercolour sketch made by her sister Cassandra in c.1810, the only likeness to show Jane Austen’s face.

tress or vex her.’ Emma, the queen of the village, prides herself on her perceptiveness, and decides that Harriet Smith, a pretty seventeen-year-old of unknown birth whom she takes up, is too good to marry a local farmer. Emma invites her to the house to meet the new parson, who misinterprets the encouragement and proposes to Emma. This is only the first, however, of Emma’s mistaken efforts to marry off Harriet. Austen so manages appearances that the reader shares Emma’s dangerous delusions. Virtually everybody in the book is misled by their imagination. In this sense, Austen is squarely anti-Romantic.

Emma, doted upon by her old father, believes that she herself will not marry. ‘But still, you will be an old maid!’ says Harriet, ‘and that’s so dreadful!’ ‘Never mind, Harriet,’ Emma replies, ‘I shall not be a poor old maid; and it is poverty only which makes celibacy contemptible to a generous public!’ Both may be thinking of a garrulous old spinster in the village, the good-hearted Miss Bates, an old friend of the family who is neither handsome, clever nor rich. The normally considerate Emma is later carried away by the playfulness of Frank Churchill at a picnic, and in a chance remark publicly ridicules the dullness of Miss Bates. For this cruelty she is rebuked by Mr Knightley, a worthy family friend who has the judgement Emma’s father lacks. Further misunderstandings ensue: Harriet Smith fancies that Mr Knightley is interested in her; Knightley

thinks that Emma is taken with Frank Churchill. But Mr Churchill suddenly reveals that he has been secretly engaged to the mysterious Jane Fairfax.

Emma is walking in the garden when Knightley calls. ‘They walked together. He was silent. She thought he was often looking at her, and trying for a fuller view of her face than it suited her to give.’ In Jane Austen’s tightly-governed world, this is intimacy and drama. After Knightley has chivalrously consoled Emma for the pain caused her by Mr Churchill’s engagement, and has been undeceived, he declares his love and entreats her to speak. Miss Austen now teases her reader: ‘What did she say? - Just what she ought, of course. A lady always does.’ Reticence resumes. Yet Knightley comments on Mr Churchill’s secret engagement: ‘Mystery; Finesse - how they pervert the understanding! My Emma, does not every thing serve to prove more and

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more the beauty of truth and sincerity in all our dealings with each other?’ Although Miss Austen smiles at the man’s vehemence, she too admires truth, sincerity and plain-dealing. This is both Augustan, Romantic and romantic.

Persuasion is for devotees her most touching and interesting novel. Eight years before the novel begins, the 19-year-old Anne Elliott was persuaded by Lady Russell, a friend of her dead mother, to break off her engagement with Wentworth, a man whom she loved, accepting Lady Russell’s view that he was: ‘a young man, who had nothing but himself to recommend him, and no hopes of attaining affluence, but in the chances of a most uncertain profession [the navy], and no connexions to secure even his farther rise in that profession ...’. Captain Wentworth returns rich, and, he tells his sister, ‘ready to make a foolish match. Any body between fifteen and thirty may have me for asking. A little beauty, and a few smiles, and a few compliments to the navy, and I am a lost man.’ Nevertheless, ‘Anne Elliot was not out of his thoughts, when he more seriously described the woman he should wish to meet with. “A strong mind, with sweetness of manner,” made the first and last of the description.’

Wentworth is persuaded that a woman who broke her engagement does not have a strong mind; and Anne is persuaded that Wentworth cannot think of her. He is soon involved with Louisa Musgrove, but when Louisa has a fall, it is Anne who is calm and useful. Earlier, Wentworth had silently relieved Anne of the attentions of a troublesome two-year-old while she is engaged in looking after the child's sick brother. In a letter to a friend, Maria Edgeworth comments on this passage: ‘Don’t you see Captain Wentworth, or rather, don’t you in her place feel him, taking the boisterous child off her back as she kneels by the sick boy on the sofa?’

In this short novel - concluded as the author became very ill - gesture and silence develop emotional expressiveness. At the climax, Anne takes her opportunity to make it clear to Wentworth - indirectly, but persuasively - that she loves him still. Wentworth is sitting writing at a table in a room full of people as Anne is engaged in debate by a naval officer who claims that men’s love is more constant than women’s love. Wentworth listens to her reply, which ends: ‘All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one, you need not covet it) is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone.’ When compared with the plot of Emma, that of Persuasion is theatrically conventional, especially on its ‘wicked’ side; but the central relationship is magically managed.

No 19th-century successor in the novel or the theatre approaches the economy in dialogue and action Austen developed by formal discipline and concentration of theme. (Her novels offered ‘an admirable copy of life’, but lacked imagination, according to Wordsworth, who lacked the kind of imagination she relied on in a reader.) She also seems to be the first English prose writer since Julian of Norwich who is clearly superior to male contemporaries in the same field. A finer novelist than Scott, she confirmed the novel as a genre belonging significantly to women writers as well as women readers.

