ORCID iDThis post forms part of my ‘aspects of the novel’ collection. Please do note that these entries, which may appear basic, are simply my own notes on the subject. They implicitly or explicitly describe a canon not of my own making or choosing and replicate this from various sources. The original encyclopaedia articles are far more comprehensive, nuanced and worth consulting. I am especially conscious, in this article, of the danger of causing offense by grossly simplifying a national history.
The nineteenth century was, in Britain, the point at which the novel came of age. It is a celebrated age of Jane Austen, Walter Scott, CHarles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy. The rise of the novel in this period was propelled by the twofold expansion of printing, allowing widespread distribution, and broader societal literacy. That said, Nicholas Dames has claimed that fiction of the 19th-century British Isles exhibits a formal stability of literary realism that is very different to the experimental forms of the preceding and following centuries (p. 116).
In terms of format, it is important to note that many 19th-century novels were initially serialised, appearing in newspapers, emerging from Dickens’s The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836-37). Other notable examples of serialised fiction include William Makepeace Thackery’s Vanity Fair (1847-48), Anthony Trollope’s Framley Parsonage (1860-61), Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1864-66), and Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd (1874). Such serialisation managed to spread the cost of purchasing fiction for a middle-class readership. Serialised novels were also frequently illustrated, adding a visual dimension to the texts.
As with the later 18th-century novel in the British Isles, women dominated the authorship market. Sometimes this took place under a pseudonym: Currer Bell was Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot was Mary Ann Evans. Broadly speaking, famous 19th-century novelists were from middle-class backgrounds. Many of these authors started out, as well, by writing journalistic sketches that then developed, serially, into novels. The period also sees the birth of historical fiction as a genre, made famous by Walter Scott’s definition.
At the outset of the 19th-century there were a variety of generic forms. For instance, the novels of Ann Radcliffe, Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818), and Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) are among the most prominent examples of the gothic genre. Scott’s historical fictions of Jacobite rebellions were also written at this time. There were even “Newgate” or crime novels at the time, such as Bulwer-Lyttton’s Eugene Aram (1832). As the century reaches a third of the way through – around 1830 – Dames and others argue that a consensus emerged around domestic realism as the stable generic form. The villains of crime fiction become figures who threaten a routine private domesticity (think Rochester in Jane Eyre (1847)). The novel becomes a psychological interrogation of how individuals navigate social interaction, with extensive ruminations from interior narrative perspectives. Perhaps the ultimate expression of domestic realism is Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-72), the tale of Dorothea Brooke who finds herself entwined in a vast network of characters amid a sprawling portrait of complex social life.
Dames argues that the domestic realist consensus begins to come apart in 1859 with Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White and the birth of the “sensation novel” (p. 123). This, in turn, spiralled into a variety of generic forms, including the popular detective novel via Conan Doyle and imperial exotic works written by Kipling, Haggard and others.
Further reading:
- Armstrong, Nancy, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006)
- Dames, Nicholas, ‘British Isles (19th Century)’, in The Encyclopedia of the Novel, ed. by Peter Melville Logan, Olakunle George, Susan Hegeman, and Efraín Kristal (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), pp. 115–24