The document discusses novelists of the Victorian era in England. It describes how novels shifted from focusing on action to character development. Novelists used their works to shed light on social problems caused by industrialization, such as child labor. The first generation of Victorian novelists, including Dickens, Thackeray, and Gaskell, addressed contemporary issues through satire, morality tales, and realistic depictions of society. Women writers like the Bronte sisters also produced notable works during this time period examining issues like class and gender. The second generation of novelists, such as Eliot, Hardy, and Meredith, took a more literary approach with greater psychological depth and focus on how Darwinian ideas were transforming views of humanity.

1. St Xavier’s College, Mahuadanr
Novelists in the Victorian Age
A significant shift in the English Novel in its movement from the 18th
to the 19th
century was the change of emphasis from action to character. They gave primacy to the
character as opposed to Neo-classical novelists who gave more importance to action.
The novelists represented society as they saw it but, being aware of the problems
created by industrialization, (exploitation of women and children, terrible living conditions
etc) they used their novels in order to put in evidence these evils and to stimulate people to
find remedies to them. In this sense “didacticism” was the dominating aim of most of the
novels of these years. As a consequence the narrator is generally omniscient: he operates a
marked division between good and evil characters, he judges people and actions, he makes
its stories finish with a wise distribution of “punishment” for the evil characters, “retribution”
for the good ones.
Novelists of the Victorian Period
First Generation Novelists
The early Victorian or first-generation novelists comprised of William Thackrey, Charles
Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Mrs Gaskell etc.
Although there were several more novelists of the time, only the ones mentioned here have
survived the test of time and are considered representative of the early phase of the Victorian
fiction in England.
They chose for their themes the specific contemporary problems of the Victorian society
caused by the predominance of industrialism and utilitarianism and wrote about them
sometimes as satirists, sometimes as humanists, sometimes as moralists.

2. CHARLES DICKENS:
Charles Dickens is the most famous Victorian novelist. Extraordinarily popular in his day with
his characters taking on a life of their own beyond the page, Dickens is still one of the most
popular and read authors of that time period.
Dickens worked diligently and prolifically to produce the entertaining writing that the public
wanted, but also to offer commentary on social problems and the plight of the poor and
oppressed. His most important works include Oliver Twist (1837–1838), Dombey and
Son (1846–1848), Bleak House (1852–1853), Great Expectations (1860–1861), Little
Dorrit (1855–1857), and Our Mutual Friend (1864–1865) The Old Curiosity Shop. There is a
gradual trend in his fiction towards darker themes which mirrors a tendency in much of the
writing of the 19th century.
William Thackeray was Dickens' great rival in the first half of Queen Victoria's reign. With a
similar style but a slightly more detached, sharp and unkind satirical view of his characters, he
also tended to depict a more middle class society than Dickens did. He is best known for his
novel Vanity Fair (1848), subtitled A Novel without a Hero, which is an example of a form
popular in Victorian literature: an historical novel in which recent history is depicted.
Women Novelists of the Victorian Era
The era saw a production of women writers. The novel as a genre was initially seen as
feminine literature and as the literacy rate among women increased, a new need for women
writers provide to this section was answered by these writers.
Mrs. Gaskell
Elizabeth Gaskell, popularly called Mrs. Gaskell wrote short stories and novels that
dealt with presenting a social picture of her society in the 1850s. While it was a time when
doubts about material progress reaching the actual lives of the ordinary man were starting to
be raised, Gaskell mostly gave an optimistic view of the time.

3. Mary Barton was her first novel, published in 1848, and North-South as the instrument of
social reforms and sticks to the Victorian concern of presenting the daily life of the middle
class.
Bronte Sisters
Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte were the three famous novelist daughters of Patrick Bronte,
a well-educated man and a writer himself; and Maria Bronte.
Anne, Charlotte and Emily Bronte produced notable works of the period, although these
were not immediately appreciated by Victorian critics. Wuthering Heights (1847), Emily's only
work, is an example of Gothic Romanticism from a woman's point of view, which examines
class, myth, and gender. Jane Eyre (1847), by her sister Charlotte, is another major nineteenth
century novel that has gothic themes. Anne's second novel The Tenant of Wild fell Hall (1848),
written in realistic rather than romantic style, is mainly considered to be the first
sustained feminist novel.
George Eliot
Perhaps the one most famous woman writers, George Eliot still maintains a canonical
status. Her real name was Mary Ann Evans or Marian Evans and she adopted the pseudonym
George Eliot to escape the stereotype attached with women writers and successfully entered
the domain of ‘serious’ writing. She had a controversial personal life and there too was not
hesitant to break the norms of societal feminine boundaries.
2nd Generation Novel and Novelists
If the novels of the early Victorians were written in the 40s and 50s, those of the later
Victorians were published in the 60s and 70s. George Eliot, George Meredith, and Thomas
Hardy all these major novelists of the period started publishing around the end of the 50s or
later.

4. The second-generation Victorian novelists were more ‘literary’ and less ‘popular’ than
the first generation. They had more academic flavors in their writings, more poetic
imagination. They did not have the breadth and variety of the early novelists but they
certainly had a greater depth of characterization and greater intensity of presentation.
Another change that took place in the English novel around the year 1860, was the
shift in its focus from the city with its industrialism and utilitarianism to the village with its
vision of destruction under the threat of the new scientific rationalism and evolutionism,
which started new ethics and human relations inspired by the Darwinian concepts of
“struggle for existence” and “survival of the fittest”.
These new ideas made the novelists look at human society from a new perspective, not as a
static Biblical model existing between the dynamic tension between good and evil, but as an
evolutionary process of human nature, society and civilization, growing on the Darwinian
principles.
2nd Generation Novelists
• THOMAS HARDY: The Desperate Remedies, The Return of the Native, Far From the
Madding Crowd.
• GEORGE ELIOT: Adam Bede, Middlemarch, Romola
• GEORGE MEREDITH: The Egoist, The Shaving of Shagpot
The age hence was important for the rise of the novel as a genre and form which itself saw
transformation within the period. From romanticism to realism, politics to passion, optimism
to pessimism, the novel could successfully deal with the changing mood of the society. Class,
gender, individualism, society all was given space in the novel. The period was known to have
witnessed the massive change of Britain from an agrarian to industrial landscape. All concerns
informed the novel and the novel was made into perhaps the most important genre of the
age and the ones that would follow.