The success of this first novel made Dickens famous. At the same time it influenced the publishing industry in Great Britain, being issued in a rather unusual form, that of inexpensive monthly installments; this method of publication quickly became popular among Dickens's contemporaries. Dickens subsequently maintained his fame with a constant stream of novels. A man of enormous energy and wide talents, he also engaged in many other activities. He edited weekly periodicals, administered charitable organizations, and pressed for many social reforms. In 1842 he lectured in the United States in favor of an international copyright agreement and in opposition to slavery.
Dickens's extra-literary activities also included managing a theatrical company that played before Queen Victoria in 1851 and giving public readings of his own works in England and America. As Dickens matured artistically, his novels developed from comic tales based on the adventures of a central character, like The Pickwick Papers, to works of great social relevance, psychological insight, and narrative and symbolic complexity.
Among his fine works are Bleak House, Little Dorritt, Great Expectations (1860-1861), and Our Mutual Friend. Readers usually prized Dickens's earlier novels for their humor and pathos. While recognizing the virtues of these books, critics today tend to rank more highly the later works because of their formal coherence and acute perception of the human condition.
The novel Great Expectations is considered one of the most satisfying of all Dickens' books. Its tone varies a great deal – it is comic, cheerful, satirical, wry, critical, sentimental, dark, dramatic, foreboding, Gothic, and often sympathetic. As far as themes go, the novel contains one which is ambition and the desire for self-improvement – social, economic, educational, and moral. It is also a book telling the story of maturation and the growth from childhood to adulthood. The writer emphasizes the importance of affection, loyalty, and sympathy over social advancement and class superiority. Above all, the novel speaks directly about the difficulty of maintaining superficial moral and social categories in a constantly changing world.
One of Dickens' projects was the magazine Household Words. It was to this magazine that he requested a contribution from a female writer whose name was Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865). Dickens came to know her after the success of her first published novel. It was Mary Barton, a Tale of Manchester Life (1848), an attack on the behavior of factory employers during the 1840s, which was the time of depression and hardship for the British working class.
Gaskell contributed the papers to Dickens' magazine which were later published under the title of Cranford. This book, concerning elegant gentility among women in a country town, has become an English classic.
Gaskell is the novelist known for her compassion toward her subjects, and skillful narrative style. Her other works include a biography of her friend, the novelist Charlotte Bronte, published two years after Bronte had died.
Another great realist is William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-63). He was a novelist and humorist, one of the foremost exponents of the 19th-century realistic novel. His most famous work is Vanity Fair.
Thackeray was born in India. He entered the University of Cambridge. Leaving the university without taking his degree, he attempted to develop his literary and artistic abilities, first as the editor of a short-lived journal and subsequently as an art student in Paris. Thackeray began the serial publication of his great satirical novel Vanity Fair early in 1847, quickly establishing a reputation as one of the major literary figures of his time.
Thackeray is particularly noted for his exquisitely humorous and ironic portrayals of the middle and upper classes of his time. His narrative skill and vivid characterizations are strikingly evident in his masterpiece Vanity Fair, an elaborate study of social relationships in early 19th-century England. The character of Becky Sharp, a scheming adventuress, is drawn with consummate skill, serving as a model for the heroines of many later novels. Thackeray's keen awareness of social eccentricity is seen also in his short works, especially in The Rose and the Ring, in which his own clever drawings accent the text.
In other novels he broadened his observation of social situations to various eras and locales. These widely acclaimed works brought Thackeray new recognition. He became a principal competitor of his great contemporary, Charles Dickens, with whom he frequently disagreed on the nature of the novel as a vehicle for social commentary.
The Victorian age saw a great number of female authors whose works are still widely read and admired. The talents of the Bronte sisters produced the works that have become beloved classics.
Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855), Emily (Jane) Bronte (1818-1848), and Anne Bronte (1820-1849), and their brother (Patrick) Branwell Bronte (1817-1848), were born in Yorkshire. Their father, Patrick Bronte, who had been born in Ireland, was appointed rector of a village on the Yorkshire moors. When their mother died, Charlotte and Emily were sent to join their older sisters Maria and Elizabeth at the Clergy Daughters' School; this was the original on which was modeled the infamous Lowood School of Jane Eyre.
