1854 was certainly a good year for the social novel. Charles Dickens had just completed Hard Times, his serialised account of life in a northern mill-town. The very next story published in his Household Words magazine was also set in the "smoky, dirty" north – except, this time, the injustices of working life weren't chronicled by an appalled visitor but by someone who lived in Manchester, Elizabeth Gaskell.
Whether this made for a more authentic novel is moot. Undeniably, Gaskell's sympathies were with the poor: North and South's central concept is the gradual realisation of haughty, scornful southerner Margaret Hale that there is a beauty to the "vulgarity of shop people". There's also a clever balance to North and South, a certain acknowledgment of the middle-class manufacturers who raise themselves "into the power and position of a master by [their] own exertions".
Gaskell's priorities lay with storytelling. Margaret is torn from the bucolic surroundings of Hampshire in classic fish-out-of-water style. She becomes part of a clearly signposted will-they-won't-they love story with the outwardly rough-and-ready manufacturer Mr Thornton. There's even a Shakespearean case of mistaken identity, just to make the course of true love run a little less smooth.

All of which makes North and South far too long. Dickens was apparently infuriated by its lack of focus, only for Gaskell to respond by cunningly reintroducing edited chapters later. It's not exactly original, either – there's more than a doff of the cap to Charlotte Brontë's Shirley, and suggestions that it's an industrial Pride and Prejudice certainly hold some water.

But, actually, it doesn't matter. As Dickens himself found with Hard Times, marrying social concerns with enjoyable storytelling is far from straightforward, but Gaskell succeeds. Would that contemporary novelists could also take on that challenge.

One hundred years after the publication of Clarissa (no 4 in this series), Thackeray not only revels in the possibilities of the genre, he even illustrated his own work with some decidedly inferior woodcuts. Vanity Fair was published in serial form (including some memorable cliff-hangers, for instance Becky Sharp's revelation of her marriage to Rawdon Crawley) from January 1847 to June 1848. Thackeray, on top form, cheerfully exploited an ebullient tradition, transcending all his previous efforts as a writer, novels such as The Luck of Barry Lyndon (1844).
Early drafts of the book, which had the working title "a novel without a hero" lacked the all-important figure of William Dobbin, a thoroughly good and likable character who owes much to Thackeray himself. "Vanity Fair", a title that came in a eureka moment to the author in bed one night, actually derives from Pilgrim's Progress (no 1 in this series) and refers to the fair set up by the devils Beelzebub and Apollyon in the town of Vanity. Unlike Bunyan, Thackeray was hardly a die-hard Christian, but rather a man who relished a life of pleasure and luxury, and who, on the evidence of his letters, found much of the Bible either ludicrous or distasteful. As a title, however, "Vanity Fair" set the tone of the novel in its depiction of a society, rather as "The Bonfire of the Vanities" did for Tom Wolfe (who also illustrated his own work) in 1987.

Thackeray's intention was satirical and realistic. Writing mid-century, he set his masterpiece in Regency England during the Napoleonic wars, intending the lessons of his tale to be applied equally to his own times. In contemporary terms that would be like a modern literary novelist setting their scene during the second world war, or the blitz.

The climax of the novel comes with the battle of Waterloo. Unlike Tolstoy, whose War and Peace was influenced by Vanity Fair, Thackeray was squeamish about military matters, and chose to leave most of the fighting off-stage. This makes the irruptions of violence all the more shocking, as in the death of George Osborne, "lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart" on the field of Waterloo, which occurs almost exactly halfway through the narrative.

Thackeray was highly conscious of his audience and repeatedly breaks off from his story to buttonhole and tease his readers ("the present chapter (8), is very mild. Others – but we will not anticipate those"). The tale, however, will not be denied for long. Upwardly mobile Becky Sharp, and her sweet, devoted friend, Amelia Sedley, are perfectly matched by the caddish rake, George Osborne, and clumsy, decent William Dobbin. The social trajectory of each pair gives the narrative an almost perfect symmetry.

The key to the novel's magic, in addition to the delight it takes in the Regency pageant, probably lies in the contrast between scheming Becky, one of fiction's great female protagonists and awkward, dutiful William whose unwavering love for Amelia mirrors Thackeray's own passion for another man's wife.

Finally, however, for all its realism, Vanity Fair is a bravura performance by a writer who has found his theme. As the serialisation of the novel that would transform its author's reputation draws to a close, Thackeray himself concluded his tale with a nod to the gaudy theatricality of the whole business: "Come children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out."

But condemned and laughed at such women were, and the experience was both infuriating and debilitating, as we see with Eliot’s heroine, Maggie Tulliver. Maggie’s painful maturation in a provincial milieu hostile to her passionate, imaginative nature reflects Eliot’s own struggles growing up as an intellectually ambitious girl with little encouragement and scant educational opportunities.
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As appropriate in a novel of development, education is a central theme of The Mill on the Floss. Thanks to the support of free-thinking friends and to her own intelligence and determination, Eliot herself triumphed over the limits usually set on women’s education in the 19th century. She become one of Victorian England’s foremost intellectuals: she read multiple languages, including German, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew; she translated works of history and philosophy; she edited and contributed to a prestigious journal, the Westminster Review, where she was responsible for overseeing work by notable figures including philosopher John Stuart Mill and historian James Anthony Froude.

