This paper surveys eight major thematic preoccupations in Victorian literature, tracing how writers from Thomas Hood and Tennyson to John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning engaged with the social transformations of their age. Topics examined include labor ethics and factory conditions, the ambiguous nature of progress, the tension between eroticism and social convention, individualism and liberty, gender norms and conformity, the evolving function of art, the ideology of domesticity, and the existential dimensions of solitude. Drawing on poetry, prose, and social criticism, the paper argues that Victorian writers responded to industrialization and modernizing capitalism with a complex mixture of critique, idealism, and irony.
A concern with labor ethics, rights, and labor politics makes its way into Victorian literature at the dawn of an industrial age and the modernization of capitalism. Key among the concerns of Victorian social commentators were working conditions in factories. In The Song of the Shirt, Thomas Hood comments on textile mills and especially on their effect on the women who worked in them. From the very first verse, Hood makes his political stance clear: "In poverty, hunger, and dirt, / And still with a voice of dolorous pitch / She sang the 'Song of the Shirt.'" There is a clear literalism in Hood's approach to discussing labor issues and how they impact the poor and disenfranchised.
Although less literal in its approach, Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott" likewise critiques the gendered labor of textile factories. Part II of the poem begins: "There she weaves by night and day / A magic web with colours gay. / She has heard a whisper say, / A curse is on her if she stay / To look down to Camelot." There is no potential for upward social mobility for the poor in the Victorian social system, which is highly stratified and immutable.
In considerable contrast to Hood and Tennyson, John Ruskin postulates that labor can have redeeming qualities in The Nature of Gothic. The most notable feature of Ruskin's work is its ironic convergence with Marxism, even as Ruskin seems dangerously oblivious to the systematic disenfranchisement of workers in the capitalist system. Writing as a Victorian contemporary, Marx also would have noted the importance of taking pride in one's work and evolving the artisan spirit as a means of empowering workers. The problem is that the systems depicted by Tennyson and Hood preclude worker engagement with their labor and instead perpetuate the capitalist system in which labor is devalued by the owners of the means of production.
Victorian writers were naturally interested in commenting on the social, political, technological, and normative progress unfolding around them. In "A Crisis in My Mental History," John Stuart Mill explains his theories on ethical progress as a function of utilitarian values that supplanted religious ones. Like many Victorian thinkers, Mill believed that progress was characterized by a shift toward extreme rationality and a move away from religiosity. However, Mill's progress is more personal than political. Discovering poetry, Mill feels liberated: "I felt myself at once better and happier as I came under their influence."
Carlyle takes a different stance on the theme of progress in "Past and Present," in which the author describes a regression into an almost feudalistic social state brought about by the capitalist-style divisions of labor inherent in the factory system. Technological progress promises to alleviate the suffering of the poor but does not do so; in many cases it exacerbates such suffering and sharpens awareness of income disparities. Disconnection from society and anomie are the prevailing pessimistic observations of writers like Carlyle. Likewise, Newman comments on various Victorian conundrums related to progress, including the movement toward a more strictly secular society and a primarily capitalistic one. Progress is a double-edged sword in the Victorian world — rooted in the temporal, yet offering no reliable marker of whether it produces genuine improvement or simply spirals around the same persistent social ills.
Victorian norms related to sexuality and eroticism are as ironic and contradictory as norms in any other social arena. The tension between emerging liberal social norms and the fears surrounding such liberation produces a dramatic intensity that manifests frequently as heightened eroticism. Poetry is an ideal medium for exploring eroticism, as it allows for nuance, innuendo, and euphemism. In "Andrea del Sarto," for example, Browning uses overtly sexual imagery: "My serpentining beauty, rounds on rounds! / — How could you ever prick those perfect ears, / Even to put the pearl there!" The lover seeks to possess the object of his desire, rendering her immortal through the act of artistic representation.
In "The Defence of Guenevere," Morris builds on the Arthurian legends to describe the forbidden love between the title character and Lancelot. Using the Arthurian legend allows the poet to explore the overarching theme of the tension between desire and social convention — the crux of the Victorian romantic aesthetic. Like Browning, Morris's diction is overtly erotic and sensual. In "Anactoria," Swinburne likewise alludes to classical literature but, rather than looking to Britain, takes the reader to Greece and Sappho's lesbian eroticism. The theme of Swinburne's poem is the confluence of love, eroticism, and pain; references to "blood" and "beasts" add a gothic dimension to the poem as well.
Individualism and the notion of personal freedom and liberty were emerging at the forefront of Victorian identity. In The Nature of Gothic, Ruskin uses an exploration of architecture and history to discuss the evolution of the concept of the individual. Freedom and individuality had always been embedded in the human spirit, according to Ruskin, and these are necessary forms of creative expression detectable in the great cathedrals and masterworks of Europe. Workers must be empowered to a degree — a Christian principle, according to Ruskin. Yet there is a dynamic tension between the individual freedoms afforded to workers and the way those workers subsume their creative energies to the dictates of those in power.
Throughout On Liberty, and particularly in the passages collected as "Of Individuality," John Stuart Mill remains preeminently concerned with freedom and liberty. How one expresses freedom within a hierarchical society, and how governments respond to the needs of individuals, become central concerns. Mill was a staunch individualist whose philosophies underlie postmodern thought on governance; however, he continually reframes his theories on freedom within a utilitarian framework, allowing that one may temporarily sacrifice personal freedoms for the good of the whole. Finally, Arnold stresses a form of intellectual freedom in his treatise "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time," musing on the power of free thought as something that transcends one's actual social status or situation in life. Intellectual freedom is, for Arnold, the individual right of all persons and the only genuine path to liberation.
"Meredith, Webster, and Stevenson on conformity"
"Tennyson, Browning, and Pater on art's power"
"Dickens and Barrett Browning on domestic ideology"
"Tennyson, Carlyle, and Webster on solitude"
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