Towards Victoria

The literary lull which followed the early deaths of Keats, Shelley and Byron is a true age of transition, the period of the Great Reform Bill of 1832. Features of the Victorian age began to appear: liberal legislation, a triumphant middle class, industrial advance, proletarian unrest, religious renewal. When Victoria came to the throne,

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the warning voices of Keble and Carlyle were audible. Among the young writers were Tennyson, the Brownings, Thackeray and Dickens.

periodically tried to make sense of it; Matthew Arnold criticized it; Mrs Gaskell reflected it and reflected on it. Anthony Trollope represented it.

Moral history

Although literature is never merely history, the novel becomes a moral history of modern life with Dickens and Thackeray, elaborately so in George Eliot’s Middlernarch, a novel exemplifying a principle Eliot derived from Scott: ‘there is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life’. Yet the wider life was interesting to George Eliot (the pen-name of Mary Ann Evans) because it shaped the moral and emotional life of single persons. In keeping with this Romantic priority, her characters are more personal than Scott’s.

George Eliot (1819-80) was one of many who sought after wisdom in an age of shaken certitudes and robust consciences. Clergymen, sages and critics wrote lessons and lectures for the breakfast-table and the tea-table. These were later bound up in tomes with marbled endpapers. Few are unshelved today, except in universities. The Victorian books living today are chiefly novels, and these novels (despite the ‘authenticity’ of their modern film versions) do not hold up a mirror to the age. Victorians produced impressive reports on the London poor, on the factories of Manchester and on urban sanitation, but a documentary social realism was not the rule in Victorian fiction.

One reason for this lies in the subjective and imaginative character of Romantic literature of the years 1798-1824, which altered the nature of non-factual writing. The simple pleasure of vicarious egotism died with Byron, but books, annuals and

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periodicals brought a regulated Romanticism into Victorian homes - via, for example, Jane Austen’s novels. In this simple sense, all subsequent literature - even the anti-Romantic literature of the modernists - is post-Romantic. Victorian narrative history has much in common with novel-writing. Scott’s wish to tell the tale of the tribe was felt by Thackeray, Dickens and George Eliot, who re-create the worlds

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surrounding their childhoods. In an age of disorienting change, historical thinking was incited by the blasts of Carlyle’s trumpet in his French Revolution, Heroes and Hero-worship and Past and Present. The effects of Carlyle can be read in Ruskin, Dickens and William Morris.

Abundance

An eager reading public, larger than before, was regularly fed with serials and three-decker novels. Collected editions of popular novelists and best-selling prophets, and of fastidious prose-writers such as John Henry Newman and Walter Paten run to many volumes. In an age when engineering miracles appeared every month and London had several postal deliveries a day, Dickens was thought hyperactive. Trollope wrote 2-3000 words daily before going to work at the Post Office. He invented the pillar box, rode to hounds midweek and Saturday, and wrote seventy books. The verse of a Tennyson, a Browning or a Morris is not contained in a thousand pages. Lesser writers such as Benjamin Disraeli, Bulwer Lytton, Charles Kingsley, Mrs Oliphant and Vernon Lee were equally prolific. Victorian vim continued less cheerfully in Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Joseph Conrad and the Edwardian Ford Madox Ford. Thereafter, serious novelists became less productive, though D. H. Lawrence (18851930) and the American William Faulkner (1897-1962) are exceptions.

To some, such abundance already seemed oppressive long before 1914. But by the time Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians came out in 1918, most of what the Victorians had believed, assumed and hoped had died. Strachey’s debunkings of Cardinal Manning, Dame Florence Nightingale, Dr Thomas Arnold and General Gordon sold well. Victorians enjoyed laughing at themselves with Dickens, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, W. S. Gilbert and Oscar Wilde, and had a genius for light verse and for nonsense verse (not the same thing). But the modernists ridiculed the Victorians, who are still not always taken seriously, even by academics. Although universities have reinvested heavily in Victorian literary culture, quality remains the criterion in a critical history. Much of this literary abundance is of human or of cultural interest. How much of it is of artistic value?

Queen Victoria opening the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace, Hyde Park, London, 1 May 1851.

extraordinary in form and style. Once devoured for its message, the book’s chaotic style makes it hard reading.

After arduous years studying German thought and translating Goethe, Carlyle moved from Craigenputtock, Dumfries, to Chelsea, where his History of the French Revolution made him famous. Scornful of metaphysical and materialist thinkers, he forged a faith in Life, in intuition and action, and in historical heroes who transcended human limitation. His great man - statesman, priest, man of action, captain of industry, man of letters - achieves his vision with energy. Earnest action is itself good; the vision itself is secondary. Carlyle’s shrewdness, trenchancy and conviction cannot hide a want of mind, a substitution of means for ends. It is an attitude which prepared the way for the ‘world-historical’ man, the Hitlers and Stalins of the religion of humanity.