Eliot understood only too well, however, that her own path was not an easy one to follow, and she knew better than to tell an uplifting story that would obscure the need for radical change. Instead, in The Mill on the Floss she dramatises the tragedy of a girl chafing against sexist restrictions while her less able brother has all the opportunities she craves. The thwarting of Maggie’s intellectual potential makes it doubly ironic that Tom’s privileges are wasted on him: he has neither interest in nor capacity for the expensive gentleman’s education his father fondly believes will guarantee his upward mobility.

As mentioned in the introduction Stevenson´s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is not written from just one point of view but is characterized by the individual narratives of Enfield, Lanyon and Jekyll. The chosen order of the narrative voices “add[s] increasing rhetorical and psychological dimension to the events they describe”.^[8] It is beyond question that the most gripping and frightening narration is that of Jekyll, in which he describes his attitude and relationship towards his alter ego. Nevertheless, the previous chapters provide us with numerous other speculations, reactions and opinions of Hyde and construct him as a mysterious character for the reader.^[9] By this approach to narration the author also succeeds in creating suspense for the initial reader, who does not find out about Dr. Jekyll´s two identities until the story almost comes to an end.

Lombroso's L'Uomo Delinquente
Lombroso’s argument was that criminal behaviour was a throwback to an earlier evolutionary form of behaviour, and that this would be reflected in the shape of the subject’s head, equally displaying an earlier evolutionary form. In this case, a rapist with a trococephalous head (round, due to the premature union of the frontal and parietal bones of the skull) with long and looping ears, a flattened forehead, slanting and squinting eyes, a snub nose, and enormous jaws, is described as ‘monstrous’ and of a type ‘seldom seen in an asylum’. Hyde in Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is described as ‘monstrous’, but also ‘small’. The gentlemen in the book are unable to describe his features, but are nevertheless convinced that he is ‘deformed’.
Darwin's influence
Late-Victorian society was haunted by the implications of Darwinism. The ideas outlined in Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) had by the 1880s and 1890s been assimilated, initially by the scientific community and then by much of the general public. For many, the balance between ‘faith’ and ‘doubt’ had tipped disturbingly in favour of the latter, and questions about the origins, nature and destiny of humankind had become matters for science, rather than theology to address. The final chapter of The Descent of Mancontains a passage in which Darwin concludes that humans are ‘descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped’ which, via several intermediary stages, had itself evolved ‘from some amphibian-like creature, and this again from some fish-like animal’. Such a nightmarish lineage in which human evolution was portrayed as a disturbing variation on the theme of Frankenstein’s monster, with humanity being assembled from assorted disparate earlier versions, perhaps lies behind the descriptions of Mr Hyde as ‘ape-like’ and ‘troglodytic’ in Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde; the implication is that the brutal and uncivilised Hyde is somehow a reversion to a more primitive stage of human development; a ghastly evolutionary precursor who stands in a direct genetic line behind the eminently respectable Dr Jekyll.

'Supernatural' meant many things in the nineteenth century. The difficulty in defining what the term meant exactly is what made it so appealing, as individuals could use the idea of the supernatural in support of different hoaxes that promoted 'unexplained' phenomena. Spiritualism; the belief that the dead can communicate with the living, was one such popular fad that swept throughout Europe and America in the 1850s. Due to its indefinable nature, different interpretations of the supernatural could allow spiritualists to believe in ghostly presences and sceptics to explain the phenomena as psychological. Supernatural events such as table-rapping, automatic writing and full-body materialisation of spirits were construed as new forms of nature which had previously been overlooked.
The Victorian era saw the abandonment of conventional religion. In the search for meaning, people were prepared to suspend reason. Many Victorians, including the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, actively believed in Spiritualism.

When The Picture of Dorian Gray was first published in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in 1890, it was decried as immoral. In revising the text the following year, Wilde included a preface, which serves as a useful explanation of his philosophy of art. The purpose of art, according to this series of epigrams, is to have no purpose. In order to understand this claim fully, one needs to consider the moral climate of Wilde’s time and the Victorian sensibility regarding art and morality. The Victorians believed that art could be used as a tool for social education and moral enlightenment, as illustrated in works by writers such as Charles Dickens and George Gissing. The aestheticism movement, of which Wilde was a major proponent, sought to free art from this responsibility. The aestheticists were motivated as much by a contempt for bourgeois morality—a sensibility embodied in Dorian Gray by Lord Henry, whose every word seems designed to shock the ethical certainties of the burgeoning middle class—as they were by the belief that art need not possess any other purpose than being beautiful.

