In Our Time - Victorian Realism

Episode Date: November 14, 2002

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Victorian realism. Henry James said “Realism is what in some shape or form we might encounter, whereas romanticism is something we will never encounter”. A reaction against Romanticism, the realist novel presented life as it was in urbanized, industrial Britain. Attacked as ordinary, mundane, overly democratic and lacking the imaginative demands of poetry, its defendants argued that the ordinariness of life contained a complexity and depth previously unseen and unconsidered. At its best the realist novel was like life itself - complex in appearance, rich in character, diverse in outlook, teeming with ideas and operating on several levels. It was a forum for the confusions of the Victorian age over Christianity and Darwinism, economics, morality and psychology, yet it was also a domestic novel concerned with the individuality of human relationships. From the provincialism of George Eliot’s Middlemarch to Hardy’s bleak and brutal Wessex, Victorian Realism touched all the great Victorian authors, but can it truly be the touchstone of an age which produced the fantasy of Alice in Wonderland, the escapism of Tthe Waterbabies and the abundant grotesquerie of Dickensian London? With Philip Davis, Reader in English Literature at the University of Liverpool and author of The Victorians, a volume of the New Oxford English Literary History; A.N. Wilson,novelist, biographer and author of The Victorians; Dinah Birch; Fellow and tutor in English at Trinity College, Oxford.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, Henry James said, if I may be allowed to edit, realism is what in some shape or form we might encounter, whereas romanticism is something we will never encounter.

It's a useful starting point for the Victorians. When realism, when used in novels, describing events that people actually experienced, was hugely popular. Victorian realist novels were devoured greedily by readers who became deeply engrossed in their subject matter. But why was the Victorian realist novel greeted with such enthusiasm? Was it driven by some form of religious impulse, despite the growing secularisation of society? What its popularity connected to the growth in science and technology? And what place does realist fiction have in our own time? With me to discuss this is Phil Davis, a reader in English literature,

at the University of Liverpool, an author of the Victorians, a volume of the Oxford English Literal History, Dr. Dina Birch, a fellow and tutor in English at Trinity College Oxford, and Ian Wilson, Andrew Wilson, novelist, and author of the Victorians. Andrew Wilson, what do we mean by Victorian realism in the novel? Well, let's start with a specific example. In the last chronicle of Barsit by Anthony Chollop, there's a clergyman called Mr Crawley, who's basically doing a bit nuts.

and he may or may not have perpetrated a fraud with a check. And the drama of the novel really hangs on that this man's nervous breakdown and whether you believe he did or he didn't do this fiddle with the money. Now, here you have something which is a bit like a dramatic episode of The Archers. And while that was going on and while the novel was coming out and being read by everybody at the time, the whole nation, it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say, was gripped by the drama of it.

There were even leaders in the times about whether Mr. Crawley was or was not guilty, and if he was, what should happen to him, whether he should be suspended from his living. So in other words, you have a species of literature in the middle of the 19th century, the blunt-old, realist, industrial, gritty 19th century, which is in fact, of course, untrue.

Fiction, by definition, is untrue, but which is purporting to be a slice of real life. And I think the exciting thing about the novels of Trollope, George Eliot and their followers at the time for the readers was the idea that you could actually hold up a mirror to real life, quite comparable in a way, to the sort of thing that the microstroke was doing in science or the camera was doing in the visual arts.

Phil Davis, would you like to put a gloss on that, would you like to define it a little bit more or put your own interpretation of what Andrew Wilson said? Well, there are many great individual realist novels in the period from Harriet Martin O' Deer book in the 1830s through to Mrs. Oliphant's Hester in the 1880s and there's a wide variety. But I would take as a starting point,

a statement by George Henry Lewis, who was the common law partner of George Eliot. And in his principles of success in literature in 1865, he said this, that too frequently the imaginative power of a work of art is measured in terms of its departure from ordinary experience, its distance from ordinary experience.

And to Lewis, this was a mistake. He said, on the contrary, that it was more complicated to imagine the ordinary life of a milkmaid or a poacher than to invent the fantastic life of a fairy or a demon. That's to say, could operate within the realm of ordinary existence and not in place of it. This is important to readers then and now because it suggests that the powers of the realist novelists

are things that people have in ordinary life. When one is baffled by the thoughts and feelings of an acquaintance of friend, a partner, then the imagination that one uses in the face of that, that bafflement to think what's going on in their minds, in their lives, is like a real-life version of a novelist's thinking. And to George Eliot in particular, it was that sort of human imagination that the realist novel was not only drawing upon in the novel, but wanted to encourage in readers, in people, outside the novel, in real life itself.

