1

- English Studies
- S5P1
- Number of the Module (M27)
- Novel 1
- Professor : Mohamed Rakii

Sultan Moulay Slimane University

Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Benimellal

Department of English Studies

Subject: Novel 1

Semester: 5

Professor: Mohamed Rakii

Monday, November 9th, 2020

Week 2

Dickens recalled for Forster a summer evening in Chatham, ‘the boys at play in the churchyard,

and I sitting on my bed, reading as for life’, the world of books more real to him than anything

in his material surroundings.Reading, in ways we have lost in an electronic age, was a creative

act. For the emerging lower middle classes it was political…

Dickens was one of the performers who extended the written word into public readings.

Without today’s mental overload, untrammelled by academic boundaries, the printed word

was savoured at a more leisurely pace.

 2

As the century developed John Stuart Mill deplored the effects of mass circulation newspapers

on the reading public, and complained that this advance in literacy had brought ‘no increase

in ability, and a very marked decrease in vigour and energy’ in mental activity.

Ruskin and Carlyle also looked with alarm at the rapid spread of cheap reading that they saw

threatening public taste. Meanwhile the ‘respectable’ novel, in particular through the central

role of women writers within it, became a potent force shaping the ways of life and ethos of

the new middle classes in the Victorian period.

The Art of Allusion in the Victorian Novel (1979)

That the middle-class readership came to accept a broader range of fiction was due above all

to Sir Walter Scott, whose historical novels stood poised between fiction and chronicled fact.

William St Clair has demonstrated that in the first decades of the century, more copies of

Scott’s novels were sold than those of all other novelists combined (St Clair, p. 221). Scott not

only framed his stories in an accurate historical setting and so made them ‘true’, he also wrote

from the historical viewpoint of the common people, making his stories relevant to the lives

of his readers. Working-class libraries that banned fiction allowed Scott’s novels.

But by 1870, when Trollope declared that the novel was a ‘rational amusement’,30 reading

with a moral purpose, he was already arguing against the tide. Novels had become ever

cheaper, increasingly sold for their ‘sensation’ value and bought for casual recreation and

railway reading. By the 1880s, writers like *George Meredith and *George Moore were

challenging the censorship of lending libraries that selected only those novels they thought

suitable for family reading. There would be a case for ending this study then. But as we have

noted, as the main Victorian period was passing, debates about its values were central to the

work of Henry James, *Thomas Hardy, *George Gissing, Oscar Wilde and *Robert Louis
 3

Stevenson, and to end this study about 1880 would be like leaving a good play before seeing

the last act.

CONTEXT 1 Time Maps Prelude: 1830–1846

‘We live in an age of visible transition’, declared Bulwer Lytton in 1833, ‘– an age of disquietude

and doubt – of the removal of time-worn landmarks, and the breaking up of the hereditary

elements of society – old opinions, feelings – ancestral customs and institutions are crumbling

away, and both the spiritual and temporal worlds are darkened by the shadows of change.’

Britain was becoming the epicentre of interlinked revolutions in the expansion of its cities, its

industrial development and the world of ideas. We now know that the ‘Industrial Revolution’

is something of a misnomer, and that the transformation of Britain through industrial

development was a gradual process that goes back to the eighteenth century and steadily

changed the nation through the nineteenth. But by 1830 cotton mills and ironworks were

forever changing northern England. Writing verse in the ledger books of his Sheffield iron

foundry, Ebenezer Elliott marvelled at the ‘tempestuous music of the giant, Steam’, but noted

ominously that its iron powers ‘toil ceaseless, day and night, yet never tire, / or say to greedy

man, “thou dost amiss” ’.

If the north was becoming increasingly industrialized, the south was dominated by London,

the centre of commerce. With a population of over a million at the beginning of the century,

it contained more than a third of England’s urban population, and topped 4 million by the end

of the century. But all areas were affected by the ethos of industry. ‘It is an age of machinery’,

wrote Carlyle in ‘Signs of the Times’ in 1829, ‘in every inward and outward sense of the word.’

This was nowhere more apparent than in the expansion of the railways, our first focus for the

changes of the era. ‘Steam! Steam! Steam!’ Frances Trollope was to write in 1848: Steam has
 4

so changed the face of the country, from John o’ Groats to the Land’s end, that few persons

of the present day who are basking on the sunny side of fifty either have, or can have, any

accurate ideas of what England was, during the early part of the present century – and

nevertheless we have not yet reached the middle of it.

Books became part of travelling, and railway station shops sold pocket-sized ‘railway novels’

for passengers. With rail and canals servicing its commerce, its overseas trade protected by

naval supremacy, British industry was to expand at speed, moving the nation into a period of

unprecedented prosperity.

One cannot move far in the Victorian period without encountering the Gothic. It focused social

debate. Carlyle’s Past and Present of 1843 contrasted the aridity of industrial society with the

creative humanity of medieval monastic communities: in the 1890s, it inspired William Morris’

socialist vision. It entered the religious controversy as High Church movements looked back to

pre-Reformation times.

Reference:

James, Louis.TheVictorianNovel. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006

Objectives: This course is expected to introduce you to the Victorian novel. For this, you have

to go through the above extract and build up a solid understanding of the Victorian fiction and

its historical development.

Writing essays: You are required to write a five-paragraph essay each week to master literary

analysis.
 5

Instructions:

Assignment 2 (it is a homework which will certainly enable you to improve your writing skills.

(N. B. Don’t send your assignments to me. Just do them at home.)

Write an essay on the basis of your reading to address the historical development of the

Victorian Novel.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
 6

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
 7

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………