The Style of Victorian Novels

The Victorian Age is marked roughly by the reign of Queen Victoria of England from 1837-1901. The Victorian reading public firmly established the novel as the dominant literary form of the era. The novel is the most distinctive and lasting literary achievement of Victorian literature . The publication of novels in monthly installments enabled even the poor to purchase them .The Victorian novel featured several developments in narrative technique , full description and exposition , authorial essays and multi plotting featuring several central characters . Furthermore, the practice of issuing novels in serial installments led novelists to become adept at sub climaxes . Dickens was the most successful of the English Victorian novelists, a master of sentiment and a militant reformer . The literature of the Victorian age entered in a new period after the romantic revival. The literature of this era expressed the fusion of pure romance to gross realism. Though, the Victorian Age produced great poets, the age is also remarkable for the excellence of its prose . Literature of this age tends to come closer to daily life which reflects its practical problems and interests . Moral purpose : The Victorian literature seems to deviate from "art for art's sake" and asserts its moral purpose . Idealism : It is often considered as an age of doubt and pessimism. The influence of science is felt here. The whole age seems to be caught in the conception of man in relation to the universe with the idea of evolution . Though, the age is characterized as practical and materialistic, most of the writers exalt a purely ideal life. It is an idealistic age where the great ideals like truth, justice, love, brotherhood are emphasized by poets, essayists and novelists of the age . Victorian novels tend to be idealized portraits of difficult lives in which hard work, perseverance, love and luck win out in the end; virtue would be rewarded and wrongdoers are suitably punished. They tended to be of an improving nature with a central moral lesson at heart . While this formula was the basis for much of earlier Victorian fiction, the situation became more complex as the century progressed .The narrator of the Victorian novel is typically omniscient , serving both as a moral guide and as an instrument for analyzing the psychology of the characters . Finally , Significant Victorian novelists and poets include: Matthew Arnold, the Brontë sisters (Emily, Anne and Charlotte Brontë), Christina Rossetti, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Joseph Conrad, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens ..etc .