So in one way it was saying that ordinary people are, to be endowed with all the vigor and power that imaginative writing can bring to them? Right. Was this a manifesto with Lewis and with George Elyt together, or were they reacting to something that was going on and, as it were, riding on that way? I don't mean manipulating it or anything, but riding on that way. It's a big movement. I'm not sure that I entirely agree with Andrew Wilson about it being a mirror.

As you know as a novelist, as both of you, Melvin and Andrew know as novel. This realism is not imitation. It's still an expression. It's still a vision of what reality is. But what was happening was that in the Victorian period from the 1830s, there is a more prosaic worldview. So in relation to your question, this is emphatically a post-romantic age

in which, after the premature death of the second-generation romantic poets, and Shelley and Keats. For the first time really in English literature, the novel, and increasingly the realistic novel, dominate the culture, whereas previously it had been poetry. Yes, and even people like Hazlitt, the Great Haslett, and Matthew Arnold, we know, of course, think the novel is too popular a thing

and not in the same category as poetry. Dinaburch, can I turn to you now? Who were these, did the, as it were, let's call it a manifesto, which Philis worked very eloquently to. Did that reach out to a readership ready for it? Was the Victorian readership ready for the realistic novel? And what was the interaction between the readership and the Victorian realist novel? Yes, I think they were ready for it. And as you began by saying, you know, there was a real hunger for this kind of fiction. And I think it's very interesting

to consider why that should be so. Where this hunger came from and where realism comes from? It's partly, it seems to me, a reaction against romanticism, with the emphasis that romanticism had contained on the individual and the needs of the individual. And the notion that the artist was, in some ways, a special and sacred person. I think there was a reaction against that, and realism is in part a reintegration of the artist

into a wider social community. I think that's one of the reasons there was such an acceptance what was going on. But I think another interesting point here, if you think about the shape of British Romanticism, particularly, you do see that realism has rather deep roots within what had been happening in an earlier generation in British Romanticism. Wordsworth, for instance, the high romantic theorists, no realist.

But you do see, say, in lyrical ballads, in the preface, famous preface to lyrical ballads, words with claiming that he was going to create the real language of men and translated. The language of ordinary men, that's right. And also, of course, in those poems, when he encounters the old Campbell and Bega or the Leach Gatherer. Or Michael, most of all, yeah.

Michael, you could say that this was very much what Phil was talking about, using art as an insight into the way ordinary people thought and felt and existed. Absolutely. And if you think about the romantic novel, as opposed to the Victorian novel, Jane Austen, for instance, or Mariah Edgeworth or Walter Scott. They're not Victorian novelists, but what you begin to see emerging very clearly in their fiction is a confirmation of the needs of the community

and a process of disciplining the assertion of the self. And I think that you begin to see, and I'm thinking here perhaps particularly of Jane Austen, the shape of Victorian realism beginning to emerge. in that earlier period. And certainly also in the novels of Strott, where up to Strott, I think most people conceived of history as something that we were told by an historian, which had happened to the past,

and largely it happened to the generals and the kings and the queens. And I mean, what is so arresting about the novels of Strott, the great novels, the seven Scottish novels, before you get on to the medieval fantasies, is the notion that history is actually formed and shaped by real people with real emotions, at all levels of society. I think that there's a rather large figure

we're missing out here, if I may, sound a dissentant note. And that is Dickens, who is infinitely the most popular novelist of the 19th century and probably remains so. And it's rather hard, I think, to place Dickens in this spectrum that we're drawing, because on the one hand, you could say that he was a complete fantasist and that his novels wore no relation to real life at all. I mean, he was just peopling the world.

