THE VICTORIAN NOVEL

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THE VICTORIAN NOVEL

• Period
• Themes
• Setting
• Characters
• Narrator
• Narrative techniques
• Anti-Victorian novel

ILARIA BIGNOLIN 5B
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PERIOD the Victorian Age

• In Great Britain, under the reign of Queen
  Victorian (1819-1901)
• The following age of the Industrial Revolution

• ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL SITUATION
• increase of factories
• birth of the working class
• - enrichment of the middle class

• Readers lower and middle class, then also
  legislators, opinion formers and those who could
  vote.

NOVEL considered simpler than Poetry
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THEMES

• CLASS the clash between lower and middle class
  due to economic reasons.

es. Oliver Twist, Hard Times, Nicholas Nickleby,
by Charles Dikens.

• FAMILY LIFE the typical bourgeois family.

es. Hard Times, by Charles Dickens.
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SETTING
THEMES 2
PURITANISM an hidden theme the religious values
that influence middle class behaviour.
es. Oliver Twist.
CITY the expression of Industrial civilization.
es. Oliver Twist, Hard Times, Nicholas Nickleby.
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CHARACTERS

• from middle and lower class
• the virtuous are too virtuous and the villains
  are too villains
• children and women, symbols of weakness.

• Characterization
• by describing his/her actions
• es. Nicholas from Nicholas Nickleby (Nicholas
  shrugged his shoulders).
• by what he/her says
• es. Mr.Bounderby from Hard Times (a man who
  could never sufficiently vaunt himself a
  self-made man)
• es. Miss Rebecca Sharp from William Makepiece
  Thackerays Vanity Fair (thank God, Im out of
  Chiswick. I hate the whole house).

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NARRATOR

• omnicient he knoes everything about everything,
  he chooses the facts to present to the reader and
  he creates a dialogue with him/her.

es. Hard Times (let us strike), Oliver Twist,
Nicholas Nickleby (he could not but observe).

• intrusive he influences the readers opinion
  about facts and characters by filtering them with
  his own view.

es. Vanity Fair (Miss Rebecca answered Im no
angel and, to say the truth, she certainly was
not).
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NARRATIVE TECHNIQUES

• pathos.

es. the children sat crouching and shivering
together, and seemed to lack the spirit to move
about from Nicholas Nickleby.

• grotesque.

es. Oliver Twist and his companions suffered the
torture of slow starvation for three months from
Oliver Twist.

• caricature.

es. he was a rich man banker, merchant,
manufacturer, and what not from Hard Times.
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THE ANTI-VICTORIAN NOVEL
from Thomas Hardys Jude The Obscure

• characters they arent caricatures (at sight
  of this Sues nerves uttelry gave away, an awful
  convinction that her discourse with the boy had
  been the main cause of the tragedy).

• Victorian values they arent respected (the
  first union of Jude).

• Victorian philosophy there is no positivism (
  done because we are too menny, for the
  misfortunes of those parents he had died, Jude
  has kept back his own grief on account of her,
  but he now broke down).