If this philosophy informed Wilde’s life, we must then consider whether his only novel bears it out. The two works of art that dominate the novel—Basil’s painting and the mysterious yellow book that Lord Henry gives Dorian—are presented in the vein more of Victorian sensibilities than of aesthetic ones. That is, both the portrait and the French novel serve a purpose: the first acts as a type of mysterious mirror that shows Dorian the physical dissipation his own body has been spared, while the second acts as something of a road map, leading the young man farther along the path toward infamy. While we know nothing of the circumstances of the yellow book’s composition, Basil’s state of mind while painting Dorian’s portrait is clear. Later in the novel, he advocates that all art be “unconscious, ideal, and remote.” His portrait of Dorian, however, is anything but. Thus, Basil’s initial refusal to exhibit the work results from his belief that it betrays his idolization of his subject. Of course, one might consider that these breaches of aesthetic philosophy mold The Picture of Dorian Gray into something of a cautionary tale: these are the prices that must be paid for insisting that art reveals the artist or a moral lesson. But this warning is, in itself, a moral lesson, which perhaps betrays the impossibility of Wilde’s project. If, as Dorian observes late in the novel, the imagination orders the chaos of life and invests it with meaning, then art, as the fruit of the imagination, cannot help but mean something. Wilde may have succeeded in freeing his art from the confines of Victorian morality, but he has replaced it with a doctrine that is, in its own way, just as restrictive.

The Supremacy of Youth and Beauty

The first principle of aestheticism, the philosophy of art by which Oscar Wilde lived, is that art serves no other purpose than to offer beauty. Throughout The Picture of Dorian Gray, beauty reigns. It is a means to revitalize the wearied senses, as indicated by the effect that Basil’s painting has on the cynical Lord Henry. It is also a means of escaping the brutalities of the world: Dorian distances himself, not to mention his consciousness, from the horrors of his actions by devoting himself to the study of beautiful things—music, jewels, rare tapestries. In a society that prizes beauty so highly, youth and physical attractiveness become valuable commodities. Lord Henry reminds Dorian of as much upon their first meeting, when he laments that Dorian will soon enough lose his most precious attributes. In Chapter Seventeen, the Duchess of Monmouth suggests to Lord Henry that he places too much value on these things; indeed, Dorian’s eventual demise confirms her suspicions. For although beauty and youth remain of utmost importance at the end of the novel—the portrait is, after all, returned to its original form—the novel suggests that the price one must pay for them is exceedingly high. Indeed, Dorian gives nothing less than his soul.

The Superficial Nature of Society

It is no surprise that a society that prizes beauty above all else is a society founded on a love of surfaces. What matters most to Dorian, Lord Henry, and the polite company they keep is not whether a man is good at heart but rather whether he is handsome. As Dorian evolves into the realization of a type, the perfect blend of scholar and socialite, he experiences the freedom to abandon his morals without censure. Indeed, even though, as Basil warns, society’s elite question his name and reputation, Dorian is never ostracized. On the contrary, despite his “mode of life,” he remains at the heart of the London social scene because of the “innocence” and “purity of his face.” As Lady Narborough notes to Dorian, there is little (if any) distinction between ethics and appearance: “you are made to be good—you look so good.”

Morality or A-morality?
The presence or lack of a moral in Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray is a topic of uncertainty. In reading The Picture of Dorian Gray and in hearing conflicting thoughts about morality in the novel, I couldn’t help but create a mental division between two types of morals. One would be morals with direction, consisting of ones intended to lead the receiver of the moral to a particular action or inaction, and the other would be morals without direction, that are intended to demonstrate some element of life that might affect how a person formulates their own morals. I read The Picture of Dorian Gray as a novel that does indeed provide a moral, but of the second variety, without direction.
It’s difficult to extrapolate any directed moral from the story. It seems that no set of behavior is entirely safe. As a result, though I can’t help but be struck by the demonstrations of how characters suffer for their actions in The Picture of Dorian Gray and take this demonstration to be some kind of moral, I don’t think that it is a moral that compels a reader to any specific conclusion. Rather, it leaves us to decide for ourselves where to take our actions from here.

In these years everyone believed in men's potentialities, there was faith in progress, in capacity of humans to change the present through their actions.

In Victorian literature this trust in men is converted in a paternalistic vision that we can find mainly reading Dickens’ and Gaskell’s novels.

Paternalism is an attitude born in Victorian era and consist in judging and highlighting wrong behaviour and in believing that rich people with their good heart can help the poor one.

In this first period of literature of 18th century characters were flat, in the story we know only one side of them, one detail of their personality, the good or the evil, the generous or the stingy (as Scrooge in “A Christmas Carol” written by Dickens).

In 1859 Charles Darwin published “The origin of species” and upset everyone beliefs.

In fact, now man wasn't perfect anymore, he derives from animal and he's dominated by animal instincts.

The paternalistic narration is changed in a narration with no more judgements; the narrator tells the story without transmitting his opinion or highlighting evil actions (because of that he’s also judged by society because he didn't condemn immoral behaviours).

With the discovery of a new side of human beings also characters became more complete, they made complex thoughts, they took their own decisions, and some of them also rebelled to society like Jane Eyre or Tess d’ Urbervilles.


Your essay is well made and original. Well done!