world as he saw it with creations of his own demonic comic energy. On the other hand, of course, as we all know, people read, let us say, Oliver Twist as an indictment of the workhouse system and... And they recognised people in it. And in my childhood in a small northern town in the 40th... I recognised Dickensian characters. I think I'm not alone in this, we all did. Where are we? And so there was a reality in that. There was, but doesn't it all into question the very meaning of realism

if you realise that Dickens actually has drawn life as many of us understand it, but he is in no sense a realistic writer, is he? I know this is a tough one, and I know it's very difficult for you three who know so much in concentrate as it were to be categorised in this way. I mean, you want to spill back in romanticism, did realism

sat romanticism, in January the burnt porridge is very realistic and so and so forth. But I'd like to try to get a shape to this because it's an interesting topic in itself. Dynne talked about how the Victorian audience met this Victorian realism Phil. What was the resistance to? Was there any resistance to

artists in the now supreme, but still by people, great critics Matthew Arnold and such, looked down on form of the novel? Was there any resistance to them putting all their imaginative powers into ordinary life and into realistic life rather

into kings and queens and greatnesses and Gothic adventures and so on and so forth? Of course because the claim would be that it wasn't imagination. When you look at poetry, the reader is actively involved in trying to make out the meaning. There is something often frightening to people in poetry

because there is not a language of background explanation. Many critics were saying with the novel that this is not a great imaginative work, that it is writing about people, very like the people who are reading it, that it's a sort of transcription, it's what we might call a sort of soap opera, and that readers would receive.

perceive it passively rather than have to work at it imaginatively and like poetry. I think this is wholly wrong. And I also think, going back to what Andrew was saying, that Dickens has some claims to be a realist. I think it would be extraordinary, for example, if the author of David Copperfield was not in some sense a realist. Excellent. Dian, were the things the realistic novel struggled to do?

It struggled to deal with melodrama, isn't it? I mean, a theatre is ignoring realism and going on being melodramatic as I'll watch it all over the place. Mariah in the red bar and all the rest. But it struggles to be meldeme, because if you're going to have plausibility, then bolts of lightning aren't wholly acceptable, and Dracula is out of the window. And so what is this tension between,

did the realistic novel impose things on the structure and on the strategy of the novelist? I think it had to do that. I think what you're really saying is that the realist novel struggled with the structure of plot. You have to tell a story. That's what was my note, but I just went on a bit too much.

If you're a novelist, you have to tell a story and it has to be a story that's shaped, that selects some things, that rejects other things. And of course, in the end, it has to be a story that will engage the attention of the reading. There's a wonderful example of what George Gissing calls absolute realism. In a novel of the early 1890s, New Grubstreet, by Gissing, has a rather admirable character called Harold Biffen,

who sets about writing a completely realistic novel, and it's going to be called Mr. Bailey Grosser. It's the story of his struggles in his shabby little shop. Nothing exciting happens to Mr. Bailey. the grocer. But he terms of a very sticky end and doesn't nobody wants to read the book. Exactly. He's a failure.

He's a failure. You've pinched our punchline. No, I didn't mean to do that. I forgive you one. And eventually, of course, as you'll remember, Harold Biffin commits suicide. And there's a rueful little paragraph that Gissing inserts

into that novel about realism and he says, yes, well, it was an admirable project, but a novelist does have to create excitement and shape the material. That example has always bothered me because it's always used to put down realistic novels. Well, the fact is he probably wrote a rotten novel.

And I've been bored stiff with the so-called magic, some, some, so-called magical realism, bored stiff with this lurid science fiction, bored si for sensational novels by some American, more bored than I could be my Mr. Watson grocer. So I don't think, what I worry about that is that we're saying, oh, realism leads to deadly boringness, nor as bored as I'd been by that

other stuff, I can tell you. It surely isn't it a question of, when we use a word like realism, we're talking about how people perceive the world. Yeah. Surely. And I mean, artists are people who conceive the world in a more interesting way on the whole than the rest of us, which is why we are interested in their paintings or their novels or

their poems. Otherwise, we would not bother to read at all. We would just talk to one another. And surely what we're looking for when we pick up a novel, however you define it, is a picture of the world which is going to shake change in some way or another, enlightened. But we are talking about the sea chance.

I go back to what Phil said, and I was quoting Lewis, that the idea of imaginatively investing, so-called ordinary life, in ways which appear to be normality, almost designed to look like reportage, almost are intended to look like what you hear in a clapom omnibus, but are just as worked on as anything else. That's the project, and it's a wonderful project.