Carlyle was one of the first to diagnose the ills that industrial capitalism brought to society. He saw the plight of the factory hand whose labour was the source o wealth: with no stake or pride in the processes to which he was enslaved; exploited, underpaid, discarded (unemployment was high in the 1840s) and condemned to the workhouse. Carlyle’s analysis was admired by Karl Marx when he took refuge in

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liberal England. Marx’s solution was political: class war, and the victory of the proletariat. The warning of Carlyle was moral: those to whom evil is done do evil in return. The remedy, in Past and Present, lies in renewing old arrangements: leaders who work, a renewed feudalism. Carlyle argues that Gurth, the Saxon swineherd of Scott’s Ivanhoe, knew his master, his place, and the value of his work. Unlike the factory hand, the serf Gurth was spiritually free. This idealization of the mutual respect between the different ranks of pre-industrial society, found in Burke, Scott, Cobbett’s Rural Rides (1821-) and Pugin’s Contrasts (1836), is found again in Disraeli, Ruskin and even Morris. Anti-capitalist, it more often took a paternalist than a progressive form. Carlyle’s political legacy was mistrust of revolution and fear of the mob, given unforgettable expression in his French Revolution, a source of Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities.

John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill (1806-73) was the son of James Mill (1773-1836), a Scot intended for the ministry who came to London, like Carlyle. A friend of the economist David Ricardo and the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, James forced his infant son through a famously stiff educational programme.

At 16, J. S. Mill founded the Utilitarian Society to study Bentham’s idea that all policy should be judged by the criterion of what furthered ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ by the use of a ‘felicific calculus’. As Mill recounts in his Autobiography (1873), he had as a young adult ‘felt taken up to an eminence from which I could see an immense mental domain, and see stretching out into the distance intellectual results beyond all computation.’ This biblical metaphor recalls both Swift’s Academy of Projectors, and Bentham’s Panopticon, a design for a workhouse where every inmate could be supervised by a single all-seeing person. (All inmates could see the supervisor’s elevated observation-room, but could not tell whether he was there watching them.) British reformers used Bentham’s planning throughout the 19th century, but his reductive and mechanistic model of society was anathema to Carlyle and Dickens (see the illustration on page 255).

At 20, Mill suffered a depression from which he was rescued by reading Wordsworth’s poetry – ‘the very culture of the feelings which I was in quest of’. Mill’s lucid essays on Bentham and Coleridge balance rational material improvement with emotional and spiritual growth. They are a good starting-place for an understanding of post-Romantic culture, and an advertisement for the 19th-century liberal mentality. Intellectual clarity marks the prose of On Liberty (1859), Principles of Political Economy (1848) and Utilitarianism (1863).

John Ruskin

The most Romantic prose of the Victorian sages is found in John Ruskin (1819-1900). His eloquent reaction to social problems had a spellbinding effect on the thought and lives of the young: on William Morris and Oscar Wilde, on Gandhi, who read him on trains in South Africa, and on Marcel Proust, who translated him (with some help) into French. Ruskin, untrained in aesthetics, was to be England’s great art critic. He next turned from art and architecture to society, denouncing the ugly greed of England, and eventually, in apocalyptic tones, the pollution of the natural world by ‘the Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century’.

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Ruskin’s greatness is as striking as his singularity, an instance of the effect of Evangelicalism and Romanticism on an only child. Of his first sight (at 14) of the Swiss Alps at sunset, he wrote (at 70) that ‘the seen walls of lost Eden could not have been more beautiful’. Like the Alps at sunset, Ruskin’s works are vast, awe-inspiring and easy to get lost in. He is like Coleridge in his range, but less metaphysical and more moral in his discursiveness. He has passages of rhythmical harmony almost as beautiful as Tennyson’s verse: of rapt perception and analytic description, of social insight and prophetic force. Of his passages of description, Virginia Woolf wrote that it is as if ‘all the fountains of the English language had been set playing in the sunlight’. He was an enchanting public lecturer, but could run self-persuaded into oddity or obsession. Ruskin, like Carlyle and Dickens, confronted by the brutality and waste of industrial society and by the amoral neutrality of political economists, felt outrage. He proposed radical and collective human solutions both in the arts and in politics. He lost the narrowness of his upbringing, but regained Christian belief. He called himself a Tory of the school of Homer and Sir Walter Scott and a ‘communist, reddest of the red’.

Ruskin’s first major work, Modern Painters (5 volumes, 1843-60), was interrupted by The Seven Lamps of Architecture and The Stones of Venice (3 volumes,