19th Century Literature

2. Literary Terms II: Short Story, Inscape & Instress, Sprung Rhythm

The second group of Unit 1 terms clusters around form and perception: the short story as a genre, and two coinages of Gerard Manley Hopkins — inscape and instress — with his prosodic invention, sprung rhythm. All three are best learned from the set texts: Hawthorne's Dr. Heidegger's Experiment and Hopkins's Spring and Fall.

For the examination, hold three contrasts. Short story vs. novel: the story compresses — one situation, few characters, a single turn; the novel expands — plot, subplots, social world (compare Wilde's Dorian Gray in Unit 4). Short story vs. sketch/essay: the story invents an action with a beginning, middle and turn; Stevenson's On Walking Tours or Huxley's Selected Snobberies argue or reflect, they do not stage an experiment. Tale vs. modern short story: Hawthorne's piece keeps the older "tale" habit — an explicit moral voice and a touch of the marvellous (the Fountain of Youth) — while still obeying the single-effect economy that Poe would theorise a few years later (Poe's review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales, 1842, is the landmark statement of the single-effect theory).

The set poem Spring and Fall (written 1880; published 1918) is a perfect classroom for both terms. A child, Margaret, grieves over falling leaves — "Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving?" The inscape here is autumn's own pattern: leaves that are "fresh-thoughted," gold, doomed to fall. The instress is the ache the pattern strikes in the child — and the poet's flash that her grief is really for mortality itself: "It is the blight man was born for, / It is Margaret you mourn for." One short quotation of the turn ("you mourn for") demonstrates instress better than a paragraph of theory.

Scan the opening of Spring and Fall to feel it: "Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving?" The stresses fall where the voice naturally pounds, and the unstressed syllables hurry between them — no neat iambic alternation. Hopkins marked his manuscripts with stress-signs because Victorian readers, trained on Tennyson's smooth lines, kept misreading him. Note for the exam: sprung rhythm is not free verse — it is a strict system, only the counting-unit has changed (stresses, not syllables). And it is not the metre of the other set poems: Tennyson, Arnold and Browning all write in measured, running rhythm; only Hopkins springs.

3. Victorian Age & Industrial Revolution

The syllabus asks for the Victorian Age together with the Industrial Revolution because the second made the first: the age is named for Queen Victoria's reign (1837–1901), but its character — factories, railways, cities, reform agitations, doubt and earnestness together — was forged by industrial change. The official course objectives divide the era into three phases: Early Victorian (1837–1851), Middle Victorian (1851–1870) and Late Victorian (1870–1901). Learn the phases as a story of confidence rising, peaking, and cracking.

Industrial Revolution (c. 1760–1840). The shift from hand production to machine production: steam power (Watt's engine, 1776), the factory system, coal and iron, and then the railway age (Stockton–Darlington line, 1825; Liverpool–Manchester, 1830). By Victoria's accession the transformation was advanced; by mid-century Britain was "the workshop of the world." Social consequences matter more than inventions for literature: the rise of manufacturing towns (Manchester, Birmingham), a new industrial middle class and an urban working class, slums and cholera beside mill-owners' mansions, and the political pressure that produced the Reform Acts (1832, 1867, 1884), the repeal of the Corn Laws (1846) and the Chartist movement (1838–48) demanding the vote for working men. Dickens's Hard Times (1854) — Coketown, "a town of red brick," Mr Gradgrind's "facts" — is the literary photograph of industrial England, even though it is not on this paper's set list; cite it as background, never as a set text.

Early Victorian (1837–1851): adjustment and earnestness. A young queen, a new industrial society finding its morals. Carlyle preaches the "gospel of work"; the Oxford Movement (from 1833) tries to re-Catholicise the Church of England; the novel becomes the age's great form because it can house the new social world — Dickens's Pickwick Papers (1836–37) and Oliver Twist (1837–39), Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1847–48). The phase closes with the Great Exhibition of 1851 in the Crystal Palace — Prince Albert's showcase of industry, the symbolic noon of Victorian confidence.