And worked on with a project. And worked on with a purpose, I mean, I do think that one of the things that distinguishes the great realist novels, and I'm thinking particularly here, perhaps, of George Eliot's novels, because I do think she is the greatest Victorian realist, is that they are by no means written simply to reflect ordinary life, you know, the old woman in the kitchen scraping carrots, that famous example from Adam Bede. They are written to change people's lives.

when George Elliott gives us her definition of realism, and she's in fact talking about John Ruskin when she does so, she says that if we could only bring ourselves to accept this doctrine, as she puts it thoroughly, it would remold our lives. And she means that. She thinks that if we could set aside our egos as writers and as readers, if we could really understand what it was like to be someone else. Our lives would be changed and they would be changed for the better.

And there's the high purpose of realism. And that's why Mr. Bailey Grosser, and I agree, it wasn't necessarily a bad novel. I've often rather wanted to read Mr. Bailey Grocer. Cast a different kind of light on the success or failure of novels because we've no doubt whatever Mr. Bailey Grosser was like. we can't read it, it was never written. It wasn't like Middlemarch. But what we're talking about in the case of Adam B, let us say,

is not an instrument. I've been, Phil has rightly said, it's something more complex than a camera, the human mind which simply takes a picture of real life. What George Elliot has done is create an image, which is every bit as artificial as the novels of Dickens, or for that matter, every bit as artificial as Alice in Wonderland. And this is the paradox of talking about realistic fiction.

which by definition fiction isn't real. If you don't mind, would I like to move on for the last 30 programme? I would just because we did, trade descriptions act to apply very strictly in the BBC. Is that we did talk about Victorianism and what was going on behind it. So I just would like to talk about something to touch on, to give an indication of the powers of that particular time,

say 1830 to 1818, out of which an in which, and with which the Victorian realist novel reacted. Phil Davis, you start with your excellent book with a huge description with documents about the changes, the pollution, the switch from country to city and so and so forth. Can you just give us some idea of how you think the industrialisation, that's a useful, cliche way, but still it's useful,

how that's fed into and was fed into by the realist novel? The confusion of reality in the 18th century, 1930s, 1840s, was the result of a massive displacement whereby in England people who had been usually living in the country, born in the country, living often in the house for the rest of their lives in which they were born, were now uprooted and moved to the new and terrible industrial cities. This massive change in reality has deep consequences throughout the century. It is the biggest social change ever in England, and there are no approved patterns by which to manage that change. The reason why Dickens is in some sense of realist is that he's a product of that vertiginous sense of displaced memory,

of not knowing where you are, where reality is all up for grabs in an experiment. Just one second, no, because can I pursue the second? Because it was thought at the time that not only was the location being changed, more people living in the city and the continent had before, but actually human body were being changed. Children having to stand up but to do jobs for 16 hours, their ankles were bending, their bodies were smaller,

and all that sort of thing. Their minds were being changed by thousands and thousands of people living in horrible basements, cholera was sweeping through, typhoid was sweeping through. We had not so much a different species, but human nature was under this, terrific strain, let's put it. And therefore, we had to look at it a different way because it was speaking to us in a different way.

And one thing we haven't talked about in trying to define what realism is and what it can do in this period is its political potential. Elizabeth Gaskell, for instance, picking up the point you've just made about conditions for the working classes. When she describes in novels like North and South

or Mary Barton what it was like to live in one of those fetid, She exerts every literary muscle to make it possible for her more affluent middle-class readers to have a sense of the degradation of the lives of those workers. And there is realism being recruited for a very particular purpose. She wants to intervene in a political debate about the kinds of lives that people were leading. Now, I do think it's true that some of her readers responded to the, that rather more as a matter of a kind of lurid sensationalism

than a call to action. But there were readers who did encounter texts like Elizabeth Gaskell's and she wasn't unique in this respect and felt that they really did have to see the world differently and behave differently. But though the Victorian realist novel may well be a product of social change, social change and social conditions are not the sole subject of the Victorian realist novel. And if the Victorian realist novel has something to teach us in our time, then one of the things must be that reality is not purely

socioeconomic. We're too clear as to what reality is sometimes, and the confusion and tension in this crisis period in the Western conscience means that the Victorians are our best explorers of all the realms of reality, with prior to them being categorized as social or political or religious. The great thing about the novel at this time is not, in my view, to do simply with campaigning on behalf of, say, a chimney sweep or road sweeper, however important that is, is to do with examining ordinary life and saying, what is it that makes this continue? What is it that makes it worth living? And it is, of course, the great era of what we call science, beginning as a part of the public consciousness,

as opposed to a fad by a few clever intellectual people. And while these novels are coming out, you get the great scientific text of the 19th century, you get Lyell's geography, geology, shaking everybody's sense of how old the world was, and by definition of creating very troubling thoughts about whether there was a creator. And later, of course, you get the impact of Darwin. So how do these, I was going to these things? Let's take Lyle and Darwin, Andrew. How do they feed in to the Victorian realistic novel?

