Chapter 7 English Literature of the Victorian Age I.Introduction
1. Historical Background
（1） An age of expansion
（2） The conditions of the workers and the chartist movement
（3） Reforms
（4） Darwin's theory of evolution and its influence
（5） The women question
2. Literary Overview: critical realism.
In Victorian period appeared a new literary trend called critical realism. English critical realism of the 19th century flourished in the 40s and in the early 50s. It found its expression in the form of novel. The critical realists, most of whom were novelists, described with much vividness and artistic skill the chief traits of the English society and criticized the capitalist system from a democratic viewpoint.
II.Novels of Critical Realists.
1. Charles Dickens.
（1） Life:
a. clerk family;
b. a miserable childhood;
c. a clerk, a reporter, a writer;
d. a man of hard work.
（2） works of three periods.
a. optimize
b. frustration
c. pessimism
（3） Features of his works.
a.character sketches and exaggeration
b.broad humour and penetrating satire
c.complicated and fascinating plot
d.the power of exposure
2. William Makepeace Thackeray
（1） Life:
a. born in India;
b. studied in Cambridge;
c. worked as artist and illustrator and writer.
（2） work: The Vanity Fair
（3） Thackeray and Dickens – features
a. Just like Dickens, Thackeray is one of the greatest critical realists of the 19th century Europe. He paints life as he has seen it. With his precise and thorough observation, rich knowledge of social life and of the human heart, the pictures in his novels are accurate and true to life.
b. Thackeray is a satirist. His satire is caustic and his humour subtle.
c. Besides being a realist and satirist, Thackeray is a moralist. His aim is to produce a moral impression in all his novels.
3. The Bronte Sisters
（1） Charlotte Bronte and Jane Eyre
（2） Emily Bronte and The Wuthering Heights.
4. George Eliot.
（1） Life:
a. Mary Ann Evans;
b. the rural midland;
c. abandoned religion;
d. interested in social philosophical problems;
e. editor of the Westminster Review;
f. George Henry Lewis.
（2） works
l Adam Bede
l Silas Marner
l Middlemarch
（3） Features of works.
As a moralist, she shows in each of her characters the action and reaction of universal forces and believes that every evil act must bring inevitable punishment to the man who does it. Moral law was to her as inevitable and automatic as gravitation.
5. Thomas Hardy: novelist and poet
（1） Life:
a. Dorchester—“Wexssex;
b. close to peasantry;
c. belief in evolution.
（2） Works:
a. Romances and fantasies
b. novels of ingenuity
c. novels of characters and environment
（3） Ideas of Fate.
Unlike Dickens, most of Hardy's novels are tragic. The cause of tragedy is man's own behaviour or his own fault but the supernatural forces that rule his fate. According to Hardy, man is not the master of his destiny; he is at the mercy of indifferent forces which manipulate his behaviour and his relations with others.
III.English Poets of the Age
1. Alfred Tennyson
（1） life:
a. Cambridge;
b. friend with Hallem;
c. poet laureate.
（2） Works: In Memoriam; Idylls of the King.
2. Robert Browning.
（1） Life: married Elizabeth Barret, a poetess.
（2） Works
（3） the Dramatic Monologue
The dramatic monologue is a soliloquy in drama in which the voice speaking is not the poet himself, but a character invented by the poet, so that it reflects life objectively. It was imitated by many poets after Browning and brought to its most sophisticated form by T. S. Eliot in his The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock （1915）
IV.English Prose of the age
1. Thomas Carlyle
（1） life
（2） works
2. John Ruskin
（1） life
（2） works
（3） social and aesthetic ideas
V. Aestheticism
1. Aestheticism
the basic theory of the aesthetic – “art for art's sake” – was set forth by a French poet, Theophile Gautier. The first Englishman who wrote about the theory of aestheticism was Walter Peter, the most important critical writer of the late Victorian period, whose most important works were studies in the History of Renaissance and Appreciations. The chief representative of the movement in England was Oscar Wilde, with his The Picture of Dorian Gray. Aestheticism places art above life, and holds that life should imitate art, not art imitate life. According to aesthetes, all artistic creation is absolutely subjective as opposed to objective. Art should be free from any influence of egoism. Only when art is for art's sake can it be immortal. It should be restricted to contributing beauty in a highly polished style.
2. Oscar Wilde
（1） Life: dramatist, poet, novelist and essayist, spokesman for the school of “Art for art's sake”, the leader of the Aesthetic movement
（2） works
l The Happy Prince and Other Tales
l The Picture of Dorian Gray
l The Importance of Being Earnest