The children's imaginations transmuted a set of wooden soldiers into characters in a series of stories they wrote about the imaginary kingdom of Angria and the kingdom of Gondal.
Charlotte went away to school again, returning home a year later to continue her education and teach her sisters. She returned to school as a teacher, taking Emily with her. At 24, conceiving the idea of opening a small private school of their own, and to improve their French, Charlotte and Emily went to Brussels, to a private boarding school. The death of their aunt, who had kept house for the family, compelled their return, however. In 1845 the family was together again.
Charlotte's discovery of Emily's poems led to the decision to have the sisters' verses published; these appeared, at their own expense, as Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell (1846), each sister using her own initials in these pseudonyms. Two copies were sold. Each sister then embarked on a novel.
Charlotte's Jane Eyre was published first, in 1847; Anne's Agnes Grey and Emily's Wuthering Heights appeared a little later that year. Speculation about the authors' identities was rife until they visited London and met their publishers.
On their return they found Branwell near death. Emily caught cold at his funeral, and died December 19, 1848. Anne too died, on May 28, 1849. Alone now with her father, Charlotte resumed work on the novel Shirley (1849). This was the least successful of her novels.
Charlotte married her father's curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls. Pregnant in 1855, she became ill and died that year of tuberculosis.
Since their deaths, new generations of readers have been fascinated by the circumstances of the sisters' lives, their untimely deaths, and their astonishing achievements. Jane Eyre's popularity has never waned; it is a passionate expression of female issues and concerns. The transcendent masterpiece, however, is almost certainly Emily's novel Wuthering Heights, a story of passionate love, in which irreconcilable principles of energy and calm are ultimately harmonized. Emily Bronte was a mystic, as her poetry shows, and Wuthering Heights dramatizes her intuitive apprehension of the nature of life.
Perhaps, the best known Victorian female poet was Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861). She was also political thinker and feminist. Browning was privately educated. She started publishing poetry at the age of 20. She was incapacitated for nearly a decade after 1838 as a result of a childhood spinal injury and lung ailment. She continued writing, however, and produced a volume of poems. These verses were so highly regarded that when William Wordsworth died, Browning was suggested as his successor as poet laureate of England.
She was 39 when the poet Robert Browning began to write to Elizabeth to praise her poetry. Their romance was bitterly opposed by her father. However, the couple eloped and settled in Florence, Italy, where Elizabeth regained her health and bore a son at age 43. Her Sonnets from the Portuguese, dedicated to her husband and written in secret before her marriage, was published in 1850. Critics generally consider the Sonnets, one of the most widely known collections of love lyrics in English, to be her best work.
SONNET XXXVIII
First time he kissed me, he but only kissed
The fingers of this hand wherewith I write;
And, ever since, it grew more clean and white,..
Slow to world-greeting, quick with its 'Oh, list',
When the angels speak. A ring of amethyst
I could not wear here, plainer to my sight,
Than that first kiss. The second passed in height
The first, and sought the forehead, and half missed
Half falling on the hair. O beyond meed!
That was the chrism of love, which love's own crown,
With sanctifying sweetness, did precede.
The third upon my lips was folded down
In perfect, purple state; since when, indeed,
I have been proud and said, 'My love, my own'.
She expressed her intense sympathy with the struggle for the unification of Italy in her poems. Her longest and most ambitious work is the didactic, romantic poem in blank verse Aurora Leigh, in which she defends a woman's right to intellectual freedom and addresses the concerns of the female artist.
English lyric poet Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) wrote different kinds of verses. Much of Rossetti's work was religious in nature; the themes of renunciation of earthly love and concern with death shadow such favorite poems as “When I am dead, my dearest” and “Up-Hill.” Other poems are earthy, romantic, and sensuous. Rossetti's work encompasses a wide range of styles and forms. Her ballads, sonnets, love lyrics, and nonsense rhymes are all clearly products of an accomplished mind. A devout Anglican, Rossetti spent the last 15 years of her life as a recluse. At the same time, she wrote delightful verse for children.
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