The Victorian Achievement in Prose

The idea

Victorian prose made the novel the dominant form and realism its hallmark. Published in serial instalments and three volumes for the circulating libraries, novels reached a mass readership. Dickens, the factory boy turned reporter, exposed the workhouse in Oliver Twist, the law in Bleak House and the cult of facts in Hard Times, told orphans' lives in David Copperfield and Great Expectations, and converted Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. The Brontës, publishing as Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, gave a governess her voice in Jane Eyre, layered a moorland passion in Wuthering Heights and wrote an early feminist novel in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Thackeray's Vanity Fair had no hero; Gaskell took the condition of England to the mills; George Eliot defended the faithful representing of commonplace things and wove a whole town into Middlemarch; Trollope chronicled Barsetshire; Collins invented sensation and helped found the detective novel; Hardy set tragic lives in Wessex. Prose argument flourished: Carlyle's condition-of-England question, Ruskin's truth to nature, Mill's liberty and women's equality, Newman's Apologia, Arnold's sweetness and light against the Philistines, Pater's gem-like flame and Darwin's Origin. At the century's end the Gothic returned in Jekyll and Hyde, Dorian Gray and Dracula, decadence prized art over life, Holmes made the short story popular, and Wilde's Earnest turned epigram into satire while Shaw began his plays of ideas. To answer a Victorian prose question, identify the narrator or the arguer, find the social facts or the opponent, and name the author by voice.