Middle Victorian (1851–1870): high noon and first doubts. Prosperity, empire, and the great mid-century books that also unsettle: Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) and Mill's On Liberty (1859) appear in the same year — science and individualism challenging old certainties together. Tennyson is Poet Laureate (1850–1892); In Memoriam (1850) mourns and doubts by turns. The set Tennyson lyrics (Lyric 7, "Dark house, by which once more I stand"; Lyric 54, "Oh, yet we trust that somehow good") belong exactly here — grief seeking faith after loss. Browning's My Last Duchess (1842) sits at the phase's opening edge.

Late Victorian (1870–1901): doubt, beauty and revolt. The confidence cracks: economic depression (from 1873), Irish Home Rule agitation, socialism, the "woman question," and literature turns either inward to art (aestheticism, decadence) or outward to criticism. Pater's Renaissance (1873), Hopkins writing in obscurity (his poems published 1918), Wilde's triumphs and trial (1895), Hardy's bleak novels (Tess of the d'Urbervilles, 1891), Yeats's The Second Coming (written 1919, but its apocalyptic mood is the late-Victorian inheritance carried forward). Arnold's Dover Beach (1867) is the hinge-poem between middle doubt and late despair: "the Sea of Faith / Was once, too, at the full" — now only "its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar."

4. Victorian Poetry & Victorian Novel

The syllabus names Victorian Poetry and the Victorian Novel as the age's two great literary forms. The examination expects you to know what makes each distinctively Victorian — not merely to list names, but to state the form's job in the age and to place the set poets correctly.

Victorian poetry. After the Romantic lyric "I," Victorian poetry turns outward and dramatic: the age distrusts naked self-expression and prefers speakers, situations and arguments. Its hallmarks are the dramatic monologue (Browning), the meditative lyric that thinks through doubt (Tennyson's In Memoriam, Arnold's Dover Beach), technical mastery of stanza and music, and a willingness to use poetry for public, moral and religious questioning. The three set poets map the arc:

• Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892), Poet Laureate 1850–1892. The age's official voice — musical, consoling, doubtful by turns. In Memoriam (1850), written for his friend Arthur Hallam, is the great Victorian poem of grief seeking faith; the set lyrics (7 and 54) show both poles — "Dark house, by which once more I stand" (desolation) and "Oh, yet we trust that somehow good / May somehow flow from good" (willed hope). The Lotus-Eaters (1842) gives weary mariners tempted by forgetfulness — "There is sweet music here that softer falls / Than petals from blown roses on the grass."
• Robert Browning (1812–1889). The poet of the dramatic monologue and of energetic, difficult speech. My Last Duchess (1842) is the set piece (see Lesson 1). Browning's speakers — dukes, bishops, painters — argue, persuade and betray themselves; his optimism ("God's in His heaven — / All's right with the world!") is always dramatised, never simply his own.
• Matthew Arnold (1822–1888). Poet and critic; the elegist of faith's withdrawal. Dover Beach (1867) hears "the eternal note of sadness" in the waves and finds only love as shelter: "Ah, love, let us be true / To one another!" As a critic he demanded "high seriousness" and "the best that has been thought and said" (Culture and Anarchy, 1869) — the moral earnestness against which aestheticism rebelled.

Two more set poets belong to the margins of the Victorian map: G. M. Hopkins (1844–1889), writing in the 1870s–80s but unpublished till 1918, whose sprung rhythm and inscape (Lesson 2) make him the age's great buried innovator; and W. B. Yeats (1865–1939), whose The Second Coming (1919) inherits late-Victorian apocalyptic mood — "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold" — while opening the twentieth century.

Victorian novel. The age's dominant form, because only the novel could contain the new industrial society whole — its cities, classes, courts, schools and drawing-rooms. Its hallmarks: serial publication (monthly numbers, keeping a vast middle-class readership in suspense), the omniscient narrator who judges as well as tells, panoramic social range, and moral earnestness — the novel as the age's secular scripture. Four names carry the form:

• Charles Dickens (1812–1870). The age's most popular novelist — Pickwick Papers (1836–37), Oliver Twist (1837–39), David Copperfield (1850), Bleak House (1852–53), Great Expectations (1861). London as a living character; caricature and pathos; reformist anger at workhouses, courts and schools.
• W. M. Thackeray (1811–1863). The satirist of snobs and vanity — Vanity Fair (1847–48), "a novel without a hero." Where Dickens loves, Thackeray dissects.
• George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans, 1819–1880). The philosophical novelist — Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Middlemarch (1871–72). Provincial life raised to moral epic; sympathy as a discipline.
• Thomas Hardy (1840–1928). The late-Victorian fatalist — Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), Jude the Obscure (1895). Wessex as a tragic landscape; human will crushed by chance and convention.

