• Victorian Literature

The Victorian age gave rise to a new trend in literature – critical realism. The best-known poets of the period were Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning and Robert Louis Stevenson. Alfred Tennyson made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832). In his early work Tennyson brought an exquisite lyric gift to late-Romantic subject matter, but in the major poems of his middle period Tennyson combined the larger scale required by his new ambitions with his original gift or the brief lyric by building long poems out of short ones.

But the dominant form of literature during the Victorian period wasthe novel. Early Victorian literature includes some of the greatest and most popular novels ever written. Political novels, religious novels, historical novels, sporting novels, Irish novels, crime novels, and comic novels all flourished in this period. Most novelists of the period wrote long works with many characters.

Charles Dickens (1812–1870), the greatest master of the century, exhibited an astonishing ability to create living characters. His novels Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, Great Expectations and others put among the best writers in worlds literature. His exposures of social evils and his powers of caricature and humour have won him a vast readership. Even during his lifetime Dickens became the national symbol of the country. He invented the theatre for one author, and gave public readings from his novels.

Another master of characterization, William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1883), the author of Vanity Fair, was a popular writer, working for the enlarged reading public of his day, and especially for serial publication. Both authors were humourists, sentimentalists and social satirists. But instead of writing about the lower classes and social injustice, Thackeray satirized romantic sentimentality and the snobbishness of upper-class life.

The 19^th century saw a surprisingly big number of women-writers who did not only write for pleasure, but left a substantial trace in English literature. One of them was Jane Austen, the author of Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma. She had a witty mind and wrote about right judgement, right behaviour and the formation of character.

Elizabeth Gaskell remains best-known for the novel Mary Barton in which she describes with realism and sympathy the lives of industrial and agricultural workers in the wake of the Chartist movement.

George Eliot is the pen-name of Mary Ann Evans. Her best-known novels are The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner. Eliot was the first among the English novelists to develop an interest in factors that contribute to making people what they are, the first to analyze these factors and to show them at work. The idea is manifested in Silas Marner, which is a wonderful study of English provincial life, rural speech and character.

The famous Brontё sisters, Charlotte and Emily, brought up in poor surroundings, wrote the books which rank among the most popular novels of the century. Charlotte Brontё’s Jane Eyre describes the life of a poor and plain-looking girl who has a strong character and wins her happiness. Charlotte’s sister, Emily Brontё, is the author of one of the greatest English novels, Wuthering Heights. In the opinion of some critics no woman could have written it. The novel has been compared to Shakespeare’s King Lear, chiefly because of its immense and uncontrollable passions.

The Irish-born intellectual Oscar Wilde was a poet, a writer and a dramatist. He led an eccentric life that fuelled his witty satires and epigrams on Victorian society. As a member of the aesthetic movement in literature, Wilde advocated the idea of art for art’s sake. His works include two collections of fairy stories, the only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, a few poems and four comedies – Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest. The plays sparkle with clever paradoxes and witty dialogues.

• Pre-Raphaelites

In the middle of the century, in 1848, a group of seven young men, led by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (‘PRB’). They aimed to revolutionize British art by painting serious subjects directly from nature, with vivid realism of detail. Their chosen name reflected their wish to return to the sincerity and simplicity of the artists of the Middle Ages. Their subjects were to tackle modern social problems – drink, prostitution, gambling and so on. They often had a religious message, as in Holman Hunt’s “The Awakening Conscience”. The young woman in the picture is the kept mistress of the man. She had jumped up from her lover’s lap and is staring out of the window at the brilliant light we can see reflected in the large mirror behind her. The light symbolizes Christ, and Hunt’s title indicates that she has had a crisis of conscience and has realized the moral horror of her situation. The Pre-Raphaelites illustrated history, mythology and literature; they brought a new concern for truth to life and human psychology.

DO YOU KNOW THAT
The name of Wellington got into the English language thanks to the high boots he used to wear. In Modem English the word “wellingtons” means high rubber boots. It was after the first name of Robert Peel (Robert – Bob – Bobby) that London policemen were nicknamed ‘bobbies’. The world’s highest award to a nurse today is the Florence Nightingale medal.	?