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THE VICTORIAN NOVEL

THE VICTORIAN NOVEL. Period Themes Setting Characters Narrator Narrative techniques Anti-Victorian novel. ILARIA BIGNOLIN 5°B. PERIOD: the Victorian Age. In Great Britain, under the reign of Queen Victorian (1819-1901) The following age of the Industrial Revolution.

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THE VICTORIAN NOVEL

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  1. THE VICTORIAN NOVEL • Period • Themes • Setting • Characters • Narrator • Narrative techniques • Anti-Victorian novel ILARIA BIGNOLIN 5°B

  2. 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

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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 Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (“’thank God, I’m out of Chiswick. I hate the whole house’”).

  6. 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 reader’s opinion about facts and characters by filtering them with his own view. es. Vanity Fair (“Miss Rebecca answered ‘I’m no angel’ and, to say the truth, she certainly was not”).

  7. 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.

  8. THE ANTI-VICTORIAN NOVEL from Thomas Hardy’s Jude The Obscure • characters: they aren’t caricatures (“at sight of this Sue’s nerves uttelry gave away, an awful convinction that her discourse with the boy had been the main cause of the tragedy”). • Victorian values: they aren’t 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”).

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