The set prose of Unit 3 (Hawthorne, Stevenson, Huxley, Belloc, Chesterton) is essay and tale, not the Victorian novel proper — keep the categories apart. And Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (Unit 4) is the late-Victorian novel turning against Victorian moralism itself: the aesthetic novel as anti-Victorian statement.

5. Movements & Ideas: Oxford Movement, Utilitarianism, Darwinism, Pre-Raphaelitism

The last lesson of Unit 1 gathers the four ideas-and-movements the syllabus names. Each is a Victorian answer — or challenge — to the age's central question: what can we still believe, and how should we live? Learn each as: date, leaders, doctrine, literary result.

The Oxford Movement (1833–1845). A High-Church revival inside the Church of England, centred at Oxford, trying to recall Anglicanism to its Catholic roots — apostolic succession, sacraments, ritual — against liberal reform and state interference. It began with John Keble's Assize Sermon on "National Apostasy" (1833) and spoke through the Tracts for the Times (1833–41); John Henry Newman's Tract 90 (1841) stretched Anglican doctrine toward Rome, and Newman himself became a Roman Catholic in 1845 — the movement's symbolic end. Literary result: a poetry of ritual, reserve and doctrinal seriousness. Keble's The Christian Year (1827) was the best-selling devotional verse of the century; Newman wrote the hymn "Lead, Kindly Light" (1833). For this paper the movement matters as background: it is the religious earnestness against which Arnold's doubt and Pater's aestheticism define themselves, and the Hopkins of Spring and Fall — a Jesuit, a Catholic convert's church — breathes its air.

Utilitarianism. The philosophical doctrine, founded by Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and refined by John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), that the right act is the one producing the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Bentham's "felicific calculus" tried to measure pleasures; Mill, in Utilitarianism (1863) and On Liberty (1859), defended higher (intellectual, moral) pleasures against lower ones and liberty against the tyranny of the majority. Literary result: the age's great quarrel. Dickens caricatured it in Mr Gradgrind ("Now, what I want is, Facts"); Arnold attacked the "machinery" of Benthamite liberals in Culture and Anarchy (1869); and aestheticism — art answerable to nothing but beauty — is utilitarianism's direct opposite. In an answer, always name both the formula (greatest happiness) and the enemy it made (every Victorian who thought life was more than calculation).

Darwinism. Charles Darwin's (1809–1882) theory of evolution by natural selection, published in On the Origin of Species (1859): species change over immense time through variation and the survival of the fittest; man is part of nature, not its crowned exception. The Descent of Man (1871) drew the human conclusion openly. The shock was theological and imaginative at once: if nature is "red in tooth and claw" (Tennyson's phrase, In Memoriam, Lyric 56 — written before 1859, which shows the anxiety predated the book), what becomes of design, providence and consolation? Literary result: the Victorian crisis of faith made scientific. Tennyson's In Memoriam wrestles with it; Arnold's Dover Beach hears the Sea of Faith withdrawing; Hardy builds novels on a universe indifferent to human will. For the exam, the date 1859 does double duty — Darwin and Mill's On Liberty in one year: nature and the individual dethroned together.

Pre-Raphaelitism. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, founded in 1848 by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882), John Everett Millais (1829–1896) and William Holman Hunt (1827–1910): young painters (and Rossetti the poet) rebelling against academic art, demanding truth to nature, intense colour, and the directness of early Italian art "before Raphael." Their medievalism, symbolism and worship of beauty fed straight into aestheticism — Rossetti is the bridge-figure, Pater the theorist, Wilde the heir. Literary result: a poetry of sensuous image and symbol. Rossetti's own poems ("The Blessed Damozel," 1850), the decorative medievalism that Tennyson touches in The Lady of Shalott (1842), and — by descent — the 1890s decadents. Do not confuse the Brotherhood (1848, painters-plus-Rossetti) with aestheticism (1870s–90s, doctrine of art for art's sake): the first is the seed, the second the flower.