And how does that influence that? And what's, I just would like to go out the squirrel. It is. I'm sorry, there we go. The notion of science, as we popularly understand, is a Victorian notion, I would maintain. And I'm not suggesting as fairly as that I'm a kind of 18th century idealist who doesn't think that's planet Mars.

But what I'm saying is that the human mind is the instrument by which you perceive these things, rather than it being a blank onto which reality is somehow magically fed. And science, the reason that in a period of change, such as Phil is eloquently described, appalling, frightening change, the idea that there is something that you can latch on to, which is reality, which is a real gauge

by which you can read the universe, is a tremendously consoling one, and science is therefore the new religion. Yeah, but how did it go into the novel? I mean, how did the microscope... Well, I think it went in in a way that we've been talking about, which is we've been hearing. But are we saying that, that's going to be really banal, if you wish.

Are we saying that George Elliot knew her Darwin and decided to recruit a Darwin, right? We are saying that George Eliot, and I mean, I have to say that much as I revere that great and wonderful person, George Elliott, and love her novels in a way, I don't hold her in the same esteem that these two do, because I think, basically, it is an illusion that you can create a kind of scientific reality about the world, either in science or in fiction, and that I think that Middlemarch, in a sense, is a less realistic novel, then Pickwick papers. But I mean, we haven't got the time to explore this. These two are going to blow up. I'm sorry, they've just run. But, I mean, the point is that science is the illusion, which is...

But science is the illusion of our age, and it was the illusion of their age. But I think there is a sense, Andrew, in which George Eliot would herself have agreed with you. I mean, it's very interesting to think back to what George Eliot actually said when she finished reading The Origin of Species, this enormous Victorian text.

She read it, of course, in 1859 when it came out. She had, in fact, just about finished writing The Mill on the Floss, which is in many ways her most scientific novel. And she says, well, this is an epoch-making book, but it's nothing compared to the mystery beneath. It's the mystery. The origin and species is it, but it's not compared to the mystery beneath. And it's the mystery that I, as a writer, want to make my business.

It's not that George Eliot was saying that here is the real world in all its kind of mechanistic devices. It's that she is trying to give her readers a mode of entrance into a real world which can accommodate something that the new scientific models can't. So I don't think she is quite as simple as perhaps you're making her sound, Andrew.

No, nor can science be the new religion. The impact of science is to produce more of that productive uncertainty in the Victorians by which the great thing is that doubt and difficulties of belief become themselves a phenomena of near religious seriousness. The Victorian realist novel, at its most serious, is in that area of religion where the big myth of metaphysical questions are being asked.

I think it's worth remembering that, though I think it's right to say that the realist novel is the humanist scripture, as it were, many of its finest practitioners continued to be Christians, or at least to be religious believers, like Elizabeth Gascals, Unitarian, or like Charlotte Young or Elizabeth Sewell. Or Trollope?

Exactly, who were using the resources of the realist novel to explore what was for them, a central reality, their Christian faith, in different kinds of social arenas, as it were to give the lives of the ordinary people, they describe a different kind of sacredness. So it's not altogether true to suggest that the realist novel becomes an escape route

for those who are in flight from Christian orthodoxy. Last word, I think, Phil, but you've got a bit of time. Well, let's take it into our own time because I wish that literature and the novel now was, if not a substitute for religion, at least a sort of holding ground in which people did do serious thinking about purposes of existence.

I read with some dismay in the Times last week, Simon Jenkins saying, does the taxpayer really need another work on Victorian novel or on Neolithic shards? And I'm willing to take responsibility in relation to the taxpayer because we do need to think that literature is real, we do need to think there is something other than socio-economic reality, and we do need to do our thinking in relation to ordinary life. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Andrew, I can't have forgotten all your names.

Mr. and Dana, and we'll be back next week talking about Cordobus. Thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.com.com.