Carlyle, Thackeray, and Victorian Heroism

Abstract

In the course of that rich and richly opinionated work, The Hero in Eclipse in Victorian Fiction, Mario Praz writes: 'And so, in contrast to Carlyle who exalts the hero, whom he puts forward as a combined reproof and pattern to an anti-heroic, bourgeois age, Thackeray sets himself up as deliberately anti-heroic, even to the title of his most famous novel Vanity Fair, a Novel without a Hero'.1 Like the rest of the book where it appears, this judgement rests on the belief that the 'bourgeois' is unalterably opposed to the 'heroic' and that Victorian England witnessed the triumph of bourgeois over heroic values. The large generalization is illustrated by a convenient contrast between Carlyle and Thackeray. By his attachment to an outmoded ideal of the heroic Carlyle consigned himself to the role of aJeremiah bewailing the dominant temper of his age, while Thackeray, by his abandonment of heroism for the small sentimentalities of domestic life, identified himself as typically Victorian. I begin with Professor Praz because I find his view of the matter at once representative and inadequate. My purpose here is to offer a modest corrective to the neat antithesis between Carlyle and Thackeray and so, at least implicitly, to question the free use of the terms 'heroic' and 'bourgeois' on which it depends. The Victorians, did, of course, abandon much of the traditional concept of heroism, but not in a spirit of violent rebellion; as in all their other acts of inconoclasm, they show themselves to be tentative and sometimes reluctant. They do not set out to destroy the old ideals with the confidence of men who have a ready-made alternative in their pockets. Rather, they begin from the uneasy realization that social and cultural changes are estranging them from an ideal that served their forefathers long and faithfully, and they present their solutions to the dilemma as acts of repair or adaptation. As they see it, they are not rejecting heroism but redefining it; instead of dropping the word from their vocabulary, they use it with an almost obsessive frequency that no other age in English culture has